Friday Food: A Roof Picnic

Friday 

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

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

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

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

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

Ta da! Dinner.

Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday

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

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

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

Can you spot the children in their leafy bower?

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

Date food.

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

A most excellent idea, if quite messy.

Monday

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

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

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

Tuesday

Short version: Pizza, leftover sausage, frozen green beans

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

Wednesday

Short version: Primal enchilada casserole, green salad with vinaigrette

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

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

Anyway. 

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

Thursday

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

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

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

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

Dad plate.

Refrigerator check:

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

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

The End of the Paschal Candle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She marked the spot appropriately, too.

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

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

Snapshots: Below-the-Hill Flowers

We live on a high-elevation plateau. Most of our trips out of our county involve going down a hill that drops us more than a thousand feet in elevation. Here in the West of the United States, elevation determines weather to a large extent. That means that here on our plateau, we are about ten degrees cooler than below the hill at all times, with much more wind. 

The weather difference also means a difference in animals and plants. The wildflowers are different down there. A. has been feeding our friends' extensive managerie below the hill this weekend while they're away, and I asked him to bring me some wildflowers from there.

He did.

Those big globe things are the flowers of the yucca plant. Interesting, if sort of hard to incorporate aesthetically into an arrangement.

Indian paintbrush. Tomie dePaola wrote a whole children's book about these flowers.

And some bonus flowers from above the hill when I took Poppy to play with her friend at the park and the two girls spent about half an hour running around gathering flowers for the moms.

We had a very chilly and wet day most of Wednesday. It was only 62 degrees when I woke up, so I decided to start the woodstove just to drive the chill and damp out of the house.

A June fire.

I also lit the remains of the Paschal candle to cheer up the living room a bit.

It has been a remarkably wet spring so far, which means happy plants in the garden.

Happy collards and cabbage.

Happy beets and carrots.

Unfortunately, the wet doesn't seem to be discouraging the grasshoppers, which are back in the thousands.

This is the house wall in the back garden. This is not happy.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: A Surprisingly Large Freezer

Friday 

Short version: Toasted bean burritos, raw bell peppers and radishes, oatmeal-raisin cookies

Long version: A. and the eldest were gone and Poppy wanted to help me make dinner, so we made it easy on ourselves by using flour tortillas, cheese, and the cooked pinto beans in the refrigerator to make toasted bean burritos. She needed a little help flipping the burritos in the pan so everything wouldn't all fall out, but otherwise, she did it all. Including cutting up the vegetables.

Saturday 

Short version: Pizza elk, pasta with pesto, garlic bread, still-frozen green beans

Long version: I had found a bag of elk labeled "very thin rump steaks" in the freezer. We've been grinding the elk, because it was pretty tough, but these were thin enough that I thought I could cook them as is. I marinated them first with olive oil and vinegar. Then I browned them, and then simmered them in a sauce of red wine, canned tomatoes, and frozen pesto. I also cooked some sliced onions and the other half of the bell pepper in there, and then added asadero cheese to the top to melt at the end. That's why I call it pizza elk.

The pasta used the very last of last year's pesto. My basil plants in the bathroom are still tiny. I don't know why they haven't grown very well in there this year. I guess I'll just have to put them outside and hope they get a move on, because we need more pesto.

Two children's plates, and my salad.

Sunday

Short version: Lamb loin, leftover rice or pasta, pureed calabaza or green beans, brownies

Long version: This was a really old bag of lamb loin. It was labeled 10/23, so I figured it was past time to use it up. I marinated it in vinegar, salt, and garlic powder, then seared it, sliced it and put it back in the pan, and used the last of the tomato sauce from the night before--all the meat had been eaten--to make a sauce for it. It was very good.

I still have half a dozen quart bags of pureed calabaza in the freezer, so I'm working my way through those before we have more giant calabaza again this fall.

Poppy had asked for the brownies, so I told her she could make them. I was in the kitchen with her and guided her, but she mostly did it herself. She's very much into her kitchen phase. All the boys were the same around this age, but I'm hoping she'll actually continue wanting to cook, unlike the boys.

Monday

Short version: Oven chicken, pasta, grapes, canned plums

Long version: I was in town until almost dinnertime, and while at the store, I bought chicken--both thighs and drumsticks--and grapes, among other things. I was pretty tired when I got home, but I had to separate and freeze the big packages of chicken anyway, so I just threw some in a pan with a bunch of salt, paprika, garlic powder, and a little maple syrup and baked it at 400 degrees until it was done, then shoved it under the broiler to get a little crispy.

The pasta was some plain pasta from the whole pound I had cooked for the pesto. It was too much pasta for the amount of pesto I had, and I had set some pasta aside plain. I just heated that up with butter, cream cheese, salt, and garlic powder for the children.

I didn't feel like bothering with preparing a vegetable, which is why I just put out the grapes I had gotten at the store.

Good enough.

The plums were an impulse purchase. The MiL had been telling us that her mother used to buy canned plums, and both A. and I said we had never seen them. And then, I turned into the canned fruit and vegetable aisle at the grocery store in search of tomatoes, and right there in front of me were cans of plums. Store-brand, no less. Of course I had to get a can to try.

They were quite small, and whole, with the pits still in them.

Beware the pits.

As soon as A. took a bite, he said he must have had them as a child, because the taste was familiar to him. I liked them, as did one child. The rest weren't much into them, so I think we'll stick with canned peaches, which every member of the family loves.

Also this day, I had a new freezer delivered. I had ordered one from our local (100 miles away) store that will actually deliver here. They didn't have bigger chest freezers in stock, so they ordered one for me. A. measured the old one and I intended to get one about that size. I got one that was slightly bigger. Or so I thought. Turns out a couple of cubic feet is quite a lot bigger.

That's a big freezer.

There wasn't any too much space, though, when I transferred everything from the smaller freezer.

I feel so fancy having a freezer with all these sliding bins and a light.

Tuesday

Short version: Leftovers, canned beef stew, cottage cheese and peaches

Long version: I was gone at dinnertime. The children got themselves a dinner of leftover chicken drumsticks and pasta. 

A. had the stew, which was a can we had gotten from excess commodities. He used to eat this sort of stew when he was a bachelor, so he's fine with it. No one else will eat it.

And when I got home, I had cottage cheese and the last of a jar of home-canned peaches that had been in the refrigerator.

Wednesday

Short version: Ram chili, gingersnaps

Long version: I had cooked a couple of bags of ram stew meat and steaks the day before, just by simmering them to get the meat off the bones. I used that meat, plus the resulting broth, to make the chili. This also pleasingly disposed of the half can of crushed tomatoes and the quart of cooked pinto beans in the refrigerator, plus pureed calabaza from the freezer, one cube of pureed green chile, one cube of pureed red chile, and spices.

I had made the gingersnaps the day before. They're a crowd favorite.

Thursday

Short version: Scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, grape tomatoes, peaches and cottage cheese

Long version: I had a large quantity of eggs on hand, thanks to getting them from a couple of different people, so that's what we had for dinner. The fried potatoes are what differentiates it from just breakfast. I guess.

Refrigerator check:

Still a lot of eggs in there.

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

Taming the Wildflowers

When we first moved here seven years ago, I was surprised at the variety of wildflowers I was seeing every year. 

I am still surprised. That's because the varieties are actually different every year.  

We have highly variable rainfall here. About the only constant is that we don't get very much of it. Our average is only around 18 inches a year. When we get it is the question. We don't really have a very reliable wet season, but we can get a heavy storm at any time. And when that rain comes determines which flowers bloom.

This year, we've had huge amounts of some wildflowers I've seen only rarely in other years. As soon as I am able, I always want to put wildflowers on my table. The flowers that have been available to me thus far are small, kind of weedy looking ones. I haven't had any larger ones yet to serve as the anchor flowers in the arrangements I like to make.

These smaller flowers are very pretty, but arranging them into something that doesn't look like literally a bunch of weeds has required some different techniques. And I'm going to show you how I do it. Whee!

The first thing to note is that I always gather way more plant material than I think I'll need. One reason I do that is because when working with smaller flowers, many of them must be grouped together to make a larger grouping of color in the arrangements. I need a dozen of the small flowers rather than one or two large flowers.

Also, these plants have a high ratio of greenery to flowers. It's this greenery that makes these plants look weedy, so much of it is going to be discarded.

This whole big pile will turn into just two smaller arrangements.

After I gather a large pile of plants, I start stripping and trimming them. I'm trying to keep the stems as long as possible, but get rid of all the excess leaves, spent flower stalks, etc. This will leave me with only the flower at the top of the stem. I'll use my fingers to strip the stem if it won't break as I do it, but sometimes I have to snip with scissors.

I do this outside, because there's a lot of plant material to be thrown out. It's easier when I can just throw it on the ground as I work.

Then I bring the stripped and sorted flowers inside to my sink, where I cut them shorter as needed and arrange them in my vase or jar. I still use something as a background screen--in this case, the yellow clover--and then I bunch the smaller flowers together to serve as my anchors.

All those flowers I gathered ended up making two small arrangements.

Yesterday I had one rose on my Mother's Day rose bush that was open. I have learned that there's no point in leaving these on the bush. They get whipped by the wind, dried out and beaten up so quickly that it's better to bring them inside so I can enjoy them for a few days. Knowing I had one big flower to serve as my anchor flower, I kept an eye out on my morning run for plants with complementary colors.

What I started with.

I stripped all the lower leaves and then snipped off the undeveloped flower buds at the top.

What I brought inside.

The final arrangement.

Dealing with these weedier flowers takes more time and care than just putting a few sunflowers in a vase, but the end result is very satisfying. And I love having unlimited flowers to decorate my home with. I currently have five arrangements of flowers in various places around the house. Too many? No such thing.

Snapshots: First, Poppy

One day I asked Poppy if she would like to organize the mess of pens and pencils we have in jars. Of course she did. Then she spent another hour or so checking all the markers in the art box to see which were dried out.

Something none of my sons have ever expressed interest in.

Then she helped me chop rhubarb for the strawberry/rhubarb crisp.

For a day or so, Poppy had a pet fly she had trapped between the window and the screen in the dining room. She gave it water in a pistachio shell and crumbs from her toast, but despite her tender care, the fly died, as flies are wont to do. I suggested she bury it outside. This was the grave.

A proper Christian burial.

Another day, she made herself a reading nest on the floor.

A perfect place to read Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.

Eldest son continues to work on his old truck. There was a custom-made steel bumper on another old truck at our neighbor's house that A. wanted to get--with permission, of course--to put on son's truck. I went up there with him to remove it.

Now that's a serious bumper.

Sheep at sunrise.

I had an unfortunate episode when I was making oatmeal that resulted in my deciding that perhaps the top of the refrigerator is not the best storage spot for the quick oats.

Good day for the chickens, though.

And last, A. and Poppy chose a very pretty vase for me at an antique store that they gave to me for my birthday. It's quite tall, and also pale blue, and most of the flowers I've had have not been tall enough or the right color for that vase. So I hadn't used it yet.

However, many of the wildflowers our friends brought to tea were quite tall, and several of the varieties were purple. Perfect for my birthday vase, which is now on the big bookcase in the living room.

So pretty.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Casseroles and Their Leftovers

Friday 

Short version: Chorizo/potatoes/eggs, chicken taco soup, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: I had to go to town in the afternoon. I had made the soup before I left with the chicken carcass from the night before--plus leftover rice, canned black beans, tomatoes, corn, and taco spices--knowing that wouldn't have been enough for everyone.

I had considered getting frozen tamales at the store in town, since it was going to be very close to dinnertime when I got home. Then I saw that buying enough tamales for all of us would be around thirty dollars. Too much.

So then I decided to get chorizo and cook that with the potatoes left over from the night before, and eggs. My options for chorizo included a couple of very cheap brands, and the "premium" chorizo that was a few dollars more. Wondering what the difference might be, I read the ingredients. The first ingredient in the premium chorizo was pork. The first ingredients in the cheap chorizo were salivary glands, lymph nodes, and fat.

I'm not even kidding. It said right there on the package: salivary glands and lymph nodes.

I got the premium chorizo, because GROSS.

I felt kind of bad for serving such a slapdash meal to a guest, but the MiL was actually excited to have chorizo, so that worked out. 

Saturday

Short version: Grilled lamb chops, curried split peas, rice, pureed potatoes, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: We have a kettle charcoal grill someone gave us last year that we haven't used much, since none of like to grill much. However, lamb is much better grilled, and we had the charcoal, so I decided to grill. We don't have lighter fluid or a charcoal chimney starter, so I had to actually build a fire in the grill with the charcoal. This is difficult to do, and I didn't get the charcoal hot enough to really sear the chops. However, they did cook most of the way through on the grill, and then I just finished them under the broiler in oven. They had a nice smoky flavor and were really very good.

The curried split peas were mostly for the child who still couldn't chew really well, but they went nicely with the lamb. I made rice for that, but I also made pureed potatoes with some extra baked potatoes I had made a couple of days previously. I was informed that pureed potatoes and curried split peas are an excellent combination that I should make again. Good to know.

Sunday

Short version: Lasagnas, green salad with vinaigrette, asparagus, strawberry/rhubarb crisp with vanilla ice cream

Long version: I found a small bag of ground elk in the freezer. I also had half a container of store-bought ricotta that had been in the freezer a long time, and a box of lasagna noodles. The elk wouldn't have been enough on its own for the lasagna, so I added to it the Albuquerque Italian sausage I took out of the casings. With those two meats, plus red wine and crushed tomatoes, I made meat sauce to layer with the ricotta, asadero cheese, and noodles. 

The only other lasagna I've ever made was the insane Italian-style lasagna. For a more American lasagna, I used this recipe this time, except, since I had enough noodles and meat sauce, I made one and half of the amount. I didn't have quite enough ricotta, but I did have a bag of bechamel sauce leftover from the insane lasagna that had been in the freezer all this time that I could use for the last layer.

I really needed my big 15-inch Pyrex casserole for this. But since it had unfortunately exploded the week before, I instead used my 13-inch one, plus an 8x8 pan. It all just fit. We had another guest with us for dinner besides the MiL, so there were eight people eating. We almost finished the big lasagna, leaving the whole smaller one for later in the week.

I will always be grateful to my grandfather for making eight chairs and a big table.

Monday

Short version: Hunter's pies, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: I found a bigger bag of ground elk in the freezer while rummaging around and decided to use that to make shepherd's pie. I needed my big Pyrex again, but was again forced to use the 13-inch Pyrex and a smaller casserole. 

Big and little.

We again ate almost all of the bigger casserole, leaving me with the untouched smaller one for later, so I guess that worked out.

If the number of meals with salad seems excessive, that's because I have an excessive quantity of lettuce that I have harvested from the garden. Lettuce cannot be preserved. It must be eaten promptly. Thus, salad every night.

Tuesday

Short version: Leftover lasagna, oatmeal raisin cookies

Long version: The smaller leftover lasagna was in a metal pan, so I had to reheat it in the oven. Since the oven was on anyway, I replenished the cookie jar with cookies. This was the MiL's last night with us, and she likes oatmeal cookies, so that is what I made. A. also prefers oatmeal cookies--with raisins, not chocolate chips--but most of the children do not, so he rarely gets them. He had told us before how his grandmother used to make giant oatmeal cookies when he was boy, so I decided to make a few with my last bit of dough, just for fun.

I meant to take a photo of the ludicrously large cookies, but apparently, I did not. The big cookies were the size of hamburger patties, and all the males LOVED them. They asked me to make them this way from now on. Methinks this is so they can say they're just having one cookie when in fact, they are eating the equivalent of five cookies. Sneaky.

Wednesday

Short version: Leftover lasagna for me, Chinese buffet for everyone else

Long version: A. took the MiL to the airport this day, and all the children went along with them. Given our distance from the airport, this meant I had all afternoon to myself, and was also just feeding myself lunch and dinner. A. went to the buffet with the children before leaving the city, where they apparently made sure they got A.'s money's worth. The pork ribs seemed to be a particular favorite. And the steamed buns.

Thursday

Short version: Leftover hunter's pie

Long version: I still had the whole smaller hunter's pie left, which was just enough for everyone. I certainly had an easy few days in the kitchen, huh?

Refrigerator check:

Blurry, but obviously pretty full.

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