Friday Food: Ice Cream Tower

Friday 

Short version: Chicken drumsticks, leftover rice, carrot sticks, watermelon

Long version: I mostly made the drumsticks because I had the oven on anyway to bake bread, so I thought I might as well put the chicken in there, too.

A. had seen a method of butterflying chicken drumsticks that he thought might help to make them better, since neither one of us particularly likes the drumsticks.

I hate dealing with raw chicken, but I did try it. It was a pain, and I probably wouldn't bother with it again. Though it did make them cook faster. And there was more surface area for the spices I put on there.

I made an inadvertent food face in the morning:

Happy bacon.

Saturday

Short version: Barbecue meatballs, baked potatoes, cucumber and tomato salad, more watermelon

Long version: And then I had to bake bread AGAIN, because I over proofed the dough the day before and it made very dense loaves. BOO. Baking again when it's this hot is not my idea of fun, but it did give me the opportunity to bake the meatballs and potatoes. 

I only used a little bit of barbecue sauce on the meatballs, since I don't have very much left. I used some ketchup to stretch the sauce, which works pretty well.

Sunday

Short version: Pork Spanish rice, pork soup, salad, ice cream

Long version: I used a can of commodities ground pork for this meal. Originally I was going to make taco meat with it, beans, and corn. But then I found the lamb-y rice still in the refrigerator that really needed to be used, so I dumped the rice right in with the meat mixture, added shredded cheese, and made it into a skillet meal.

The soup was for the child who came down with a sore throat this day. I had the liquid left from cooking the pork butt the week previously, so I used that, some of the ground pork, some already cooked onion, and some of the rice to make the soup.

The salad was for me, because I wasn't very hungry. It was a tomato and cucumber salad with feta.

Customized food: It's what's for dinner.

We still have three kinds of ice cream to choose from.

A tower of Great Value.

Plus chocolate syrup and peanut butter cookie crumbles.

Monday

Short version: Leftovers, garlic bread, green salad with ranch dressing, plums, watermelon

Long version: I had eight chicken drumsticks left, and some meatballs. When I got home, I found the meatballs had all been eaten. Thankfully, I had also taken out a container of leftover chili from the freezer to thaw, just to make sure there would be enough food. The chili was enough for A., who had that and a couple of chicken drumsticks.

I had one of the drumsticks in my salad. Only two children were eating--I can't believe we only made it to the second week of school before pestilence struck the house--and they had the other drumsticks.

I had made the garlic bread when I was baking bread on Saturday and purposely saved it for this meal.

The plums had been in the refrigerator almost too long. They're not something I typically buy, but a child at the store with me had asked for them. And then I forgot about them. There were three left, which was perfect for the two children eating and A.

Tuesday

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers, boiled potatoes, tomato/cucumber/feta salad

Long version: I went to Walmart this day. I had to buy meat.

Sad day.

We're getting very low on meat in our chest freezer. A. has a lot of hunts lined up for the boys, but they're all still a couple of months away. So I bought meat. I hate buying meat at the store. It's so expensive, and so not good quality.

However. We must eat. So I bought it.

One of the things I bought was ground beef, with which I made the cheeseburgers. And which lost like 25% of their mass in the pan in the form of fat and added liquid, I suppose. Such a bummer.

The cheeseburgers were pretty good, though.

So was the salad.

I spy pickled onions.

There is actually a cheese factory in one of the towns we go to somewhat frequently. Sadly, the factory itself no longer sells to the public, but the grocery store there carries their cheese. For some reason, they rarely have the feta in stock. However, the last time I was there, the feta was in stock, so I bought five packages. I'm not sorry about it, either.

Wednesday

Short version: Beef and bean burritos, carrot sticks with ranch dressing, peanut butter cookies

Long version: I purposely saved some of the ground beef to make burrito filling this night. I accomplished that by simply adding a can of pinto beans, salsa, and spices to the browned meat.

The burritos themselves were just flour tortillas microwaved with cheese, and then the meat and beans put in them before rolling. Sometimes I put out all the toppings. But not on a work day.

Thursday

Short version: Sandwiches, chips, cucumbers with ranch dressing, cottage cheese and peaches

Long version: This was the last day in a string of days that had temperatures in the mid-90s. I am very tired of sweating, so I gave myself a break and made sandwiches with the ham and salami I had on hand. 

The peaches were canned, but I think soon we should be getting lots of peaches from Nick. I hope so, anyway.

Refrigerator check:

Those big bowls on the bottom both contain roasted green chiles. More to come on those later.

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

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.

Snapshots: The Geeky Mayordoma

It's been a very good year for sunflowers. They line the roads all around here, and one of the most exuberant thickets is right outside our gate.

Sunflowers and my long shadow.

Quite a few of them have been chewed up by cucumber beetles and/or grasshoppers.

Raggedy sunflower.

But there are still lots of intact ones for my sunflowers 'n' sage.

A constant on the table this time of year.

Speaking of sun . . .

I have continued to run half an hour three or four times a week, but my running outfit has had to change with the season. No longer do I wish to wear long pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. But I do wish to be protected from the intense sun here.

I don't wear sunscreen if I can possibly avoid it, so I do actually run in long sleeves. But now it's my gardening shirt, which is a cotton button-down. I wear this with shorts--my legs don't have nearly as much sun damage as my upper body, so I don't worry so much about that--and my incredibly dorky Floppy Mom Hat.

It is, as the kids say, a vibe*.

A really geeky vibe.

I don't usually see anyone when I'm running around our ghost village, and the dogs aren't embarrassed to be seen with me anyway, so I'm good.

This month is one of my mayordoma months, so I went to the church yesterday morning to clean. The children were involved in some very fun game and none of them wanted to come with me, which meant I had the great pleasure of sitting in the silent church by myself for awhile without the lights on.

Peace.

I also took the opportunity to change the flowers on the altar. The same ones were there that I had put there after Easter, so I thought it was time to switch it up.

The yellow-and-white befores and the blue-and-white afters.

I wish we could have fresh flowers all the time, but we live too far from stores that carry them, and my garden does not produce enough, so fake flowers it is.

Lastly, I must share with all of you my great displeasure at the new scent in Dawn dish soap.

BOOOOO.

I really dislike the smell of this. It smells like baby diapers to me. Clean diapers, yes, but still. I think it's gross. And I can still smell it on my dishes after they dry. The last store I went to only had this new and "improved" kind, so I ordered several bottles of the original scent online. 

I hate fragrances so much.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

* I actually have no idea if the kids still say that. Probably not. But it's been well established that I am not a kid. I mean, have you seen the outfit I run in?

Friday Food: A Failure

Friday 

Short version: Throwaway meatloaf, baked potatoes, last-minute egg salad, salami and cream cheese, raw green beans, baked mystery apples with cream

Long version: Starting right off with the failure here. I had had ground beef in the refrigerator since Monday, when I bought it at the store. I had meant to cook it earlier in the week, but heat and tiredness from in-service week derailed me.

Our meat is so fresh out of the freezer that I never have a problem keeping it in the refrigerator for a few days. I wasn't sure about store meat, though. I did smell the meat before forming the meatloaves, and it smelled okay. But as it was cooking, it started to smell . . . not okay. Not bad, exactly, just kind of funky.

It tasted that way to me, too. I'm very sensitive to flavors, though, so I had A. taste it, too. He thought it was okay. So I served it. 

A. ate a few bites and vetoed it. He said it tasted gamey. Again, not really rotten, just not very good. 

So I quickly grabbed other available sources of protein, which were some hardboiled eggs I had on hand that I made into egg salad, and the salami and cream cheese.

The apples were from a grafted branch on the tree next door. A. had grafted several varieties onto the existing tree there, and we didn't know which variety this was. This is the first year there's been apples on that branch. They were quite large, and partially red, so I was hoping they would be good saucing apples. When I started peeling them, however, they were pretty dry and hard to peel, also almost inedibly tart when I tasted them. 

I peeled and sliced them anyway, and cooked them most of the way in the microwave, to see if they would get soft. The small green apples on that tree never do get soft when cooked--although they are delicious raw and perfect for drying--so I thought I'd better try that out first. They did get soft. I finished baking them in the oven with a lot of maple syrup, sugar, cinnamon, and cloves, and they broke down even further.

A. thinks these were an old variety of apple that are meant for pies. One of the varieties he grafted came from his uncle's farm near Blackrock, and they were pie apples. That's why they're so large and tart. 

So the meal ended well, even if it started disastrously.

Oh, and I ALSO completely burned the garlic bread I had baked with the regular bread and had intended on having for dinner after the first day of school.

Definitely not my best day in the kitchen.

The one kid that had eaten most of his meatloaf before A.'s pronouncement didn't get sick in any way, so I guess the meat was okay, just overaged. I still gave it to the dogs and chickens, though. That made me feel a little better about wasting fifteen dollars' worth of meat. But just a little.

Saturday

Short version: Lamb, rice, green peas

Long version: Pretty much all the meat I have left needs to be braised, stewed, or otherwise cooked a long time to get tender. Like the bag of lamb shanks and stew meat I pulled from the freezer in the morning. I put it, still mostly frozen, in a pot with water, onion ends, carrot, and celery, and simmered that until I could pull the meat off.

I used that meat and a little of the resulting broth, along with onion, garlic, tomatoes (from the garden, yay!), paprika, oregano, thyme, lemon juice, and cornstarch plus yogurt, to make some saucy meat to go on top of the rice.

It turned out quite well. Shanks really do produce some nice, tender meat if they're cooked right.

Sunday

Short version: Tuna-rice skillet, dressed-up ice cream

Long version: I hadn't taken any meat out to thaw, so I planned on making tuna/salmon patties. But then I didn't have any bread crumbs, and I didn't want to haul out the food processor to make some. I did have leftover rice, though.

So!

Rice+one big can of tuna+onion+mayonnaise+butter+a tiny bit of milk+grated cheddar=something like tuna noddle casserole. But with rice. In a skillet.

We had three kinds of ice cream on hand: vanilla, cookies and cream, and mint chocolate chip. So everyone got to choose their ice cream and then dress it up with either chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookie crumbles from the freezer, or chocolate syrup. Or all three! It's a Sunday! Anything goes!

Monday

Short version: Fried pork, bread and butter, pickles, ice cream

Long version: First day of school! And work for me. I knew I would be exhausted, which is why I had stashed a bag of cooked pork butt in the freezer. I took that out to thaw in the morning and fried it with spices when I got home.

I didn't have the energy to even cut carrot sticks, but I do have a lot of homemade pickles on hand right now, so everyone got one of those. And then A. remarked several times how good they were with the meat, so I guess that was a winner.

Ice cream because it was the first day of school. I didn't put out all the toppings, though, which is what differentiates Weekday Ice Cream from Sunday Ice Cream. I guess.

Tuesday

Short version: Leftovers, lamb-y rice, raw radishes and green beans, lemon jello

Long version: Tuesday is one of my days off from work, so I wouldn't typically need to have a meal of leftovers on this day, but I was in the city with a child at the doctor. So, A. had the leftover stewed lamb with the rice, which I had cooked in a jar of lamb stock that had been in the refrigerator long enough. Two children had the last of the fried pork, plus the lamb-y rice. Two children had rice and beans, just made with a half can of pinto beans that had been in the refrigerator awhile, with the addition of butter and garlic powder.

The jello was for the sick child, but he didn't want it. Everyone else was happy to finish it.

Wednesday

Short version: Sandwiches and Crunchy Cheese Snacks at school and home; cottage cheese, cherries, and bananas at home

Long version: We had a Vigil Mass for the Assumption of Mary at 5:30 p.m. this day. Our school is in the village where we go to church. School gets out at 4 p.m. I decided it wouldn't be worth it to rush home only to leave again an hour later. So I brought dinner with me to work.

By that I mean I threw sliced bread, rotisserie chicken meat, salami, ham, mayonnaise, and mustard in a bag to make sandwiches after school/work. I also brought the Crunchy Cheese Snacks I had bought at the store the day before. These are a store brand version of crunchy Cheetos. Unlike the store brand of Fritos, these don't taste just like Cheetos, but they were okay.

We got home a bit after 6:30 p.m. A. hadn't had a chance to eat because he had been driving the school bus, and Poppy had been playing with her friend, so she hadn't eaten either. I made them sandwiches and they got some Crunchy Cheese Snacks, too. 

Two boys who had eaten sandwiches already were hungry again. They had the cottage cheese and bananas (not together). We all had cherries, which tasted SO GOOD after a very hot church service. It was over 90 degrees and our church has no air conditioning. Cold, sweet cherries were very welcome after sweating profusely for 45 minutes.

Thursday

Short version: Sausage and potatoes, or pasta with pesto and chicken, cucumbers with salt and vinegar, watermelon

Long version: I had a little of the meat left from the rotisserie chicken I bought at the store on Tuesday, so I chopped that and added it to pasta with pesto. 

A. and I had the sausage, which was the very last package of smoked sausage I bought a long time ago from a store that is not close enough for me to get to often. There were two baked potatoes in the refrigerator from Sunday, so I diced those and added them to the pan with the sausage. I also found some already-cooked diced onion in the refrigerator, so that went in with the sausage and potatoes.

I was very excited to find a real watermelon (with seeds!) from Texas at the grocery store, so of course I bought one. It was a really good one, and we're going to save the seeds.

It was, of course, giant. As all watermelons with seeds are.

Refrigerator check:

Lots of watermelon in there.

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

First Day of School Thoughts

I can't be the only one who still has to think hard for a second while looking at the little arrow that denotes "greater than or less than" in math to remember which way it's supposed to point. The way I still remember it is that the greedy alligator eats the bigger number (the open part of the arrow faces the bigger number). I figure if that's what stuck in my head almost forty years ago, that must be a good mnemonic. So that's still how I explain it to the first graders.

One of my duties in the lunchroom is serving the elementary kids from our well-stocked salad bar. Some of the students were really surprised that I didn't remember exactly what they like on their salads. As if my brain is still in its prime and can keep the individual salad combinations of 28 kids on file over three months of summer. Give me a couple of weeks, though, and I'll have "Andrea=lettuce+cheese+ranch dressing+ham bits" taking up valuable space in my memory again.

I spent almost an hour trying to set up four Zoom meetings for the semester. This should have taken me about ten minutes, but every time I set the time parameters and saved them, the ending time would inexplicably change to the same as the beginning time. Over and over. It was so frustrating. I kept changing things in settings and re-scheduling the meetings until eventually it worked. Why did it finally start working? No idea, but at least I got it done. And that's pretty much my technology experience in a nutshell.

We have a couple of very spirited teachers, bless them, who always come up with a theme for the beginning of school and decorate accordingly. This year's theme is Hollywood, mostly because that was the prom theme last year so we already had a lot of props and decorations for it. 

This is by the front office.

They laid out a long length of red paper on the path leading to the cafeteria where all the kids go in the morning so they could "walk the red carpet," gave them all VIP bracelets and star-shaped sunglasses, and had the staff act as the adoring crowds lining the red carpet and being all excited to see them.

Most of the kids loved it. A few did not. I get off the bus with the kids, so my role in this was actually to reassure our one new first-grader that this was not as scary as it looked. She sort of believed me. At least she actually went into the school, which didn't look like a given when she first saw the scene outside the cafeteria.

The first day is so tiring. Everyone in my house went to bed early last night. Let's hope they'll be well-rested and ready to go for the second day.

Snapshots: Now THAT's Rain

I could not believe my eyes when I looked at our rain gauge after a night of rain.

Almost full!

We had got a half inch the night before, as well, which means that the total for these two days is actually almost a quarter of all the rain we get on average in a year.

So that was pretty exciting.

Let's see what else . . .

I made some pickles with my award-winning Armenian cucumbers after I picked them up from the county fair display.

Using an old pickle jar, of course.

At work, I found piles of books someone had dumped in the back storage room we use for classroom texts, and since books are my domain at school, I was sorting through them this past week when I had time during teacher in-service. Many of them were old textbooks, and one of them is pretty much our family manifesto:

Yup.

I didn't actually read the book, but I think it's about rhetoric and argumentative writing and so on. In any case, this is now what I say whenever anything devolves into a verbal squabble at dinner. Which is a lot. My kids say, "Stop saying that, Mom!" To which I reply, "Then stop arguing."

Never.

Speaking of school, it starts tomorrow and at least one child has been getting ready:

I found her school supply list on the school Facebook page and she started going through the box of supplies I bought to find hers, put her name on everything with a Sharpie, and put it all in her backpack.

Her brothers showed no inclination whatsoever to prepare themselves for the dreaded event, so she asked if she could sort out their supplies for them.

This girl, man. Built different, for sure.

And what do her brothers wish to do instead of going to school?

Add to their collection of spent ammunition, for one thing.

It was pretty funny that when that boy said, "Hey, Mom! Come see my shell collection!" I thought, "He has sea shells? How'd he get those?"

Silly me. You'd think after all these years in the country, I would know he was talking about gun shells. I'll just never be a real country mouse, I guess.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Elk and Pork

Friday 

Short version: Elk and gravy, mashed potatoes, frozen peas

Long version: I found two bags of elk stir-fry meat at the bottom of the freezer, which just means it was carefully trimmed and cut very thinly. Instead of making stir-fry with it, though, I fried it and made a gravy for it with a diced shallot, milk, and cornstarch.

Gravy requires mashed potatoes, so I made some of those.

Unrelated photo of the traffic situation on my way to pick some things up one day.

Saturday

Short version: Lamb chops and rice, burritos, cucumber slices

Long version: I made this meal very quickly in between getting home from the county fair rodeo and going to the county fair dance. I had to wait until all the ironing was done at the table before we could eat, but that gave me time to fry the last few lamb chops from some I had thawed a few days earlier. A. had those with the rice. 

The children had the burritos, which were just leftover bull taco meat with cheese in flour tortillas.

Sunday

Short version: Elk stir-fry, rice, chocolate pudding

Long version: I had maybe a pound of the elk meat that I hadn't cooked on Friday. It wouldn't have been enough on its own, but in a stir-fry, it was enough. I used the one bag of stir-fry vegetables that had been in the freezer a very long time, which were mostly cut green beans. To that I added carrots I had pre-cooked in the microwave, plus the soy sauce, vinegar, garlic and onion powders (too lazy to actually cook an onion), ginger powder, and peanut butter.

I made the same recipe for chocolate pudding I always use, but the cornstarch got away from me a little bit, and I also used some cream that was about to go off. Both of those things made the pudding much thicker. Not bad--especially with heavy cream poured over the top--but definitely a different texture.

Monday

Short version: Burritos and leftover pudding at home, chicken drumsticks on the road

Long version: I was with one child in town at dinnertime, so A. fed everyone at home with the leftover taco meat and pudding. Since I started my long drive home right around dinnertime, I picked up a container of rotisserie chicken drumsticks at the grocery store and shared those with the kid in the car with me.

Tuesday

Short version: Pork, smashed potatoes, green beans, cookie bars

Long version: It's really been too hot to cook something like a pork butt that needs the oven on for a long time, but I really don't have a lot of meat on hand at the moment that's fast-cooking. So I made the pork. 

I started it at 6 a.m..

Early-morning pork.

I took it out around 11 a.m., so at least the oven wasn't on during the hottest part of the day.

Late-morning pork.

The potatoes baked while the pork was in. At dinnertime, I just cut them in half, scooped out the flesh with a spoon, and re-heated them before roughly mashing them with lots of butter and salt.

I also made the cookie bars while the oven was on for the pork. They were oatmeal/chocolate chip/almond.

And I FINALLY had enough green beans for a side dish. I only have half a dozen plants, so this is not going to be a banner year for green beans. With these, I sauteed them in bacon grease, and also added a diced shallot. So good.

Wednesday

Short version: Pulled pork sandwiches, Crunchy Corn Chips, carrot sticks with curry dip, strawberries and cream

Long version: I had made sourdough buns a couple of weeks ago when I was baking, and I just stuck them in the freezer for a future meal. This was it. It was brutally hot, and I had been at teacher in-service meetings all day, so this was an easy and relatively fast meal to make.

Crunchy Corn Chips are store brand Fritos.

Strawberries because they had been on sale when I was at the store on Monday.

Thursday

 

Short version: Various leftovers, spaghetti with pesto, grape tomatoes, ice cream

Long version: Another full day of meetings, another quick dinner when I got home. For A., I used the last of the leftover stir-fry and rice to make fried rice, just by adding a couple of scrambled eggs and, um, frying it.

I had made spaghetti before I left in the morning for the child who hasn't been feeling well. I cooked a whole pound of spaghetti, so I used some to make pesto pasta, with a few of the remaining frozen cubes of pesto from last year's garden. The kids had that with leftover pork and the tomatoes.

I had the last of the pulled pork, plus a tomato/cucumber/feta salad made with my own garden produce, yay!

Roma's are not a great fresh-eating tomato--kinda mushy--but I take what I can get.

We had ice cream because I wanted some. Our meetings this day included all the wretched required trainings for child abuse reporting, suicide prevention, active shooter scenarios, and so on. I hate this day of training. It's so depressing. I should not use food to comfort myself, I know, but I do. Thus, ice cream.

Refrigerator check:

Not too bad.

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