Friday Food: Onion Salvage

Friday 

Short version: Tuna noodle casserole for the kids, scrambled eggs with feta and caramelized onions for the adults, frozen peas for all

Long version: So why did I make such fancy eggs, with caramelized onions of all things? Because I found three bags of onions in A.'s office that I had forgotten about and that were starting to rot.

Don't all your fanciest recipes start with rotting food?

The nice thing about onions is that, due to their layers, it's possible to peel off the rotting layers, do some trimming, and salvage most of even a really nasty-looking onion.

I had, um, quite a few of those.

That is a GIANT casserole dish, and it is three-quarters full of sliced onions.

After cooking those onions in the oven for a very long time with butter and salt, this is what I ended up with.

Where'd all the onions go?

Those were the onions I used for the eggs. I seriously love caramelized onions--I can eat them just by themselves--and I also love feta cheese. They were really good eggs.

The tuna noodle casserole was in no way fancy. I mostly made it because I had not one, but two cans of cream of mushroom soup given to us by different people. So I used those, with tuna, pasta, cheese, onion, and celery to make a HUGE casserole of tuna noodle. I filled my 9x13 Pyrex alllll the way to the top.

Cubby has eaten an astonishing quantity of that casserole this week. 

Saturday

Short version: Roast beef and onion gravy, fried potatoes, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: The roast was a sirloin tip. I was careful not to overcook it--always my downfall when roasting large cuts of meat--and it came out very well. 

I made the gravy with--you guessed it--more of the caramelized onions. It was tasty, but too salty. It always seems that if I season the meat enough so it tastes good on its own, then the pan juices are really too salty to make good gravy. Maybe I'm just not making enough gravy, so it's not diluting the juices enough? Maybe I shouldn't season the meat so much and instead should rely on the gravy to season it more?

Any input on this issue would be appreciated.

Sunday

Short version: Chicken legs, rosti, steamed broccoli and carrots, peach and blueberry pie with maple whipped cream

Long version: Cheapo chicken legs seasoned with salt, garlic powder, and paprika, browned, then roasted in the oven, with some barbecue sauce smeared on at the end. Everyone except one child loved these. He declared them "too sweet."

Right.

Now for the rosti, which is a Swiss dish that is basically a giant hash brown in a pan.  I should let reader Claire, who actually lives in Switzerland, tell you how to make it. And if she wants to chime in in the comments, she should. How I made it was to grate two giant potatoes, squeeze them with my hands and wring them out in a dish towel to get out most of the moisture, then dump them into the cast-iron skillet I browned the chicken in, with a bunch of coconut oil and vegetable oil, lots of salt, pepper, and some dried onion flakes. Then I put that in the oven with the chicken to cook at 400 degrees. 

The most intimidating thing about rosti is flipping it, so it will brown on both sides. You have to put a plate on top of the skillet, then flip the whole thing so the rosti drops out onto the plate, then slide the rosti back into the skillet to brown on the other side. The couple of times I've tried this in the past, it has stuck and fallen apart. But I did it this time! Hooray!

I win rosti-ing. (Yes, I just created a terribly awkward verb. Such is the beauty of the living language of English.)

Also, with the rosti, I inadvertently created a sort of potato pie. And we all know March 14 is Pi Day! 

Oh, you didn't know that? Of course not. That's because it's another of those made-up "days." The only reason I know about it is because many women online celebrate this day by making pies and posting about it.

There's only one person in our household who really likes pie. I speak, of course, of Cubby. He loves to make pie and also received a very nice pie pan from his grandma for Christmas that he hasn't even gotten to use yet. Since Pi Day happened to be on a Sunday this year, I decided it was as good a time as any to shepherd Cubby through pie-making again.

I had lots of frozen peaches and blueberries on hand, so we made a peach and blueberry pie, using this post for some help but mostly winging it with the filling and using the MiL's crust recipe. I did need the video in that post to figure out how to do the lattice top, though.

Happy Pi Day!

Cubby declared peach-blueberry pie his second favorite, after strawberry-rhubarb. It was pretty good, although the crust was a little tough. We need the MiL here to instruct this boy. I am a very poor substitute.

Monday

Short version: Many leftovers

Long version: Three of the four children had leftover tuna casserole and leftover broccoli. 

Charlie had leftover roast beef, the last bit of leftover rosti, and leftover broccoli. 

A. had leftover roast beef and carrots.

I had some of the leftover roast beef with the gravy that I had diluted with water. I added some of the leftover carrots and broccoli, plus leftover frozen peas, to make a sort of soup. Surprisingly tasty.

Can you tell it was a work day?

Tuesday

Short version: Extemporaneous meatloaf, baked potatoes, calabaza, frozen green peas, baked custard

Long version: I made the meatloaf with about 2/3 ground beef and 1/3 the cheap pork sausage from Sysco, along with eggs and about half of a half-pint jar of ancient rhubarb sauce that moved here with us from New York. No bread crumbs, because I didn't happen to have any in the freezer and was too lazy to haul out the food processor to make any.

Surprisingly, it turned out really well. Hooray.

I had two egg yolks left from making two batches of spiced almonds, plus the beaten egg from the egg wash we used for the pie, so I made a batch of custard. Good call.

Wednesday

Short version: Not-Irish food, but soda bread!

Long version: Somehow, it has become our tradition to have pesto on St. Patrick's Day. I think I made it several years ago, not realizing I had made green food for St. Patrick's Day, but then decided to pretend I did it on purpose. And from then on, I did do it on purpose.

So! This year, it was standard pasta with pesto. I still have about a dozen cubes of pesto from last year's garden. I planted a lot of basil seeds this year, in hopes of getting enough for pesto throughout the winter. We'll see.

I also used the same sausage and ground beef from the night before to make a meat casserole. It was 2/3 sausage and 1/3 beef, browned with garlic, which I topped with a bag of Finny's tomato sauce from the freezer, then grated asadero cheese from the freezer. I mixed in a bag of chopped calabaza--also from the freezer--in half the casserole dish, for A. and me. The children wouldn't touch such an abomination. I also randomly sprinkled on extra basil and garlic powder, then baked it until it was all hot and the cheese was browned. It was very good.

I actually made that ahead of time and just had it in the refrigerator, since Wednesdays are work days for me. But then our Winter Weather Advisory resulted in the call at 5 a.m. that we were going to do "remote learning" for the day.

Let me tell you how happy my children are about the school laptops and Zoom cheating them of snow days anymore. For that matter, let me tell you how happy I am about that.

However! On the bright side, me being home allowed me to make this soda bread. And the children being home allowed them to eat it. It's very American soda bread, but then I'm very American Irish, so I suppose it's appropriate. 

I mostly made it because I found no less than four partially emptied jars of yogurt in the refrigerator, at the very moment that more yogurt was incubating in the kitchen. So I decided to use up some of the older yogurt in the soda bread. 

We ended up with a lot of desserts this week. I heard no complaints about this.

Thursday

Short version: Beef sandwiches, coleslaw

Long version: I cooked an arm roast in the morning, using the last of the rhubarb sauce to season it. So I decided to pretend it was like barbecue sauce and shred the meat to serve as sandwiches. I added some Dijon mustard, too, to tone down the sweetness a little. Between that and the coleslaw, it was a pretty sweet meal for the children.

I had some of the plain meat shredded with Holy's cabbage, and A. had leftover meatloaf.

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

Milk Jugs for St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I celebrated my Irish heritage* a day early by planting out the cabbages. It has become my own little tradition to plant them on or as near to St. Patrick's Day as I can. The appropriateness of it pleases me. 

But since Wednesday is a work day for me, and our forecast for Tuesday night was for rain, I decided to do it the day before.

So! Yesterday my lovely assistant and I went out and planted nine cabbage seedlings.

She took care of the milk jug placement and the watering after the planting.

The end result, while pleasing to me because I can envision our summer coleslaw in these beds, is not actually aesthetically pleasing.

We decided to try a new crop this year: plastic milk jugs.

Just kidding. The milk jugs protect the tender young plants from the overly aggressive sun and wind. Kind of like individual greenhouses. Except not as attractive. The rocks keep the jugs from blowing away.

We've learned some lessons in our three years so far of gardening here.

Unfortunately, our forecasted rain changed to a Winter Weather Advisory. I can't un-transplant the cabbages, so we'll just have to cross our fingers and trust to the milk jugs.

And if those fail, I suppose I can always start more seeds.

* I actually do have quite a lot of Irish ancestry. My love of potatoes and cabbage is genetic.

T.T.: Two for One

I am sure everyone who reads my (very, very long) Friday Food posts has noticed that when we have broccoli, we almost always have carrots, too. And why is that? Well! I will tell you!

One reason is that the children like broccoli very much, but their father is not such a fan. He prefers the carrots. 

But the main reason is that I discovered a few years ago that it's entirely possible, and actually even preferable, to cook the two vegetables in the same pot.

See, if you put chunks of carrot in the bottom of a pot with broccoli florets on top of the carrots, and then add enough water to cover the carrots most of the way, they will cook in the same amount of time. The carrots cook faster, because they're actually in the water, but the broccoli, suspended above the water, steams. 

A broccoli blanket, with some cozy carrots peeking out from underneath.

This also means that the broccoli doesn't get waterlogged as it would if it was actually sitting in the water. The carrots take the place of a steamer insert, which I do not have. 

So, the details for what I do are as follows: About half-inch chunks of carrot in the bottom of a pot, with big broccoli florets on top of those. Sprinkle on some salt, add water to come about 3/4 of the way up the layer of carrots, and simmer, covered, until both vegetables are done.

Better cooking, two vegetables instead of one, and only one pot to wash? Works for me. I hope it works for you, too.

Snapshots: RAAAAIIIINNN!!!

Did that title adequately express our excitement about the main event of our week? No? Perhaps you require more exclamation points.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There.

I literally do not remember the last time it actually rained significantly here. Some snow this winter, but nothing remarkable, and it was depressingly dry all summer and fall. We're in a bad drought right now, which is disastrous in a place that relies on natural pastures to feed livestock. As everyone here does, including us. 

That is why the big storm that moved in Saturday morning was such a big deal. And that is why we were SO HAPPY to look out the door in the morning and see this:

RAAAIIINNN!!!!

We ended up getting half an inch of rain.

We know this because of our handy rain gauge, which has not had any measurable rain in it since I bought it for A. last year. For Father's Day. Yeah. That's a drought, all right.

The rain ended around noon and it turned into a pretty nice day, so we shooed everyone out the door.

Odin was already out the door, and happy to see the humans out, too.

Three-fourths of the children elected to go for a bike ride.

 

Into the great wide open.

Which ended as almost all bike rides do when Daddy the Indulgent is there:

Mommy the Mean has neither a belt to tow the girl with, nor the inclination to indulge her in this way.

This week was the boys' spring break off from school, and it unfortunately featured absolutely terrible winds almost every day. Luckily, the wind is usually bearable right at sunrise, so I instigated a lot of early-morning walks so the children would get outside before it became unpleasant.

The dogs were never reluctant. The same could not always be said of the children.

That golden light just as the sun clears the horizon is my favorite.

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Homemade Dog Food? Yup

Friday  

Short version: Tuna melt sandwiches, carrot sticks with ranch dip

Long version: A. finally managed to catch the owner of the tiny store in the village when he was there (I struck out at least twice last week trying to get eggs), and found that he had a bag of carrots in his cooler. Hooray!

You don't know how exciting carrots can be until you live 60 miles from the nearest produce department.

So the kids had carrot sticks with their sandwiches.

I had the very last of the somewhat sad-looking lettuce with my tuna salad, along with grated carrots (hooray again!) and cheese. 

Adventure Girl, ready to go to the neighbor's canyon with Daddy and her brothers. I stayed home and watched Pretty Woman. Because I wanted to. So there.

Saturday

Short version: Cheese pizza and frozen peas for the kids, randomness in a pot for the adults

Long version: I had half a can of tomatoes in the refrigerator, a large block of asadero cheese (our substitute for mozzarella) in the refrigerator, and I was making bread. Sounds like pizza to me.

I only made one, but since A. and I didn't eat any, it was just enough for the children. They had the still-frozen peas as their appetizer. I do this a lot when whatever they're having for dinner doesn't lend itself to a separate vegetable. I suppose I could have put the peas on the pizza (or the exciting carrots), but I think there would have been some strong pushback on that.

I made the pizza sauce entirely in the microwave by simply mashing the tomatoes with my potato masher, adding salt, pepper, dried onion flakes, garlic powder, and dried basil, and microwaving it uncovered until the liquid was reduced. Cubby said it was the best pizza he'd ever had, so maybe I should do it that way from now on.

The randomness I made for A. and me was a soup that consisted of pressure-canned bull meat, the juice and a few of the tomatoes from a can, onion, garlic, celery, carrots, the last cup of mashed squash in the refrigerator, a can of green beans (from commodities that one of our neighbors gave us), and some of the dried lamb's quarters that I dry every spring and store in the pantry in a quart jar for the inevitable Lean Vegetable Times.

The only purchased ingredients in that soup were the onion, celery, the few tomatoes, and carrots. And it was surprisingly good.

Cheap eats 'R' us.

Sunday

Short version: Rib steaks, fried potatoes, frozen peas, dry chocolate cake with maple whipped cream

Long version: I don't usually fry potatoes, but I didn't get cooking early enough to make roasted potatoes. If only I had known Karen.'s tip about pre-cooking in the microwave. So instead I cut the potatoes thinly and fried them. They were popular.

Poppy had requested chocolate cake for Sunday dessert, and I agreed because it was my dad's birthday. Not that he was here to eat it with us, but the children were happy to eat his share.

Unfortunately, just as I put the cake in the oven, I asked the children if they wanted to play The Game of Life. An old version of it--based on the clothing of the family on the box, I'm guessing 1980s--was given to me by a retired teacher at the school.

Had I ever played this game before, I would never have suggested it to the children. It's like Monopoly; it goes forevvver. And there's all this money and math involved, so I had to be the banker.

In all the excitement (ahem), I forgot about the cake, so it baked about twenty minutes longer than it should have.

It didn't burn, but it was a bit dry. So instead of frosting, I whipped cream with maple syrup and broke the cake up into pieces so I could cover them in the whipped cream. Then I made the children sing Happy Birthday to my dad before I let them eat the cake.

So much of parenting relies on bribery. (The naked piece was for Poppy, who does not like whipped cream. I know.)

Monday

Short version: Bunless (oven!) cheeseburgers, corn muffins, frozen peas

Long version: I used this recipe for the corn muffins. It's one I first saw on the NYT website, and, it being the NYT, it immediately disappeared behind a paywall. Annoying. 

There were other places online that listed just the ingredients, and I could still make it without the actual instructions, but it was nice to suddenly find that someone had written out the whole thing and posted it.

Since the oven was on anyway for the muffins, I wanted to try cooking the hamburgers on a pan in the oven. I reeeeeallly hate frying them on the stove. Such a mess, and I have to use two pans to fit all the ones we eat. And even then, people sometimes want more. This is not a problem that's going to get better as the children get bigger, so I figured I needed to find a way to cook larger quantities in the oven.

I have a propane stove, and the broilers are terrible on those. The broiler is in a drawer at floor-level, so I have to literally lie down on the floor to see inside when I'm broiling. The heat source is this little strip of weak flame right in the center of the bottom of the oven, not coils that cover the whole top surface of the oven. 

So what I did was, put the half-sheet pan of hamburgers in the 425 degree oven while the muffins were baking, to get mostly cooked. Then, when the muffins were done and the hamburgers had shrunk some, I pushed them into the center of the pan and stuck them under the broiler. After that, I turned the broiler off and melted the cheese on the hamburgers by moving them back into the still-hot oven.

It worked. I wouldn't say it was easier, but I can cook more and it's a heck of a lot cleaner.

Tuesday

Short version: More steak, fried bull meat, garlic bread, pinto beans, carrot sticks with ranch dip

Long version: There were three steaks left, which is not enough for everyone. So I fried the other half of the bull meat left in the jar after I had made the random soup earlier in the week.

I also cooked a LOT of pinto beans this day. I still have ridiculous quantities of dried pinto beans taking up space in my pantry--I'm talking like 30 pounds--so I decided to put my pressure canner to work on them.

A nice thing about pressure canning beans is that they don't have to be cooked before they get put in the jars and canned. They do have to be pre-soaked, but the actual cooking happens in the jars during the canning. I can fit 14 pint jars in my giant pressure-canner, but the pot I used to soak the beans only held enough beans for 12 pints. 

That's still a lot of beans.

And then! Since the pot I had used to soak the beans wasn't really dirty, I decided to go ahead and cook yet another pot of beans, just on the stove.

Altogether, I got about four quarts of dried beans out of my pantry. But there are plenty more where those came from.

Wednesday

Short version: Bull and sauerkraut, rice, steamed carrots and broccoli

Long version: And then, since I still had the pressure canner out in the kitchen, I went ahead and pressure canned another seven quarts of bull meat. I took out too much meat to defrost, though, so I used the bag labeled "loin steaks" for dinner.

I used every method of tenderizing available to me. I marinated them, pounded them with my heavy rolling pin, and braised them in sauerkraut and onions for about three hours.

It turned out well, but man, conquering that bull meat definitely takes some effort.

I had made the rice in the morning for the dogs. See, we ran out of dog food on Tuesday, with no opportunity to get more until A. goes to pick up the van from the mechanic. Whenever that may be. But it's not as if we're lacking in meat and rice, which are main ingredients in a lot of homemade dog food. 

So I made the pot of rice, and then they've been getting liver, bull scraps I trimmed off while preparing for canning, and some of the nasty pre-cooked hamburger patties from the giant bag the school cook gave us before Thanksgiving.

Those dogs are living the high life, and will probably not be enthused about the reappearance of kibble. 

They'd better not get too used to it. I do enough cooking just for the people of the household. I don't need to add to my kitchen time by preparing custom dog food.

Thursday

Short version: Various foods

Long version: I used the pot of beans I cooked on Tuesday to make chili with some ground beef. This was a taste of my childhood; we always had beans and ground beef in our chili.

Cubby ate his chili over rice. The other three children had it as tacos with corn tortillas and cheese. And, thanks to A.'s trip to the grocery store, there was avocado for the top, which is always appreciated.

My current refrigerator looks a lot different than last week's refrigerator. 

Last week's refrigerator. (A. also got a new lightbulb for me to replace the one that burned out last week, so it's not only fuller, but brighter.)

A., who doesn't eat beans, had the last of the leftover steak and some leftover cooked carrots.

The dogs had rice, bull scraps, liver, and some canned tomato soup we got from a neighbor that I offered the children for lunch and they refused to eat. After one taste, Cubby said, "You can give this to the dogs." So I did. The dogs didn't refuse it.

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

T.T.: Baked Potatoes, Now With Half the Baking Time!

A little bit of trivia for you: My favorite TV chef of all time is Jacques Pepin*. He's had various cooking shows on PBS over the years. Probably the most famous one was the show he did with Julia Child. I bought the companion book for that show--Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, in case you need the title--out of the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble maaaany years ago now. And this tip comes from that book. 

It's a way to bake potatoes without having to keep them in the oven for hours.

Okay, so it doesn't take hours to bake potatoes, but it always takes a LOT longer than I think it will. I could never get the timing right on baked potatoes. Half the time they weren't quite done when the rest of dinner was. Or I would forget to put them in over an hour before dinnertime and give up on the idea of baked potatoes entirely. It was annoying.

But with this tip, you can put them in the oven only half an hour before you want to eat, and they will be ready. 

Jacques Pepin said that he learned this from his wife. And what she does is stick the potatoes in the microwave for a few minutes before putting them in the oven.

This is brilliant because, of course, potatoes cooked entirely in the microwave have a bit of a gummy, dense texture. It's just not right. But if you just do some partial cooking in the microwave, and then finish them in the oven, they have the right texture and the crisp skin a baked potato should have, but in waaaay less time.

You need a microwave to do this, obviously. If you don't have one, I am sorry. If you DO have one, just scrub your potatoes, stab them a few times with a knife to prevent potato explosions, and pre-cook them in the microwave on high. 

If you're cooking only one or two potatoes, they would only need about about a minute and a half in the microwave. For four or five potatoes, you need more like three and a half minutes.

Then you just put the potatoes in the oven and finish baking them in there at 350 degrees or so, 20-30 minutes depending on how big your potatoes are. 

Ta da!

I don't have any photos of potatoes to put here, but you know what baked potatoes look like, right? Right.

So here. Have a sunrise instead.

As viewed through the frame of our front gate.

And that's it! 

Have a nice Tuesday.

* He wrote a memoir several years ago that I recommend to everyone. It's The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen. He had an interesting life, and it's a very entertaining book.

Snapshots: Spring Things

Another week, another chance to share random photos!

Last Wednesday was Wacky Wednesday at school, and the kids were invited to "dress wackily." Somewhat surprisingly, every one of the boys elected to do this and came up with their own outfits. 

Not all of them elected to be in the photo I wanted to take of them, though. Only Cubby and Poppy, who of course insisted on dressing like her brothers.

 

Cubby is wearing a cape he made out of a ripped pair of jeans, and duct tape all over. Poppy has long johns under shorts, and three pigtails, although only the two are visible here.

Cameo by Jasper.

Nothing and no one gets by The Sentinel.

We had a big garden day yesterday. A. dug up a couple more beds for me so I could plant snow peas and spinach. Then I dug up the last of the small fall-planted carrots. I wasn't sure how they had fared in the ground when it froze, but they were just fine.

Tiny, but tasty.

After doing the outside stuff, I started planting more seeds for the indoor grow box.

With help, of course, from my lovely assistant.

It's possible I went a bit overboard.

12 Roma tomatoes, 8 Stupice tomatoes, 5 Black Krim tomatoes, 5 Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, 17 basil, 6 Chablis bell peppers, and 4 Alma paprika peppers. Whew.

Also, there was a lot of laundry.

Is there such a thing as too many clothesline photos? Not around here.

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.