Snapshots: A Mix of Pretty and . . . Not

Let's pretend this is Instagram and start with pretty, shall we?

 

First light is the best light.

And on a much less aesthetically pleasing note . . .

When I say I'm "picking meat," this is what I mean. 

Three chicken carcasses pressure-cooked into stock, then dog scraps in the skillet, meat for us in the Pyrex measurer, and bones/trash in the Pyrex pan. About half an hour of work. Tedious, but necessary to use every bit of those meat birds.

I don't know who set up this scene in Calvin and Jack's room, but it certainly is carefully staged.

We can all be glad that T-Rexes are extinct.

Let's end with something less grisly.

A tiny chef works.

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Brownie Pie, Anyone?

Friday 

Short version: Bunless hamburgers, leftover spaghetti, raw green beans

Long version: The rest of the ground beef from earlier in the week that I never cooked, more of the spaghetti from the cafeteria, more cucumbers from the garden.

Unexciting, but tasty.

Saturday

Short version: Leftover spaghetti, leftover chicken salad with crackers, cucumbers, Larabars

Long version: Cubby had his first football game this day. It was an away game. Very away. Three hours away, actually. A. went, so he and Cubby were gone for dinner.

That's why we had leftovers.

Also why I gave the kids the Larabars for dessert. I had mentioned to them that I had given Cubby a couple to bring with him in case he needed to eat something, so of course they wanted one, too. I usually have these on hand. They're really good. Not exactly health food, but not total junk, either.

Sunday

Short version: Pork and gravy, garlic bread, Holy's cabbage, roasted carrots, raw cabbage, double chocolate brownie pie

Long version: I found a random bag of what looked like pork loin in the freezer, so I sliced that into kind of medallions, fried those with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika, and then made a milk gravy for the pork in the pan. 

For those who have no idea what's so holy about cabbage, you can read all about it here. Three of the four children prefer their cabbage raw, but Cubby LOVES Holy's cabbage, so I can be assured the family recipe will live on.

It was Cubby's turn to clean the toilet, and thus choose dessert, and he chose brownies. I made these brownies (though I never bother with the parchment paper lining), and added a few chopped dark chocolate truffles of unknown age that I found in the back of my baking cabinet. I also baked it in a nonstick round cake pan and cut it into wedges. Hence, brownie pie.

It was popular. Obviously.

Oh look! An action shot of many things!

Brownies, cabbage, garlic bread, and roasted carrots. Looks like a balanced meal to me.

Monday

Short version: Breakfast sausage patties, mashed potatoes, beet greens, carrot sticks

Long version: Nah.

Tuesday

Short version: Pork stir-fry, rice

Long version: When I cut up the pork on Sunday, I cut some into smaller pieces for stir-fry. Even though I have probably enough vegetables from the garden right now to make the stir-fry with fresh vegetables, I still used two bags of frozen stir-fry vegetables.

Lazy? Guilty as charged.

Wednesday

Short version: Curried rooster slop, leftover mashed potatoes, raw green beans, leftover beet greens

Long version: We must've gotten at least half a dozen roosters from various people this year. I guess a lot of people got chicks this spring, and of course, when anyone gets chicks they're bound to get excess roosters.

This one came to us Tuesday, A. killed it and skinned it Wednesday morning, and then I pressure-cooked it. It was pretty shreddy when it was done, so I just pulled it apart and added some curried split peas I took from the freezer as a sauce.

This rooster had a lot of very dark meat, and the brown of the meat with the yellow of the curry made for a pretty ugly dish.

We do not always eat with our eyes in this house.

Thursday

Short version: Very late chicken burritos

Long version: Cubby had a home game this night, so we all went. It went a lot later than I thought. We didn't get home until 7:40 p.m., by which point, of course, everyone was starving.

I hadn't actually made anything ahead of time, but I had saved some of the rooster's breast meat for some undetermined use. So I heated that up with salsa, and then put it in flour tortillas with cheese.

There were no vegetables with dinner, but the kids all ate apples while they were watching the game, so I called it good.

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

T.T.: More Books, Less Internet

The Internet is an insidious thing. It's so useful and can be a great tool for learning, sharing, and entertaining.

But it can also sneakily subvert your life in ways you don't even notice.

I have always been a reader. Sort of inevitable given a childhood when gaming and computers were still so rare as to be a novelty. We had a computer when I was young, but all I remember doing on it was playing some game that involved apples. (Maybe? My memories are hazy on this.)

We had a Nintendo when I was slightly older, but I also don't have any really clear memories of that.

What I do have memories of is lying in my bed reading with my reading light. I have very clear memories of the books I read, and when.

Books and reading have been part of my life and identity from a very early age. So imagine how disconcerting it was when I realized I wasn't really reading books much anymore.

It is, of course, entirely possible to read on a computer. And I was actually going days without reading anything that wasn't on my laptop screen.

But this is not a positive sort of reading for me. This is the sort of reading that only requires a minute and a half of attention and focus. It's the sort of reading that involves a lot of negativity--in the news cycle, in confrontational commentary, in political disagreements.

It was not making me happy to read the news or other people's "takes.*"

So, I stopped.

Not that I stopped reading online entirely. I mean, I have a blog. I'm online every day for sure. But I'm also in books every day again, because I'm not looking at news sites or Twitter comments. Instead, I'm looking at these:

The left book is good so far, the middle I've read before and would recommend, and I haven't started the right book yet.

So if you're feeling anxious and unsettled, I would gently suggest closing whatever screen you're looking at right now (which would be, uh, this one) and finding something printed on a physical piece of paper to occupy your mind instead. It doesn't solve anything in the larger world, but it can make your own small world feel calmer.

* I hate that word. Have an opinion, please, not a "take." 

Monday Bouquets: Small but Mighty

Although there is still a profusion of sunflowers lining the roadsides, the blooms tend to be much smaller than the ones we saw earlier in the summer. 

A portent of fall, no doubt. 

I decided to take my cue from the diminutive blossoms and make much smaller arrangements. I used a little four-ounce jar Cubby found somewhere as my vase.

It was nice having a less towering arrangement on the table. I didn't have to move it off the table so I could see Cubby across from me during dinner.

First I went with just the sunflowers.

And then with some sunflowers and sage. Because sunflowers without sage is like peanut butter without jelly. Or something.

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

Snapshots: In the Garden

Who wants a garden tour? Thought so!

Did you know that carrots are on a two-year cycle for producing seeds? They grow the root we eat the first summer, and then if you leave the plant in, they'll make seeds the summer after that. And when they make seeds, they make A LOT OF SEEDS.

Three carrots, approximately 300,000 seeds.

Of course I saved some to plant next year.

I have these beautiful trumpet vines (I think) that come up every year by the front fence. The flowers are very nice, but they choke out the green beans I have planted against that fence. Next year, I will have to be ruthless in pulling them as they appear.

Pretty, but not edible.

This has been an absolutely brutal year for pests in the garden. Everything has been eating my plants. First it was the flea beetles that attacked the brassicas, then the tomato hornworms, then these nasty tomato fruit worms I was picking off plants by the dozens every day, then swallowtail caterpillars all over the dill, and now grasshoppers of every kind.

These poor cabbages I started about a month ago were plagued by the flea beetles in their infancy, and then the tomato fruit worms after I planted them out. I lost a few, but the survivors seem to be doing well now.

The weeds, of course, are unfazed by any kind of pest.

We put in rhubarb plants this year, which are doing very well, although they also have some holes in them courtesy of the tomato fruit worms.

We'll get a rhubarb pie out of this yet, disgusting worms or no.

Then there were the cabbage looper caterpillars that ate the basil. Basil! I didn't think anything ate basil!

These things sure did, though. They killed two of the plants, but two of the others that I thought were goners are coming back.

Take that, stupid cabbage loopers. (Basil only grows here if I plant it down in these sunken feed tubs, to protect it from the wind.)

The tomatoes, of course, have sustained the most damage. Everything eats tomatoes. Unfortunately, the tomato fruit worms eat the tomatoes before they're even ripening. So even though the worms are gone now (I suspect eaten by these black centipede-looking insects that started appearing under the tomato plants), almost every tomato I pick has holes in it.

It's very discouraging. I spy a hopeful glimpse of red, pull the ripe tomato off, and . . .

Sigh.

Some are only partially damaged, though, and I can just cut the holey part out. So I am getting some tomatoes.

Also on the positive side, the cucumber beetles that are swarming the squash plants out in the pasture seem mostly uninterested in the actual cucumber plants inside the wooden fence. So I'm getting some cucumbers, too, which is very exciting. This is the first year I've sucessfully grown cucumbers here. 

I've even harvested enough to make two quarts of refrigerator dill pickles, which is really the reason I grow cucumbers.

I win!

And there you have it! My garden, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Cafeteria Food

Friday 

Short version: Leftovers

Long version: Stir-fry for some, chicken taco meat for others. All fed.

Saturday

Short version: Bull meat, garlic bread, roasted carrots, raw green beans

Long version: Another session of pressure-canning bull meat to get it out of the freezer, another opportunity to pressure-cook more of the same. This time I added some pesto I had made earlier in the day to the meat, along with some asadero cheese.

I already had a pan with butter in it from A. making an omelet earlier in the day, so I figured I might as well throw something in the oven with the bread as it baked. That something being carrots.

In case you didn't know, ponies like carrots, too.

They don't require them to be roasted, either.

Sunday

Short version: Oven-fried chicken, pasta with pesto, raw cucumbers, steamed green beans, chocolate chip cookies

Long version: Another Sunday, another meat bird down. The kids had said they were getting tired of roasted chicken (?), so I had A. part this one out for me and I used the (GIANT) pieces to make oven-fried chicken. 

First the chicken is marinated in yogurt with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika, then it's shaken to coat it in masa (corn flour) with the same spices, then baked in a buttered pan.

Cubby was SO HAPPY with this. He asked me to make every chicken this way from now on. 

Everyone else was happy with the pasta. Because pasta with pesto made from homegrown basil really can't be improved upon.

Calvin chose the chocolate chip cookies, but only because I didn't have any cream to make his preferred desserts. He allowed as how chocolate chip cookies would be acceptable. They were.

I used the recipe in Cubby's ATK kids' cookbook for the chocolate chip cookies that calls for melting the butter. This is my favorite, because I detest hauling out my mixer and creaming butter and sugar. 

While I was in the kitchen with dirty bowls and pans anyway, I decided to make some more of these "breakfast" cookies for Cubby and Jack to bring to school for their snacks (I use maple syrup, walnuts, peanut butter, Craisins, raisins, and mini chocolate chips). Since I had just made the chocolate chip cookies, I experimented with using the same melted butter method.

I am pleased to say that they were a success, and now I need never cream butter again. Amen. 

Monday

Short version: Cafeteria spaghetti and meat sauce, cucumber slices

Long version: One of my duties at the school now is helping the cook clean up after lunch. I told her that if she had any food she was going to throw away, I could bring it home for my children and/or dogs and chickens, and so she gave me the remainder of the spaghetti and meat sauce she was going to toss.

It went to the children this time.

The tomato sauce came out of a can, though, so it needed some doctoring. More salt, garlic powder, and a little vinegar, and it was quite tasty. The kids were excited to get spaghetti, too, which I never buy.

Tuesday

Short version: Leftovers, raw green beans

Long version: The younger kids had leftover bull meat and leftover pasta with pesto. Cubby had leftover chicken and more spaghetti when he got home from football practice.

Wednesday

Short version: Bunless hamburgers, calabacitas and tomatoes, cafeteria green beans, cucumber spears

Long version: Hooray, the calabacitas are coming! Calabacitas are the squash we got seeds for from Rafael. They make both an edible summer squash that's like zucchini--but better--and a hard-skinned winter squash.

I sauteed the calabacitas in some bacon fat with a few tomatoes, and they were delicious.

The green beans were leftovers from the school lunch. I buy the same frozen green beans from Sysco myself, but these I didn't even have to cook. Bonus.

Thursday

Short version: Chicken salad sandwiches, carrot sticks

Long version: I subbed at the school in the afternoon, so I made the chicken salad in the morning with the last of the leftover oven-fried chicken. A good meal for another hot day.

For Charlie, who does not like chicken salad, I sauteed some of the chicken in olive oil. Then I took some of that chicken and added it to my salad with cucumbers and tomatoes from the garden, plus some feta cheese, to make a very tasty Greek-ish salad.

Yum.

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

T.T.: A Song for Our Times

Due to my freakish ability to remember song lyrics and melodies, I go around with a constant soundtrack of changing songs in my head. Something the other day reminded me of the song "Hands," by Jewel. 

I can't remember exactly when it came out--must've been almost 20 years ago now--but it sure is applicable now. 

You can see the official video here if you want to hear the song, but the lyrics can be read like a poem, as can almost all of Jewel's songs.

"Hands"

If I could tell the world just one thing
It would be that we're all OK
And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful
And useless in times like these

I won't be made useless
Won't be idle with despair
I'll gather myself around my faith
For light does the darkness most fear

My hands are small, I know
But they're not yours, they are my own
But they're not yours, they are my own
And I am never broken

Poverty stole your golden shoes
It didn't steal your laughter
And heartache came to visit me
But I knew it wasn't ever after

We'll fight, not out of spite
For someone must stand up for what's right
'Cause where there's a man who has no voice
There ours shall go singing

My hands are small I know
But they're not yours, they are my own
But they're not yours, they are my own
And I am never broken

In the end, only kindness matters
In the end, only kindness matters

I will get down on my knees, and I will pray
I will get down on my knees, and I will pray
I will get down on my knees, and I will pray

My hands are small, I know
But they're not yours, they are my own
But they're not yours, they are my own
And I am never broken

My hands are small, I know
But they're not yours, they are my own
But they're not yours, they are my own
And I am never broken
We are never broken

We are God's eyes
God's hands
God's mind
We are God's eyes
God's hands
God's heart
We are God's eyes
We are God's hands
We are God's eyes