Kitchen Alchemy

I have been the recipient of so much food recently. So much food. It started when Rafael asked us to come pick the apples off his tree. From those apples, I made several crisps and pies, and also canned five quarts of apple slices in cinnamon syrup.

Next was the lady who runs the coffee shop in the village asking A. and me to pick the apples and pears from her trees.

These were Granny Smith apples.

Those became a crisp and six quarts of canned apple slices. The pears are still ripening, but I'm guessing I'll can at least five quarts of those. And there were great quantities more of both fruits on her trees, should we decide to get more.

Our elderly neighbor that A. helps brought me a box of sand plums the next day.

These are a small, local variety of plum, the only use for which is jelly.

Those became two and a half pints of jelly.

Such a pretty color. Delicious, too.

Next, another mom from school texted me to ask if we would like the extra roosters they weren't going to get around to butchering. A. picked those up that day and we spent the next day butchering them.

And of course, we had one for dinner that night.

When I stopped by that mom's house to give her back two of the six prepared roosters, she asked if we needed any pears or apples. I didn't really, but I took some pears anyway, just because they had just harvested the ones from their tree and she said she didn't have time to deal with them.

She also said she had saucing apples, and I couldn't say yes fast enough to those. Most of the apples here are definitely NOT saucing apples; they don't break down enough in cooking to make sauce. My family can eat astonishing quantities of applesauce, and they're always sad in the fall if I don't find good apples for it.

Small, but tasty.

I came home with enough apples to make 12 quarts of applesauce. 

I only canned seven quarts, though, because that's how much my canner holds. We ate the rest just from the refrigerator.

I also came home with eggs, because she said she was overrun with eggs from all the new pullets they got this year.

Four and half dozen eggs, and she wanted me to take more.

People here give us food a lot partially because they know I have a lot of kids to feed. But also they give it to me because they know I know what to do with it. If they ask us to, we will harvest fruit from trees. If they give me fruit, I will can it. If they give us animals, we will butcher them. No preparation is necessary on the part of the givers.

Also, and crucially, I always give them something back. Rafael got a small apple crisp. The lady at the coffee shop will get a jar of canned pears. Our elderly neighbor got a pint of jelly. And my fellow mom got two chickens ready for the oven, a quart of applesauce, and a loaf of bread.

No one asked me for anything in exchange for all these things, but it seems only logical--and polite--that they should get some small part of this food back, but in a usable form. I don't have to pay for these things, except with my labor.

Make no mistake, it is a LOT of labor, but it's also a lot of food. Seems like a good trade to me.

Twice-pickled

This has not been a good year for cucumbers. For the past several years, I have grown Armenian cucumbers. These are not cucumbers at all botanically, but rather a variety of muskmelon. I don't like them quite as much as real cucumbers--they have a faint taste of muskmelon that is detectable when eating the Armenian cucumbers raw--but they have the great advantage of never getting bitter. Even when they grow to huge sizes, they're never bitter. This was a frequent problem I had with true cucumbers. Also, the Armenian cucumbers make excellent refrigerator pickles, which is my main use for cucumbers.

This year, I planted the Armenian cucumbers, and then I decided to try again with pickling cucumbers. I noticed early in the summer that the grasshoppers had eaten only the cucumber vines that were already climbing. They had left the vines still low on the ground. I think it was the Armenian cucumber vines they ate, because I have zero Armenian cucumbers.

I am getting some cucumbers, but they are almost all bitter. Predictably. So I haven't made any pickles from them.

However! One of the former teachers at school showed up to the county fair with lots of cucumbers and mentioned she's been getting great quantities. So I texted her to ask if she would be willing to sell me some cucumbers so I could make pickles. She responded that she wouldn't sell them, but she'd be happy to take some pickles.

Thus, the year's first refrigerator dills have been stowed away.

We already ate one of the pint jars of dill pickles. Rather than throw away the pickling liquid, however, I re-heated it in the microwave and used it to pickle some carrot ribbons.

I do this a lot with the liquid from the pickled onion slivers I almost always have in the refrigerator now. When I finish the onions the first time, I either re-heat the liquid and pickle more onions, or I pickle (store) radish slices.

Pickle trio.

This way I always have some kind of pickle on hand. I only use the pickling liquid once more before dumping it, but at least I get more than one use out of it. I was dismayed to see a gallon of white vinegar priced at over four dollars last week at the store, so I feel like the less of it I have to use, the better. 

Didn't vinegar used to be cheap? I feel like even the gallon of vinegar was like two or three dollars not too long ago. But maybe I'm misremembering.

Anyway. We have pickles, and that makes everyone happy.

The Grand Total Was . . .

For that small basket of nine things at the grocery store, I spent $56.37. Yikes.

I wasn't at a fancy grocery store. I did, however, buy a few name-brand things--Skippy peanut butter, Riesens, and Nutrigrain bars--which I rarely do. Also, jerky is expensive even if it is store-brand.

Mostly, I think it's because I was buying packaged snacks. Another thing I rarely do. 

Which is why I bake way more than I would like to.

So I guess I'll just carry on with my low-snack, store-brand shopping style, lest I bankrupt us with Nutrigrain bars and candy.

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. 

The Tea Party Hostess

One of the many surprising things about my life is that I host tea parties. Tea parties were not something I grew up with. I don't even remember drinking tea as a kid. I do remember going maybe once to one of those tea rooms, the fancy restaurants that serve tea and tea foods. But it wasn't anything close to normal thing.

My first experience with tea as an event came at Blackrock, with its wealth of china for every occasion, and the MiL, the baker extraordinare. The older boys looooved tea parties as little ones. They had their personal tea cups and even their own little creamers. The MiL would sometimes bake scones for them, or I would just make them little plates of crackers and cheese or whatever. It was very low-key and thus, much more frequent than something very fancy would be.

However, boys are not likely to have tea parties to host their friends. They still love the food that comes along with a tea party, but the delicate china and elegant table? Not so much.

But now I have a girl! And she has girl friends! And they reeeeally love the delicate china, elegant table, and the chance to dress up.

Although I used to have tea parties without the nice china, I now have the delicate china thanks to my sister. She has the entire set of my maternal grandmother's lovely set of wedding china. My sister never used the tea cups and saucers, so she asked me if I would like them. Indeed I would. 

Waiting for a tea party.

That is why I am able to host a fancy tea for little and big girls alike. As I did yesterday in honor of the MiL's visit. I invited Poppy's best friend, her older sister, and her mother, who is also my friend. 

I always bake at least one thing fresh for a tea party. This time it was just biscuits. I had made strawberry jam earlier in the day, and I also set out plum butter my sister had made, and apple butter some little girls at school had made and given me. In addition, I made cucumber and cream cheese tea sandwiches (meaning they were cut very small and had the crusts removed), some pumpkin bread I had had in the freezer, peanut butter cookies from the cookie jar, and cheese and crackers. The tea was decaffeinated black tea and an herb tea.

Our guests brought with them a big bunch of wildflowers from around their house, which went right in the middle of the table. All the foods went on small plates to be arranged around the table, I set out the tea with the cream and sugar, and it really was quite a lovely table.

Tea for six.

Our guests always arrive in tea party apparel--dresses and sometimes hats--and I put on tea party music. The MiL, who is a classical music aficionado, suggested Mozart. The perfect atmosphere for elegance.

There were also four boys--the brother of the girls came to hang out with my boys--and A. roaming around the house. We've done this a few times now, so I know better than to invite the boys to join us. After we've had our tea party, they get paper plates and can fill them from the food left on the table. I make enough to ensure they get plenty, and then they can take it outside and have a nice, masculine time chowing down without worrying about being polite. A. does get invited to the table after we've mostly finished eating, so he can have his tea and finish off whatever food is still there.

I don't know when Poppy will age out of tea parties, but I'm enjoying it for now. And so is she.

Happy Fat Tuesday!

I have mentioned before--maaaaany times--that my mother is from New Orleans. Because of that, certain traditions from that city have always been a part of my life. Mostly food, since that is a big part of the culture of New Orleans.

Pork, greens, black-eyed peas for our health, wealth, and happiness on New Year's Day. Red beans and rice. Grillades and grits. King cake for Mardi Gras. 

This year's king cake, sent by my mother from Haydel's bakery and eaten by us for Sunday dessert. Warmed up with butter, of course.

And now, jambalaya, biscuits, and pecan pie for Fat Tuesday.

This was not something my mother made when I was growing up that I remember. Not on Fat Tuesday, at least. The jambalaya was something I made for the very first time last year, just because A. was remembering Popeye's jambalaya so fondly, and I was sure I would be able to make something at least as good.

This year, I'm adding the biscuits (these butter-swim biscuits) because they were very much like the greasy Popeye's biscuits that A. also loved. And the pecan pie because I now have a really good recipe for it that everyone in the family likes (except I use dark maple syrup instead of golden syrup.)

So I guess I've come up with my own tradition for Fat Tuesday. It's funny to think that these are the things my children will carry forward into their own lives--or not, we'll see--and consider just family tradition because it's what they remember from their childhoods. 

I have become the tradition maker instead of the recipient. An inevitable generational shift, I suppose.

So tell me: What family traditions have you inherited or started yourself?

P.S. I used this as our wake-up song this morning. After it was over, one boy announced, "I like that song. It has lots of food in it." Indeed.

Insane Lasagna, Denied

We don't celebrate birthdays in a really big way in our house. The birthday person gets to choose all their food for the day--breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert--and then we have a little family party after dinner with presents. 

The food is obviously a big part of that, and I have always made anything my children have requested.

Until this year.

This year's new 15-year-old* requested this lasagna for his birthday. 

Ugh.

I never wanted to make that again. It was just too much. But it's a birthday! And I always said I would make anything for their birthdays!

So I resigned myself to two days in the kitchen, plus some sore arms. As the birthday grew closer, though, and I realized how much I was dreading it, I just . . . said no. I told him I would make him lasagna, but it wasn't going to be that particular one.

Whereupon he changed his mind and said he'd rather have pork ribs and mashed potatoes. Which are about a thousand times easier.

I do feel some guilt about this, but not enough to make the lasagna. And I did make cinnamon rolls for his birthday breakfast, so that kind of makes up for the lasagna, right?

I made them on Sunday and just par-baked them because his birthday is today and I was working yesterday. (The pan in the back right has bar cookies for Sunday dessert.)

I guess even I have my limits in the kitchen. And that lasagna is it.

*I am now in the stage of figuring out how to get teenagers a driver's licenses, which is wild. Also wild: I will not be out of this stage for another decade.

A Few Things of Note

It snowed last night. Only about an inch, but it will make my children happy. They, like all children, are really hoping we'll have snow on Christmas.

I have to drive one son to the dentist this morning. Although I'm not much looking forward to the 200 miles I will spend in the car today, it will give me the opportunity to buy the gifts two boys are supposed to have for their class gift exchanges. I was just given the suggested gift ideas yesterday, which means no time to get anything ordered online and delivered. My choices for gift-buying today are Tractor Supply, Dollar General, and the grocery store. I can work with that.

I went to our staff Christmas party last night and I brought this maple popcorn. Holy cow, is it good. 

I had to put the finished product out of sight on top of the refrigerator so I wouldn't keep grabbing a few pieces every time I walked by it.

I tripled the recipe, because six cups of popcorn doesn't really go that far*. I also added a full half teaspoon of salt, instead of a few pinches. The recipe as written will make something like caramel corn. If you add more salt to it, it makes something like kettle corn, which I like much better.

Using the dark maple syrup works so well for this. So much flavor.

It was, I must admit, a little bit of a pain. One of these days I should probably get a candy thermometer for things like this, so I'm not messing around with bowls of ice water to determine a "soft ball." Also, I decided halfway through that I didn't have nearly enough, so I was popping popcorn while making the syrup. Also also, I made so much, there was just a lot of bulk to be finding bowls and pans for.

Worth it, though. I would recommend it for any party you might be attending this season. It would also be very handy to make and put in little bags for any larger groups of people you might need gifts for, like neighbors or co-workers.

That's all my notes for today. Have a lovely day.

* It doesn't go far with my family, that is. A single recipe would have been adequate for my party contribution, but there was no way I was getting out of the house without leaving some of this for my family to eat while I was gone. They can eat a lot of popcorn. Especially popcorn liberally drizzled with maple syrup and butter.

Awe-Inspiring Abundance

It's good for me to sometimes leave my very limited remote bubble here and enter the outside world, if only to realize how odd my life is in the grander American scheme. This was really highlighted by my trip to a grocery store in suburban Albuquerque last Friday.

I went to Albuquerque to pick up the traveling kid from the airport. Because his flight was coming in on the later side and we had to drive so far back home, I did not want to stop on the way home at the grocery store. We wouldn't have gotten home until 11 p.m. So instead I went to the store before picking him up. 

The grocery store I went to was just a Smith's, but it was in what is quite clearly a major area of commerce for the Albuquerque suburbs. In fact, I entered the heart of American consumerism. My exit off the freeway brought me to a road lined with every store and restaurant I've heard of or read about, but never actually shop at. Like Chick-fil-A. And Target.

I realize these are not uncommon for most of you. But they are for me.

Thankfully, this was a big road with good traffic flow, so although it was busy (keep in mind, this was Black Friday), I made it to the grocery store without too much delay.

And there I was taken aback by the experience of sheer opulence that is American grocery shopping.

This store was as big as the entire Walmart I typically shop at, except instead of half the store being things like storage containers and camping equipment, it was all just . . . food. There was SO MUCH. So many options, so many displays, so many perishable things that I never see.

I just stood there in the produce section for a minute, staring around me in awe. 

They had a fancy cheese section! And a seafood counter! I mean, I couldn't buy anything from it because whatever I bought was going to be a sitting in a cooler for six hours and that seemed like a bad idea for fish, but still. It was there. I do not ever shop anywhere that has a seafood counter.

When you drive roads like this regularly, the nearest seafood counter will be a couple hundred miles away.

In the end, I didn't buy too much. A few of the fancy cheeses and some multi-color "snacking tomatoes" were about the extent of the indulgence for me, but it was fun to visit the Other America for a little while before returning to my little bubble.

Green Beans to Soup Beans

Despite the very spotty germination on my Kentucky Wonder green bean plants that resulted in exactly nine plants growing to maturity this year, I have actually been harvesting green beans. I have two gallon-sized bags of green beans in the freezer right now, thus ensuring my favorite green beans+bacon+onions for Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, given the fact that I never did put up fencing for the plants to climb, I also have a lot of beans that get lost in the jungle and grow too much before I harvest them. This makes them tough and starchy. Not what I want to a green bean to be.

But it IS what I want a soup bean to be.

Green bean on the right, soup bean on the left.

"Soup beans" are what I call those green beans that over-mature on the plant before I find them. Some of those over-mature ones I leave to dry out, and then I save them to plant for next year. But most of them, I freeze as soup beans. 

It takes me a few days to harvest enough beans to bother with, but when I do have enough, I go through them and separate them into green beans and soup beans based on their size. All of them get the stem ends snapped off. The green beans are frozen whole. The soup beans are chopped into short lengths before being frozen.

Like so.

And then I have a bag of bean pieces ready to just throw right into soup when I make it.

Soup beans in soup.

I have about a quart of soup beans in the freezer right now, and I'll just keep adding to it as long as the plants are still producing beans and I keep missing them until they're too big.

Friday Food: Solo Food and Peaches

Friday 

Short version: Solo cottage cheese and chips, leftover omelet

Long version: A. left this morning with all the children for Tucson, to celebrate his father's 95th birthday. They stayed in a motel in Lordsburg this night, and they ate the barbecue meatballs and boiled potatoes I sent with them.

I stayed home to take care of the animals. And this is what I ate on my own:

Cottage cheese and potato chips are kind of balanced. Book  (The Luck Uglies) recommended by Jody here, and now by me. Thanks, Jody.

I had been in the garden just before I ate dinner, weeding and harvesting, during which I had eaten several small tomatoes, a small cucumber, and a few raw green beans, so I felt like my vegetable needs were met.

Saturday

Short version: Salad, ice cream

Long version: The salad was heavy on the cucumber, since the garden is heavy on the cucumbers right now. It also had tomato, hard boiled egg, feta, and pickled onions in it.

Much healthier than the previous night's meal. Except for the ice cream not pictured.

Sunday

Short version: Chili, ice cream

Long version: Even though I didn't really need to cook, I decided to make a pot of chili just to have on hand in the freezer for nights when I don't have time to cook. So I made that, and had some of that for dinner this night. 

Chili in a pot.

Same ice cream. Cookies and cream, in case you were wondering.

Monday

Short version: Brisket, mashed potatoes, sauteed calabacitas and tomatoes, cucumber with salt and vinegar, rice pudding

Long version: The return of the travelers, as you can tell by the large meal. I hadn't intended to cook brisket, but that's what was in the bag I took out of the freezer that I thought contained pork butt. So I cooked the brisket. And, of course, since the oven was on so long, I also made rice pudding.

I found another calabacita in the garden and sauteed that with tomatoes, onion, and garlic. 

A happy summer skillet.

Tuesday

Short version: Scrambled eggs, chorizo patties, leftover mashed potatoes, tomato/cucumber/feta salad

Long version: I had planned on having the leftover brisket, but then I thought I'd better save that for an after-work meal the next day. By the time I came to that decision, it was too late to defrost anything big from the freezer. We did have a small bag of elk chorizo still in there, though, which thawed quickly.

Not everyone likes chorizo, though, so I cooked it separately as patties for those who wanted it and kept the scrambled eggs plain.

Wednesday

Short version: Brisket Spanish rice, cucumbers, peaches and cream

Long version: I made a pot of rice before I left for work in the morning, so when I got home, I added that to chopped brisket, already-cooked onion from the freezer, salsa, frozen corn, spices, and grated Monterey jack cheese to make something like Spanish rice.

Nick the Peach Guy had told me on Sunday that he had been away the previous week, and his peaches had started ripening while he was gone. So they were very ripe by Sunday, and I didn't have any children to help me pick them. I brought two of the boys over there after school to pick peaches while we waited for Poppy to finish cheer practice, so we had lots of fresh peaches on hand for peaches and cream.

Thursday

Short version: Chicken drumsticks, pasta bake, cucumbers with ranch dressing, chocolate pudding with cream

Long version: I made the pudding in the morning with milk and cream that were starting to go off. And then I spent over three hours dealing with the peaches.

Because they had almost all fallen off the tree on their own by the time we got to them, and then they had to sit while I was at work on Wednesday, they were in pretty rough shape.

I ended up with four quarts of peaches in syrup, five pints of peach jam, and one gallon bag of frozen peaches. Also a complete disinterest in cooking. However, the show must go on! Especially since one of the boys had a friend over at dinnertime, and teenage boys eat a lot. In case you didn't know.

I had some roasted tomato sauce in the refrigerator I had made on the weekend when I was baking bread, as well as some pesto, so I used those to make the pasta bake, along with asadero cheese.

And because I had an Italian theme going there, I marinated the drumsticks in olive oil, vinegar, and Italian spices before baking them along with the pasta.

A fairly easy meal after a long day in the kitchen.

Refrigerator check:

Lots of pudding left in that big bowl.

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

Self-Care

We certainly have started this new school year off with a bang. A bang of sneezes, runny noses, and sore throats. We only made it to the second week of school before a cold started circulating through our house, and now it has landed on me.

Gloom, despair, and agony on me.

The worst part of colds for me is that I still have to cook. Well, A. would cook, but the things he tends to cook are not what I want to eat when I'm sick. I want to eat chicken soup. This is a pain to make from scratch, what with the simmering of the chicken to make stock and all.

But what if I had simmered all my various leftover chicken bones awhile ago just so they wouldn't take up space in the freezer anymore and then picked all the meat off and froze big containers of broth and chicken?

Well, then all I have to do when I'm sick is take that out to thaw overnight, and I'm halfway to chicken soup.

Thawing.

I even have some already-cooked diced onion in the freezer, so all I have to do today is add that, carrots, and potatoes to the stock+meat, and I have soup.

Yay, me.

Another Onion Tip

A couple of weeks ago when I made my first batch of dill pickles, I found myself with just a little bit of extra brine. This pretty much always happens when I make pickles. I either have not quite enough and have to make more to top off the jar, or I have only a cup or so of extra brine.

I never throw the extra brine away. Usually I just put it in a jar and save it for the next time I have more cucumbers to pickle.

But this time, I happened to have half an onion from something else on my cutting board. So instead of just cooking the onion like I typically would, I decided to try putting thinly sliced onion in the brine, along with just a bit of sugar.

And now I will never be without pickled onions.

They are so good. They're kind of like green onions, in that they still have an onion flavor, but the pickling tames the bite of raw onion.

I love them in my salads. They are also great on sandwiches, and I've used them to top chili, too. It's amazing how many things I find for them to go on and in when they're just waiting in the refrigerator.

A tomato and cucumber salad can always use onion.

All I did to make them was cut my half an onion in half (to make shorter pieces), and then slice those quarters as thinly as possible. That filled a pint jar. I poured the hot brine over the onion, added maybe a quarter teaspoon of sugar, shook it all up, and put it in the refrigerator. They were ready to use in just a couple of days.

When I finish up the big jar of refrigerator pickles I have right now, I think I'm going to strain the brine (to remove any bits of dill and cucumber seeds) and heat it to boiling again so I can make a really big jar of pickled onions. This should work because I make my brine really strong to start with, so it doesn't get diluted too much from the cucumbers. 

You're never too old to learn new things in the kitchen, I guess. Or anywhere.

How I Cut a Watermelon

What, that title didn't grab you right out of the gate? 

Anyway.

Whenever I go to the grocery store in the summer, there are two things I notice about the watermelons there: One is that they are always seedless. And two is that they are small.

I don't buy those watermelons. I buy the watermelons from the pick-up truck on the side of the road. These typically weigh 30 pounds and are bigger than a dog.

It requires some strategy to cut up a fruit that large. And this is how I do it.

First, I have to note that I can't cut watermelons on my cutting boards. The reason for that is that I most frequently cut onions and garlic on my cutting boards, which are wood. So they retain the faint smell of those pungent alliums, and if I cut watermelon on them (or pineapple), I can always taste just a bit of that onion/garlic flavor.

Unpleasant.

So cutting boards are out for cutting watermelon.

Luckily, I have the original 1970s yellow plastic countertops in my trailer kitchen, which I can and do cut on without any worry about messing them up. 

So I put my giant watermelon directly on the counter, grab my carving knife, and start cutting circles off the end.

Watermelon circle with carving knife.

Forgot to mention the kitchen towel on the counter. This is crucial to avoid a flood of watermelon juice dripping off the counter and onto the floor. I don't cut on the towel itself, but I leave it under the cut watermelon to absorb the juice.

The big circle gets put flat on a plate, which is where I cut it into triangles.

Or sometimes chunks for later, as you can see in the bowl on the right.

The reason I cut chunks for later is that the watermelons are so big I can't store them easily in my refrigerator if I don't cut off about a quarter of them when I first cut into them. I simply put the watermelon cut side down on that same plate and slide it into the refrigerator. If we don't eat enough to make the watermelon short enough to fit on a refrigerator shelf on its plate, I cut more off and cut it into chunks into a bowl until the watermelon will fit.

And I guess that's it. That's how I deal with giant, seeded watermelons. That was about as exciting as the title promised, huh?

Do you buy watermelons? How do you prepare them?

A Peek Into My Crazy

It has been well established here that I spend a great part of my life thinking about, growing, and preparing food. The hundreds of posts on that subject here prove that beyond a doubt.

This is why it is not even 5 a.m., and I'm about to peel a few dozen potatoes.

Lemme 'splain.

About a month ago, our priest mentioned that he was hosting all the other priests from the area* and that typically, some of the ladies from the parish would help with the lunch that they have after their meeting.

He was sitting at our table, eating dinner with us when he said this, and it was about the most blatant hint imaginable. There aren't very many "ladies" in our parish to start with, and very few that he would ask something like this of.

So of course, I asked him if he would like me to make lunch for them, thinking it would be for at least a dozen people.

Nope. He said there would be about six of them. Oh, so basically cooking for my family? Yes, I can handle that without any problem.

Fast-forward to this week, which is the last week of school, with all the insanity that this entails. Of course the priests' gathering has to be this week. Today, actually. So is the FFA end-of-year ice cream social, for which I was volunteered by my FFA child to provide cookie crumbles for the ice cream toppings.

The count of priests I'm feeding was revised to eight. And of course, I still need to feed my own family of six.

That means that for today, I'm on tap for lunch for eight, dinner for six, and cookies.

I have spent all week thinking about how I can most easily cook lunch without being there to serve it (since they eat after their meeting, I'm not walking into that meeting to deal with food, and the time is uncertain anyway). Also considering that I work on Mondays and therefore wouldn't be making much ahead.

Plus, cookies.

The cookies were easy, at least. I made the requested peanut butter cookies on Saturday and froze a container for the FFA.

When I got home from work yesterday, I made crispy rice treats. After I spilled several cups of cereal on the floor while I was opening the giant bag of Malt o' Meal Crispy Rice, that is.

Good day for the chickens.

I have to drop off all the food for the priest party (as my children have been calling it) this morning before their meeting starts at 10:30 a.m. I decided to make shepherd's pie. 

The appropriateness and humor of making shepherd's pie did not occur to me until just recently, but it is pretty amusing. (Priests are our shepherds, get it? Yeah, my sons didn't think it was as funny as I did, either.) 

Anyway.

I'm making three pans of shepherd's pie--two for them, one for us--which will require about five pounds of meat and around ten pounds of potatoes. Also broccoli slaw--because it's the only other vegetable I have--and brownies, along with the crispy rice treats.

Overkill? Probably. But that's how I operate with food.

Anyway, it's a lot. And that's why I'm going to peel potatoes at 5 a.m.

Catch you on the flip side.

Update: 6 a.m.

Potatoes for mashing are boiling on the stove, and another pan for us is waiting elsewhere. Getting up at 4:15 a.m. has its benefits.

* The "area" in this case being the entire northeastern part of the state, which is large and relatively unpopulated.

 

Built Different

I freely admit that my attitude towards food and its preparation is not what most would consider normal. Mostly because I will do so much more work in the kitchen than most.

This is why when A. asked me to provide all the food the rest of the family would need for the three days they would be traveling, I said okay. He wasn't sure if they would be camping or if the wind would force them into a motel, so anything I packed for them had to be able to be heated in either a campfire or a microwave in a motel room.

My original plan had been to go to the grocery store in conjunction with a track meet, so I could buy some snacks and lunch meat and so on.

However, I didn't go to the track meet. So I didn't go to the grocery store. So I had to get a little bit creative.

I spent three hours in the kitchen Thursday morning, cooking, prepping, and packing. 

Here's what I came up with:

--A foil packet of potatoes and sausage (this could be heated on paper plates in a microwave if needed)

--A foil packet of pork, beans, and grated cheese for burrito filling (ditto)

--Two disposable foil pans of bacon and scrambled eggs

--Tuna salad made with three big cans of tuna

--Two loaves of sliced bread

--Corn and flour tortillas

--A gallon bag of carrot sticks, celery sticks, and mini bell peppers

--Peanut butter and jelly

--Homemade crackers

--Big bag of sliced cheese

--Pistachios in the shell

--Peanuts in the shell

--Marshmallows

--Chocolate bunnies from Easter (we ended up with double what we needed, for reasons, so I sent these along for s'mores)

--Jellybeans

--Raisins

--Dried mango

--One quart jar of rice pudding

--Two pint jars of (accidentally) runny chocolate pudding with cream

It seemed like a lot of food.

It looks like a lot of food, too.

Almost all of it was eaten, though, which is why I always pack more food than seems reasonable.

I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to travel and eat at restaurants instead of out of coolers, but that's not how I operate. Clearly.

Lasagna Insanity

Some time ago, I realized I had never actually made a lasagna myself.

This seems odd, given the fact that I love lasagna, and cook so much. I had this thought about five months ago, and then it sort of sat there in the back of my mind since then.

Then I had to make ricotta cheese a couple of months ago with some milk that was heading south. That sat in the freezer until I thought, "Hey, doesn't lasagna have ricotta cheese in it? I could make lasagna with that."

I also had two packages of ground bull meat and the last quart jar of roasted tomato puree from the garden last year. This all seemed to me to be the ideal start to a really good lasagna.

And THEN I thought, "Well, if I'm going to have all these homemade ingredients in it, I might as well just make the pasta, too, right?"

Yes, this is really how I think.

I looked up several recipes for lasagna with homemade pasta, which is when I discovered that traditional Italian lasagna doesn't actually have ricotta in it. Or mozzarella. Instead, it has a bechamel (white sauce made with butter, flour, and milk) layered with the meat sauce.

I've never had this kind of lasagna, and also didn't have a lot of mozzarella on hand (or rather, asadero, which is my mozzarella substitute), so I decided I would try it.

I used this recipe for the meat sauce and bechamel (described by the author as "a beast of a recipe"--indeed), and for the first part of the pasta making in a food processor. For the rest of the instructions for the pasta making, I used the description in my absolute beast of a book, The Old World Kitchen: The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking, by Elizabeth Luard*. That had instructions for rolling the lasagna noodles by hand, which I had to do because I don't have a pasta machine.

I made the bolognese (meat sauce) on Friday, which required several hours of simmering. Because I had four pounds of ground bull, I actually made a double recipe of that, which is a LOT of bolognese.

I made the rest of it on Saturday. I decided to make enough for my 10"x15" Pyrex baking dish, so I made 1.5 of the recipe parts. This is also a LOT of bechamel sauce. And honestly, stirring the bechamel for so long while adding the milk in small increments was sort of painful for my hand and arm.

Then I compounded the hand and arm excercise by rolling out all the pasta with my rolling pin. It has to be really thin, and that's a lot of pasta. It required some pretty steady, intense pressure to get it rolled out thin enough. And THEN, I had to grate all the Parmesan. I was actually sore the next day. Those Italian peasant women must have had arms like Arnold.

Anyway.

I finally got all the parts made and ready for layering.

I had rolled the four pieces of pasta out on their own pieces of parchment paper, so I could move them and stack them that way. Worked really well.

I had some help with the assembly.

Of course.

I had just enough for four layers in that pan.

Ready to bake.

I did not, however, bake it on Saturday. I figured I would enjoy it more if I had a break to forget all the work that went into it, so it just went into the refrigerator until Sunday, and we had it for our Sunday dinner.

That was a good call.

So the big question: Was it worth the literal hours it took to make?

Not really. 

I mean, it was delicious, and I was surprised at how good the bechamel was with the meat sauce. A. also really liked the homemade pasta in it, which was much softer and more delicate than storebought. I also liked how light it was in comparison to the typical American lasagna that is so loaded with cheese.

But I think I still like the cheese in the American version. Maybe just not so much of it.

I have more bolognese from the giant batch that I froze, so I think I might make another lasagna sometime with storebought noodles, still the bechamel (I had a bunch of that leftover, too, which I froze), and some asadero cheese in it. Then I can compare the American and the Italian versions.

Oh, and you might notice that although this all started because I had ricotta in the freezer to use, I didn't actually use it in the lasagna. So instead, I made an Italian cheesecake with it. Which we ate after the lasagna, of course.

So the final verdict: I'm glad I tried it, but I probably won't do it this way again.

* This is such a great book. So detailed and comprehensive, and her voice throughout is very engaging. At the end of the two-page pasta recipe detailing how her friend Michaela in Italy made this lasagna in her own kitchen, she said "Michaela would be proud of you." I was certainly proud of me, and I'm sure Michaela would have been, too.

Another for the List

I make a lot of things from scratch that most people buy: yogurt, chocolate syrup (for chocolate milk), bread, salad dressings, and many other things. I do buy some condiments, though, including salsa, mustard, ketchup, and jam.

Except I guess I won't be buying jam anymore. And it's all because of the tea party.

I had promised Poppy that we would have a tea party while the MiL was here. Tea parties must, of course, include scones. And those scones must, of course, be accompanied by jam.

We were out of strawberry jam, and I had put it on the list for A. when he went to the store. He missed it, though, and never got any. So there I was, with a tea party promised for the next day, no jam, and no way to get it that didn't involve driving 60 miles.

I did, however, have the last of a bag of strawberries in the freezer, bottled lemon juice, and sugar. And these are the ingredients for strawberry jam.

I've made a lot of jam over the years, so I didn't use a recipe. I didn't even use pectin, because I didn't have any.

I dumped all the strawberries in a pot, heated them gently (so they wouldn't stick) until they were thawed, mashed them with my potato masher, dumped in slightly more than an equal amount of sugar, added a few squirts of lemon juice, and boiled it all furiously, while stirring, until it was sheeting* on a flat wooden spoon. 

This jam was enormously popular with everyone, of course. A. especially liked it. His theory is that it tastes better because there's no pectin in it, so the flavor of the strawberries is undiluted.

Eating it on a scone is also a good idea.

Out of curiosity, I did a little cost comparison between the ingredients for this jam and a jar of store-brand strawberry jam. What I found is that this jam is about half the cost of the store jam. And it's a lot better than store jam. 

Making jam without pectin does require more sugar to get it to a spreadable consistency, otherwise it can be slightly runny. However, we don't worry too much about runny jam. Particularly since it's often used in yogurt.

So I guess we can add jam to the list of things I make now. It's a lot easier than the bread, at least.

* Sheeting is when the jam doesn't drip in individual drips from the spoon when it's upside down, but rather all gathers and falls off all along the spoon in a line.

In the Kitchen

It is no surprise that I spend much of my time at home in the kitchen. My style of cooking is from scratch in the sense that it is laborious and takes time. This is okay. This is my choice. 

But sometimes I get tired of it. This usually happens on days when I make so many things in one day that I'm in the kitchen for literally hours, just moving from one thing to the next.

I had one of those days on Saturday. I started at 6 a.m. with the bread dough and was mostly in the kitchen for around 12 hours. I mean, not in the kitchen continuously, because I do take breaks here and there, but the majority of my work and time on Saturday was spent cooking. I was very over the kitchen by 6 p.m.

It was, however, a very productive day, and helpful for the coming week, because of course not everything I made was consumed on Saturday. 

Because I was curious, I actually wrote down everything I made throughout the day. 

Of course I'm going to share here with you. You expected something else?

--Coffee. Always first, and always chicory coffee. I make it in a french press.

--Cream of buckwheat cereal for the family's breakfast. It was a cold, snowy morning, and we were out of both eggs and bread.

--Elk stew. A make-ahead for the coming days' lunches or short-on-time dinners.

Elk stew in progress. The things on top are frozen cubes of pureed tomatoes, and the jellied juices left from cooking a pork butt.

--A loaf pan of rendered tallow. Rendered in the oven with the stew.

--Baked strawberries/blueberries. In the oven with the stew and tallow.

--Hot cocoa when the children came in from playing in the snow. Cocoa powder+sugar+salt+vanilla+milk.

--A New-York-style cheesecake, for the next day's birthday.

Before baking.

--Chocolate syrup, for a couple of gallons of chocolate milk.

--Four loaves of sourdough bread.

--Two half-sheet-pan pizzas, the crusts made with some of the bread dough.

--Ranch dressing, for pizza dipping.

--Ricotta cheese, made at the end of the day with a gallon of milk that somehow got shoved into the back of the refrigerator and was way past its use-by date.

I also made things like tortillas with peanut butter and a salad for me, but that's more assembling than cooking.

Anyway. That was my day on Saturday. Most of those things made leftovers and about half of them I still have on hand, so it was a good investment of time. 

About that King Cake . . .

It belatedly occurred to me that there might be many of you who read my last post and were thinking, "King Cake? What is a King Cake?"

And of course, although there are many search engines right at your fingertips on whatever device you were using to read that, I feel it is my duty to enlighten you here. Especially on one very important point: How to eat a King Cake.

This King Cake has already been eaten, in the proper way.

So! Here's what I know about King Cakes: They are served during Mardi Gras, which is technically a season that runs from Epiphany to Fat Tuesday. Epiphany is the feast of the Three Kings. Hence the "King" part of the name. Fat Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday. And that means Fat Tuesday is the big celebration before Lent begins.

As most of you probably remember, my mother is from New Orleans, the city most famous for Mardi Gras celebrations. This is why my family traditions include King Cakes. 

King Cakes are basically giant pastries covered in an alarming amount of sugar. I guess a lot of them now have fillings like cream cheese or praline, but we always had just plain ones. The sugar on top--which must be a ridiculously heavy layer--is always in Mardi Gras colors, which are green, purple, and gold.

Those colors have some significance, I'm sure, but I don't really know what. I just know those are the colors of Mardi Gras.

And here are the colors! In a Mardi Gras banner that is now in my dining room.

Also of note: King Cakes have a small figurine of a baby in them. This baby represents the baby Jesus. In my family, we always said whoever gets the baby in their slice has to buy the King Cake the next year. Not that we ever really did that, because my grandmother was actually the one who always bought them from the bakery near her house in Metairie (a suburb of New Orleans) but we said it.

Baby Jesus. Hand for scale.

And now we come to the very important point of how to eat a King Cake. Yes, you can just slice it and eat it cold, being careful of the baby in case it should be in your piece. But King Cakes are SO much better if you put a pat of butter on top of your piece and warm it enough that the butter and the sugar both melt a little. This forms a sort of sauce for the King Cake. This is what you want.

Leftover pieces awaiting their butter and heat.

So now if you ever encounter a King Cake in the wild, you know what to do: Apply butter and heat, and look out for the baby Jesus.

Enjoy!