Friday Food: So Much Beef

Yeah, I accidentally published this on Thursday night. But that's okay, because I was done cooking for this Friday Food week anyway.

Friday 

Short version: Before, during, and after football food

Long version: Cubby had a home football game at 4 p.m., so we all went. Before we left, the three remaining children had some leftover cream of wheat. Calvin also had some leftover potatoes and pesto. A. had leftover steak, potatoes, and pesto, plus some tortillas and cheese. I had some yogurt.

During the game, we all ate cucumbers, carrot sticks, and raisins.

After the game, we stayed for the first half of the varsity game, and A. bought Cubby a hamburger at the concession stand. The rest of the kids had bread and peanut butter, and yogurt with maple syrup when we got home. 

I had the rest of the steak and potatoes. Cold, because woah it was HOT at that game, and I was not interested in raising my body temperature with hot food.

Saturday

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers, boiled potatoes, fried mushrooms, coleslaw

Long version: Hamburgers made with the first of the 150 pounds of ground beef* I got from our neighbor's steer. So much better than store ground beef. So, so much better. 

I used some of the small garden potatoes for boiling, and I did not bother peeling them. Too small and irritating. So when we sat down to eat, I announced it was a peel-your-own-potatoes meal, if anyone was offended by the peels.

Not a single child bothered to peel their potatoes. Alrighty then.

I made a half recipe of this coleslaw with the last of some pretty old store cabbage. I have a couple of heads of cabbage in the garden that are going to be ready to harvest soon, so I figured I'd better get rid of the old one first. The coleslaw was delicious. As always.

Sunday

Short version: Giant roasted chicken, roasted potatoes, roasted green beans, leftover broccoli, magic ice cream

Long version: There were two meat chickens left to butcher, and A. grabbed the rooster this time. It really was a giant chicken. We didn't weigh it, but it seriously looked like a young turkey.

Ready for Thanksgiving two months early.

The "magic" ice cream is a recipe from Cubby's ATK cookbook for kids. Calvin chose it for Sunday dessert and helped me make it.

It's ice cream that can be made without an ice cream maker, because instead of churning a custard base, the base is made with condensed milk. I had never tried condensed milk before, but I bought some just for this recipe. 

The recipe also includes a small amount of sour cream, quite a bit of softly whipped heavy cream, and a lot of melted chocolate chips.

I think the chocolate chips took it over the top in terms of sweetness, given the fact that the first ingredient in condensed milk is sugar. We'll try it again sometime (when I have 2.5 cups of cream on hand) minus the chocolate chips and maybe try flavoring it with frozen, unsweetened peaches or something.

Monday

Short version: Leftover chicken, bread and butter, leftover coleslaw, leftover ice cream

Long version: Look at all those leftovers. Must be a workday. I did at least fry the leftover diced chicken breast in olive oil, which makes it much tastier than microwaving or something. I also added lots of paprika, salt, and garlic powder, because that's what I add to almost everything.

Tuesday

Short version: Barbecue bull sandwiches, frozen peas

Long version: When I had the food processor out earlier in the week to make the coleslaw, I decided to experiment with processing the pressure-cooked bull meat, in an effort to further break it up and make it less stringy.

That worked. And that was the meat I mixed with barbecue sauce for the sandwiches. I also topped the meat with cheese, because the bull meat has no fat in it.

I made some buns for the kids while I was making bread earlier in the day. Unfortunately, I baked them too long and the bottoms got a little singed, but nothing a little scraping with a butter knife couldn't fix.

Wednesday

Short version: Ground beef tacos, carrot sticks

Long version: I had some ground beef left from when I made hamburgers earlier in the week, so I cooked the rest of it on Tuesday with salsa and chile powder to make taco meat that I could heat up for dinner when I got home from work. 

Corn tortillas, meat, cheese, and a can of kidney beans I accidentally opened when I was making roasted chickpeas awhile ago, and there's dinner.

Thursday

Short version: Roast beef, roasted potatoes, green beans

Long version: I happened to pull a rump roast out of the freezer, mostly because it was in the box that was on the top of our stuffed-full-of-beef freezers. So I made it into roast beef, with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and dried thyme, and roasted the potatoes along with it. And I made a sauce for it with Dijon mustard and heavy cream.

I put some green beans right on the pan with the beef and potatoes, too, because using only one cooking dish makes me happy.

I needed to get everything out of the pan while I was making the sauce, so I transferred everything to the cutting board.

Insta-worthy! If I, uh, had Instagram.

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

* This may sound like a lot of ground beef to you. It is. My philosophy with the processing of animals is that if I'm going to pay someone to do it, I'm going to have them do as much processing that requires time and equipment as possible. I can make stew meat easily from any of the animals we butcher at home. I cannot (and do not want to) make ground beef. So I get mostly ground beef instead of stew meat and big roasts.

T.T.: An Escape to the Past

I don't watch television. Like, ever. We don't even have a television. 

This is a source of continual amazement at the school. Most of the students in the elementary have been to our house to play with one or another of the kids, and they go back to school to report to everyone else that no really, we don't have a TV.

Shocking.

We do, however, have one desktop computer and two laptop computers. The screens may be smaller, but anything you can watch on a smart TV, we can watch on our computers.

And, very unusually, I have a recommendation for you if you're looking for something to watch on your computer. (Or smart TV.)

When A. took the kids on their quasi-camping trip last weekend, I thought about watching a movie. I couldn't find anything that seemed like it would be worth two hours of my time, but I did find a show to watch on YouTube: Wartime Farm.  

This is a BBC show from some time ago that features my favorite trio of historians: Ruth, Peter, and Alex. They did several of these shows for the BBC, in which they essentially re-enact particular periods of history from an agricultural perspective. There was a Victorian farm, an Edwardian farm, a Tudor monastery farm . . . you get the idea.

I've seen most of those on PBS in the past, but the only one that has all the episodes on YouTube is the Wartime one. The war in this case is World War 2, and the entire show is the three of them using the equipment and doing things as farmers did in Britain during that war.

That may sound boring to you. I find it interesting, but most of all, relaxing. The three presenters are so relentlessly cheery and enthusiastic. It's a relief to watch someone slogging through mud behind a tractor and still insisting that those beans will make a good crop yet. There is nothing at all negative about it, but it somehow escapes being cheesy.

I think we can all agree that that's a rare thing these days.

So if you're looking for something soothing to watch, try that one. (And then let me know if you can find The Victorian Kitchen streaming for free anywhere online, because that's the one I was really trying to find.)

Monday Bouquets: The Autumn of the Sunflowers

More sunflowers! More sage!

But . . .

By the end of the week, I had to search pretty hard for a sunflower that was in good-enough shape to go on the table. I ended up using just one small sunflower and some of the small yellow flowers that are growing in the thousands in the sheep pasture.

Plus the sage. Of course.

The next time I make an arrangement, I might not be able to find sunflowers at all. Oh well. It was a good run.

I hope you have a lovely Monday, with or without flowers.

Snapshots: It's Adventure Honda!

Yes! You thought there was only Adventure Van who was willing to carry us to our family outings in the middle of nowhere. You were not aware there is also Adventure Honda.

But only because Adventure Van has been stuck at the mechanic for over a month now and I really don't want to talk about that.

And where did Adventure Honda take us?

To a canyon to jump around on a giant rock playground.

Jasper came with us, too, and decided he wanted to ride shotgun on the way home.

I wasn't too keen on having my faithful companion at my feet for the whole drive home, however, so he was evicted to the back again.

I've been helping out a friend by watching her five-year-old daughter two days a week, and it's been very interesting watching how girls interact. Because of course, my only experience is with a tribe of boys. Those boys do not play by setting up all the stuffed animals and having them talk to each other.

There was also some singing.

I mean, I'm sure some boys might do that, but my boys do things like this:

No singing here.

And last, but certainly not least, my last baby has started school.

With a very tropical backpack provided by the MiL.

She only goes two days a week, but still. All four of my children are now in school. When I mentioned to Cubby that this was a little bit sad for me, he offered the very practical suggestion that I should just have another baby then. 

Right.

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Pesto Pizza

Friday 

Short version: Hamburgers in camp, leftovers and eggs at home

Long version: A. took all four kids camping (although they got rained out and came home around 9 p.m.), so I packed them some pre-made hamburgers to heat up in the fire, plus bread and butter, trail mix, apples, and marshmallows.

I had leftover cabbage and mashed potatoes and cheese with a fried egg.

Saturday

Short version: Split pea soup, grilled cheese sandwiches

Long version: I'm finally making some headway with the split peas! I figured since it was relatively cool, I could make some soup with some of them. Also, I had a ham bone in the freezer I wanted to use. So I made the soup. 

It was okay. As split pea soup always is. I just can't get into it. Cubby, however, LOVES it, so I pressure-canned the remainder of the double batch I made in pint jars. That way, he can just open one for lunch whenever he wants. And we don't have to slog our way through the leftovers for a week.

Sunday

Short version: Italian sliders, pasta with pesto, corn on the cob, leftover calabacitas, pots de creme

Long version: I still had about half the ground beef left from when I made hamburgers a few days earlier, which I used to make the sliders. Those are just very small hamburgers with tomato sauce (I used a small container of leftover pizza sauce I had stashed in the freezer, plus some of the pesto I made earlier in the day) and asadero cheese melted on top.

I bought the corn on the cob when I was at the store earlier in the week. It wasn't the freshest corn, but given the fact that we don't live anywhere near corn-growing country, it's the best we were going to get. And the children were very happy with it.

Calvin chose the pots de creme. As he nearly always does on the days when it's his turn to choose.

We took a family outing to the canyon in the afternoon. 

Every outing requires a picnic, be it ever so humble (cheese, crackers, beef jerky, and grapes).

Monday

Short version: Barbecue bull sandwiches, carrot sticks with curry dip, applesauce and cream

Long version: I was making bread anyway, so I made some little buns for the bull meat. Also mixed some mayonnaise with curry powder to make the dip for the carrots.

Really going above and beyond with this meal, obviously. Ahem.

The real excitement, though, was the applesauce. There's a tree at an abandoned house in one of the villages that has red apples on it, so we stopped to pick some. Most of the apples here are green, and no good for sauce. I was hoping the red apples would be.

They were, but they were also incredibly wormy. I could only use about a quarter of the apples we picked, but from that I made two quarts of very good applesauce. Good flavor, and I didn't even need to add any maple syrup or anything to sweeten it.

The children were thrilled to have applesauce again, especially with cream for dessert. The boys are old enough to remember the gallons of applesauce I would make every fall in New York, and they miss it. So this was nice for them.

Tuesday

Short version: Scrambled eggs, bacon, corn tortillas with cheese, cucumber spears with ranch dip

Long version: Nah.

Wednesday

Short version: Last-minute pesto pizza, split pea soup, carrot sticks with ranch dip

Long version: This was not my plan for dinner. Because it was a work day for me, my plan had been to make tacos with the leftover pressure-cooked bull meat.

However.

This was also Poppy's very first day of school, ever. And she was feeling maybe a little delicate by the end of a long day. So, to celebrate her first day and make it a little bit special, I made a pizza.

I cut a small loaf of sourdough bread into three slices the long way, then spread those with the pesto I had made a few days earlier, topped it with asadero cheese, and baked it in a pan covered with olive oil. The children were very happy.

A. and I had the soup. It was not as good as the pizza. Of course.

Thursday

Short version: Steaks, boiled potatoes, steamed carrots and broccoli, brownies

Long version: These are the very last steaks from the steer we got in February from our neighbors. And we ate them on the very day we got another steer for the freezer from a different neighbor. This steer was much bigger, and should last a lot longer than six months.

I used this method for making the vegetables. I considered growing broccoli next year, but the appearance of cabbage loopers on my cabbages has me reconsidering it. I really dislike finding caterpillars in the water when I cook broccoli.

I made the brownies with Poppy and her friend (I'm watching her friend a couple of days a week while her mom is figuring out more-permanent childcare) to celebrate their first day of preschool the day before. I had told Poppy we would have the brownies on the actual first day of school, but that didn't happen. So the next day it was. 

They tasted just as good the day after the first day of preschool.

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

Remote Living: Sports

After a short lull, there was another question about remote living. Shall we?

An away game three hours away? How exactly does one handle sports in that regard? 

This is a good question, because it really is just that crazy.

Our school is so small that students there actually play football with the school twenty miles away, and even then, it's only six-man football. There just aren't that many schools that play six-man football, so to have any games at all, there is a lot of driving.

Yes, the away games all require over two hours of driving. The game last week was on a Saturday. So they left here at 10:30 a.m. and took the team to lunch before their 4 p.m. game. 

A. went to watch, so he brought Cubby home. They got home around 9 p.m.

I actually took this photo during a different trip, but it illustrates the experience quite well. Minus the darkness and driving rain that caused A. to have to pull over before they got home.

One of their upcoming games is against a school that is over five hours away. For that one, they'll pick a mid-point school to meet at and both teams will travel a couple of hours to play.

Volleyball is also going right now. They have a lot more games--because there are a lot more teams--and they do occasionally need to do things like leave school at 11 a.m. on the day of the game. And there are definitely days they get home very late. 

Although there are club sports for things like Little League, we told our kids that they had to wait to play anything until they were old enough (sixth grade) to play on a school team. Because then the school takes care of transportation. 

We just could not handle driving literally hundreds of miles a week for Little League games and practices. We have too many kids, and that is just too much of a time commitment and disruption in our family life. 

For people who are really into sports, the travel is worth getting their kids involved. We are not those people, however, so school sports it is.

T.T.: Low-Tech Apple Drying

I suspect this is another one of those posts (like the one about canning bull meat) that will have a very small audience who can actually put it into practice. I mean, unless there are lots of people who live in a very dry place and have an apple tree that produces multitudes of small green apples that are only good for eating fresh or drying.

If that's you, it's your lucky day!

So, when I say only good for eating fresh or drying, I really mean it. These apples--which come from a mature tree next to the casita--are small, green, and dry. In flavor, they resemble something like a Granny Smith. But their texture is nothing like that. They really can't be baked. They just don't get soft. They can be boiled in water and will get sort of soft eventually, but they also get kind of waterlogged and tasteless.

That means anything like applesauce or apple crisps or whatever is definitely out.

However! They are perfect for drying. Because of their low water content, they don't have as much moisture to get rid of as a typical apple. And drying intensifies their flavor. I think they're better dried than fresh.

Lucky for us, we live in a perfect climate for air drying. Strong sun, wind, and low humidity mean that the entire outdoors is a dehydrator most days. All I have to do is prep the apples and get them out there. Over the past two years, I've figured out the fastest way to do this with the least amount of equipment and labor necessary.

Here's how I do it.

I peel the apples first. It's not strictly necessary, but I find the peels to be unpleasantly chewy after they're dried, so even though it makes for a lot more work, I peel them. Because these apples are quite small, I just use my paring knife. Vegetable peelers might work for large apples, but they don't work on small ones.

Small apples are also quite difficult to core without breaking them. So I don't core them. Instead, I just cut thin slices around all four sides of the apple, stopping when I get to the core.

It looks like this:

It may leave a small amount more apple on the core than if the apple had actually been cored, but it's a lot faster to do it this way.

I lay the slices out in a single layer on my baking pans. 

Small children can help with this, but be advised that they will eat as they go, so more apples will be required.

As you can see, these apples definitely discolor quickly. I could add lemon juice or Fruit Fresh or something to them to keep them white, but since I don't care if my dried apples are brown, I don't bother.

I have two half-sheet pans and one slightly smaller pan. I can fill all three pans in about half an hour.

After the pans are all ready, I bring them outside and arrange them on the hood of the car.

Out of reach of children, chickens, and dogs.

Why the hood of a car? Well, besides the aforementioned reason of keeping the drying apples safe from marauding animals and small humans, the car is always in the sun. Also, the dark color of the Honda increases the temperature under the pans.

You can see that I cover the pans. I do this because flies would be ALL OVER them if I didn't. You can sterilize the apples after they're dried by putting them in a low oven for a certain amount of time, but there would still be little black spots all over them from the flies. I find this highly unappetizing, so I cover the pans.

I use a length of muslin the MiL sent me, because that's what I have. Cheesecloth is better--thinner, with tiny holes for air flow--but I didn't have any. I use clothespins to clip the cloth to the pans, otherwise the wind will blow the cloth up at some point and then the flies are an issue again.

On a really warm, dry day--above 90 degrees--these will dry completely in about twelve hours. Most days this time of year are not that warm, so they get mostly dry in one day, then I bring them in overnight to keep the night moisture off of them, then put them back out for a few hours in the morning. 

Because they shrink as they dry, the next morning I can combine the almost-dry apples in one pan and re-fill the other pans with fresh apple slices. I do this every day that we have good weather. 

When they're all the way dry, they're flexible and bendy, with no moisture left in them. Like fruit leather, but in slices.

The finished product next to the original form.

A full batch of the three pans will almost fill a quart jar with apple slices. If they're all the way dry, they can just be put in a jar with a lid and stuck in the pantry. They will last indefinitely that way. Except not in our house, because we eat them very quickly. They're so good, and so easy to grab.

This is not something I would do if I were buying apples, but since I have all these free apples literally just lying on the ground and I have to find some way of preserving them, I spend a couple of weeks every fall drying apples.

There you have it! The next time you find yourself with a load of free apples that will not get soft when cooked and the autumn sun is glaring down on you, you know what to do.