I Learned Something

I have discovered that the store version of Fritos are pretty much always good. The chips with more kinds of flavorings--like Doritos or Cheetos--are generally not as good in the generic version. Fritos are very basic, though. They only have three ingredients. How can you screw up corn, corn oil, and salt?

Well, you can do it if you pretty much leave out the salt.

I did not even know this was a thing, although I had noted that the corn chips I bought awhile ago said "salted" on the bag. I thought that was weird, because of COURSE they're salted. When are they not?

I found out last time I bought some. These were labeled "original," and they had so little salt it was almost impossible to taste it.

Can you imagine Fritos without salt? It was very strange. And not really appreciated.

 

Original=pretty much not salted.

Luckily, they're greasy enough that I could just shake salt into the bag and it would stick to the chips, so they were salvageable. But now I know to look for salted corn chips, not original, if I want them to taste like actual Fritos.

And now you do, too, I guess. 

Snapshots: First Canning

I canned sauerkraut and pickled beets this week.

A pleasing color contrast.

This part of my run is lined on both sides with blooming clover, which has the sweetest, slightly spicy scent.

And here's one with Jasper, just to give equal billing to both dogs.

I'm not harvesting the asparagus anymore, but here's an old photo of it I took just because I loved the contrast of the bright-green asparagus on the bright-red Pyrex top I threw it on to cool down before I put it on my salad.

Both the rose and the asiatic lilies are blooming, which makes for a very pink table centerpiece.

A former teacher at our school invited all the children to go up with him in his small plane this past week. The airport he flies out of is 100 miles from our house. He goes flying at first light, so as to avoid the almost-constant wind. This meant that we left our house at 3:50 a.m. to get there in time for his 5:30 a.m. flight.

Despite the unpleasantly early wake-up and long drive, the kids had a very good time.

Small plane in dawn's early light.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Dad's Seafood Feast

Friday 

Short version: Barbecue pork sandwiches, coleslaw, popsicles

Long version: I had a lot of pork left from the big pork shoulder I had cooked the day before, so I made some barbecue sauce to simmer shredded pork in for sandwiches. 

There were two cabbages in the refrigerator, and I used part of one to make coleslaw again.

The popsicles were mostly a way to use some little bits of things: the last of jars of apricot jam, peach jam, and yogurt. I added some milk and heavy cream, too, which makes them much more, well, creamy. Instead of icy. Very good.

Saturday

Short version: Pork fried rice, chocolate chip cookie bars

Long version: I made rice in the morning, using up the juices left from cooking the pork shoulder. Then I made fried rice with more of the pork, collard greens, asparagus, garlic scapes (all three vegetables from the garden, of course), and eggs.

Garlic scapes are so ridiculous looking. I find them very amusing. Sort of tricky to chop, however.

Sunday

Short version: Father's Day seafood fry, German potato salad, green salad with ranch dressing, Bonnie Butter cake with Chantilly cream and rhubarb compote

Long version: A. had to be in one of the cities on the Mexican border a week or so prior, and while there, he stopped at the Mexican market to pick up meat and seafood. It's much cheaper there, and pretty good quality. He bought pollock, shrimp, and "octomari," which I guess is squid tentacles that's been processed to be more like octopus? Or something.

Anyway. He wanted to fry all these things for his Father's Day feast, and he asked me to take care of all the side dishes and make them all cold ones so everything would be ready to go when the frying was done. Accordingly, I made a German potato salad and a green salad with ranch dressing.

I also made tartar sauce--extra dill pickles instead of the capers, and green onion instead of the shallot--and cocktail sauce for dipping. Cocktail sauce typically has horseradish in it, which I don't have, but the Internet assured me I could use chile powder, which I did. I didn't have the right hot sauce, either, so I didn't use that. A. said this didn't taste really like cocktail sauce, but he liked it anyway.  He called it New Mexico cocktail sauce.

He did the frying, using the thermometer I had got from my parents for my birthday and not yet used. It was perfect for this.

A very professional set-up.

That's lard in the pot. He did a real deep-fry, first coating everything in eggs and then a breading of flour, cornmeal, and Old Bay seasoning. It took a long time to fry the great quantity of seafood he had.

An impressive quantity, in fact.

There were many rapturous expressions of satisfaction among the family about this feast. A. did a very good job with the seasoning and frying. I don't even like seafood, and I thought the shrimp was good.

A. had said he would like a yellow cake with rhubarb for dessert. Knowing his pleasure in anything in great quantity, I made a layer cake instead of a single cake layer, using an online recipe for Bonnie Butter cake. The MiL used to make Bonnie Butter cakes when she was a kid. It's a simple and very tasty recipe for a yellow cake. I layered it with rhubarb compote--I guess that's what it's called when you just cook rhubarb down with sugar?--and Chantilly cream, and then frosted it with the Chantilly cream, too. Chantilly cream is just whipped cream with vanilla and sugar. I added a bit of sour cream, too, both for the flavor and because it helps it to hold its texture better. 

This cake ended up being a bit over the top.

I even made a heart on top using my cookie cutter and some of the compote. And mint leaves, just for fun.

It was really delicious. And certainly abundant. We didn't even eat half of it this night.

Monday

Short version: A feast of leftovers

Long version: There was a lot of fried seafood left, which I just re-heated in a skillet on the stove. Also potato salad, although some of the kids had leftover lamb-y rice with butter instead. They had some still-frozen green beans, too, and the adults had pureed calabaza.

Most excitingly, there was leftover cake.

Quite a lot of it, in fact. It held up very well in the refrigerator, surprisingly.

Tuesday

Short version: Burgers on the road, tuna salad and cookie fool at home

Long version: A. and one child were in town at dinnertime, and they went to a fast food restaurant to get hamburgers before starting their drive home. For the other three children, I made tuna salad. Two of them elected to have it in a corn tortilla with melted cheese, like a taco tuna melt. One had a sandwich.

I made a sort of odd dessert to use up the last of the chocolate chip cookie bars that were getting pretty crumbly, and the rest of the extra whipped cream from the cake. I crumbled the cookies and folded the crumbs into the cream, sort of like how fruit is folded into whipped cream for a fool. Then I drizzled some chocolate syrup on top.

It was not photogenic, but it was eaten.

Wednesday

Short version: Bulked up fried rice, more tuna, sauerkraut

Long version: I got the kids up at 3:30 a.m. to drive to a small airport, where we met one of their former teachers who has a plane. He took them all up for a short flight.

The plane is so small, it's just moved around by hand.

This was very fun for them, but made for a very tired rest of the day. Which is why dinner was not too exciting.

I had some leftover pork fried rice, but not quite enough. I had more plain lamb-y rice I needed to use, though, plus some cooked collard greens. So I added those two things to the fried rice, then scrambled more eggs to add, then put in more soy sauce, ginger, garlic powder, and vinegar. Plus some butter. I didn't fry this, instead just heating in the microwave. It would have been better fried, but I just didn't feel like washing a big skillet.

The three younger children had the rest of the tuna, in flour tortillas with cheese. I microwaved this, too, to melt the cheese. And they had raw sauerkraut, at their request.

A very odd mixture of various cultural foods. America on a plate, I suppose.

Thursday

Short version: Spaghetti with meat sauce, sauteed garlic scapes, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: I took out some ground primal blend--elk and cow heart--and made the meat sauce with that. I feel like I make taco meat with ground meat more often than not, and maybe everyone would appreciate something different.

They did. I cooked probably a pound and a half of meat, plus a pound of spaghetti, and most of it was eaten.

Garlic scapes are the stalk of what would be the garlic flower if I left them on the plants. I don't. I cut them off, cut off the flower part at the top, then saute them until they're soft. They taste like slightly garlicky green beans. Yum.

LOTS of spaghetti, and some garlic scapes.

I had just a bit of ranch dressing in the refrigerator, and just a bit of washed lettuce that needed to be used. So I used them both. In salad, with cucumber, too.

Refrigerator check:

My deli drawer has broken AGAIN on the runner, for I think the fourth time in seven years. So annoying. It does get an awful lot of hard use, though.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

Trudgery, in Photos

I've been running my entire life, off and on. It's something I could always do no matter where we lived. It doesn't require special equipment or driving anywhere. I just put on my shoes and went out the door.

I'm not a fast runner, and I'm certainly not an effortless runner. I run just because it keeps me in good working order, basically.

It's something I do because I really have to, and it often feels like just another obligation. So it's a sort of drudgery. And as I'm often more or less doing the running equivalent of trudging, I have dubbed my exercise to be trudgery.

Get it? Yeah.

But I consider myself very fortunate to be able to trudge where I do. I don't have to worry about cars or stop lights or bad air or, well, anything. It's just me and the grasshoppers.

Just after I go out our gate . . .

Around the first corner . . .

The home stretch . . .

And back to our gate.

Snapshots: First, Flowers

We went down the hill last Sunday to take care of our friends' animals, which gave me the opportunity to pick some wildflowers that don't grow up here at our house.

Those white ones smelled exactly like oregano.

I thought it needed some more color, so I added clover, silver nightshade, and whatever those yellow flowers are.

And I put this on the bookshelf in the living room.

Many of the wildflowers around the house are towards the end of their life cycle, so I had a pretty random assortment later in the week that I collected on my run.

Lots of clover.

And I maybe got a little over exuberant with the height of the clover on the bookshelf. Oh well. It's dramatic, I guess.

In other plant news, I harvested the first beets this week.

There are beets under those greens somewhere.

One of the beets has gone to seed, which is perplexing, as I thought they only seed in their second year and I planted all these seeds this year. We'll just see what happens with it.

The grasshoppers continue to be horrifying. Not only are the sheer number of them overwhelming, but there are really a shocking variety.

This bright green one was unusual enough that I took a picture of it.

Poppy woke up early one morning. The oven was on already to cook pork shoulder before it got hot, so we made some muffins to go in the oven, too.

When children help in the kitchen, things often end up on the floor.

Jasper is delighted with the warm weather. It means all the people are outside with him all day.

And that means belly rubs are a strong possibility.

Early-morning baking is the only kind I want to do in the summer.

Granola and chocolate chip cookie bars at 6:30 a.m.

The strong sun and heat also means that it's sun-tea time.

The big jar has decaffeinated black tea. In the smaller jars are mint leaves, and a combination of peach leaves and mint leaves.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

P.S. Happy Father's Day to all the dads. I hope you have an excellent day.

Friday Food: A Roof Picnic

Friday 

Short version: Tuna patties, lamb-y rice, garden cabbage

Long version: Poppy and I harvested the first cabbage from the garden this day.

No dolls to be seen in the cabbage patch, alas.

Poppy has been asking for, oh, four months now when the cabbages will be ready, so this was a big day for her. 

So. Two cans of tuna made into patties--with bread crumbs, eggs, mayonnaise, and mustard--rice cooked in lamb stock, and wedges of the cabbage.

Ta da! Dinner.

Saturday

Short version: Ram in wine sauce, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, chocolate ice cream

Long version: And on the second day of garden cabbage, there was coleslaw. This coleslaw, to be specific, and man, it sure is good.

The ram meat was a bag labeled "kebab," which meant it was small pieces cut from the back leg, so it would be tender. The ram meat is pretty strongly-flavored, however, which is why I marinated it in olive oil, vinegar, and lots of garlic powder. It still smelled kind of rank when I started cooking it, but by the time it was done, it was fine. No off taste at all. Hooray for marinating.

All I did for the sauce was add red wine to the pan, then some pickled onions diced fine, and then cold butter off heat. It's really magical how cold butter swirled into a sauce will thicken it right up.

One child had happened to spy the chocolate ice cream when I was getting the meat out of the freezer, and asked wistfully if we could have it this night. So we did.

Sunday

Short version: Sausages, leftover rice, baked beans, green salad with vinaigrette, triple chocolate ice cream sandwiches

Long version: I've been getting a package here and there of different sausages available at Walmart, to see which ones my family likes. This night, I cooked one package of plain smoked beef, and one of jalapeno-cheddar. The jalapeno was surprisingly popular, so I guess I'll get that again.

Poppy had asked me if we could have a picnic outside. I told her she and her brothers could go ahead, but that Dad and I prefer to eat inside. After some discussion among the children, it was decided that they should eat on the shed roof to get high enough to avoid the grasshoppers. And that is what they did.

Can you spot the children in their leafy bower?

This meant A. and I got to eat together with just the two of us. Like a date or something.

Date food.

I hadn't made anything for Sunday dessert, but I had lots of double chocolate peanut butter cookies in the cookie jar, and a little chocolate ice cream left. So I combined the two into a sandwich.

A most excellent idea, if quite messy.

Monday

Short version: Scrambled eggs, leftover mashed potatoes with cheese, cucumbers and grape tomatoes

Long version: My children get unreasonably excited about leftover mashed potatoes heated up with cheese stirred in. It is awfully good. They probably would have eaten just that, but I also scrambled some eggs since I still have a lot on hand.

I can think of no entertaining caption for this photo of a plate of food. So here. A photo of food.

Tuesday

Short version: Pizza, leftover sausage, frozen green beans

Long version: I made just one cheese pizza, and then portioned out the leftover sausage to supplement it.

Wednesday

Short version: Primal enchilada casserole, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: When I was switching all the food from our old freezer to our new one, I found a package of beef heart from the last cow we got. That was about two years ago, so I wanted to get rid of that. In the past I've given the heart to the dogs. It has a slightly iron taste, and the texture is a little off for me.

However, it occurred to me we could try grinding it with the rest of the elk meat. So that's what we did. I was joking that we had made a primal blend of the sort sold at a premium at fancy meat shops. Which is, actually, what we did. Except I think the primal blends include liver, and that I will never do. Liver ruins everything for me, no matter how little of it there may be.

Anyway. 

I used some of the resulting ground meat to make an enchilada casserole, mostly to use up the remains of three bags of corn tortillas that only had broken pieces of tortilla left in them.

Thursday

Short version: Pork, pureed potatoes, pureed calabaza, frozen green beans

Long version: We're getting into weather hot enough that I do not want to be cooking at 4 p.m. in an already-warm kitchen. So I made a pork shoulder in the morning, and then just shredded some of it and fried it in the rendered lard with spices at dinnertime.

I also baked potatoes with the meat, which I then scooped out and pureed. Half the children love them this way. The other half do not appreciate the texture. I don't, either, which is why I usually mash them with a potato masher.

Only the adults ate the calabaza. The children had the green beans.

Dad plate.

Refrigerator check:

My family will look in this full refrigerator and say with completely straight faces that "There's no food in this house."

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

The End of the Paschal Candle

Remember when we brought home the old Paschal candle from church to burn? That turned out to be way more fun than I thought it would be.

First of all, it was cool to have such a big candle in the house. It was about a foot tall when we started burning it, which is the biggest candle I've ever had at home. 

Also, it was decorated on the outside with raised wax that burned in an interesting way. For instance, the blue raised cross on the front resisted melting when the wax around it was melting, which resulted in the cross being much more prominent for awhile. The gold paint used on it looked really neat when it melted, too, all sparkly and forming a separate pool of molten wax in the middle of the melted clear wax.

Since this is a Paschal candle, it is lit in our church only for the Easter season, baptisms, and funerals. I decided we would just burn it during the Easter season and then bury the remains.* The Easter season runs from Easter Sunday through Pentecost Sunday, which was last Sunday. We burned it all day on Sundays in that time, as well as a couple of other rainy, dark days. 

By this weekend, all that was left of the candle was a pit in the sand I had secured it in, with melted wax in it. I had sunk the candle down a couple of inches in the sand to make sure it wouldn't tip, so the pit was pretty deep. The heat from the flame continued to melt wax around the outside that then flowed into this pit, and so the flame kept burning, even with no actual candle left.

It was actually really neat to see this, particularly on Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost is the celebration of the Holy Spirit being sent to the church. The Bible story about this describes the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire from heaven coming to the apostles, which made this ever-burning little flame in our house most appropriate.

I kept thinking that surely the flame would go out anytime during the day on Sunday, but it was still burning when I went to bed. A. finally blew it out before he went to bed.

I was kind of curious to see how much longer it would have burned like this, but the children were adamant that Easter was over and so we couldn't burn the candle anymore. Poppy took it upon herself to dig the hole and bury the remains.

She marked the spot appropriately, too.

Thus ends the Paschal candle. We don't replace it at church every year--it's originally about three feet tall, so it doesn't burn down all that fast--which means we won't have one next year, but it was fun while it lasted.

* This candle had been blessed, so it had to buried, not just thrown in the trash.