Snapshots: Books 'n' Stuff

Our Saturday Book Talk kind of dropped off the cliff there when I had gone through all the categories of books I could think of. You want to see the library that inspired all of that, though?

This is the (very small) library for the middle school and high school students that I created out of nothing.

It's on the stage in the old gym, which is why the walls are black.

The other side of the stage has a kind of lounge set-up with a pool table and foosball, plus a table with art supplies and some chairs and things for hanging out.

And here's a rather impressive crane that Calvin created out of blocks and Magna-Tiles.

Inspired by a crazy German engineering documentary they watched on YouTube.

Poppy was very excited to start school last week, and carefully laid out her outfit for the first day, to make sure it looked okay.

This is not something my sons have ever done.

I still have a bouquet on my table, even though I haven't been featuring them every Monday like I did last year.

Sunflowers and sage, of course.

A. decided the time had come to replace the leaning and unsightly back steps to the fenced garden area.  He used stone, of course.

The in-progress view from the back door.

And finally, last night around 8 p.m. the dogs started barking to announce someone at our gate. It was Miss Amelia's daughter, who lives in a village about an hour away. She stopped by to bring me . . .

Apples! Suitable for saucing, yay! Good thing the new jar lids I ordered arrived on Friday.

I am quite clearly the person to know if you have excess fruit hanging around that you can't bear to throw away.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: A Rib-ful Week

Friday 

Short version: Beef rib meat, spaghetti, raw green beans

Long version: I only have a few boxes of beef left in the freezer, and almost one whole box was all beef ribs. So I decided to cook some.

I filled my big pressure canner about 3/4 of the way with ribs and pressure-cooked them for 45 minutes. Then I spent almost as long picking meat off bones and pulling off fat. So tedious.

At dinnertime, I fried that meat in olive oil with dried oregano and garlic powder, then added the last of a can of spaghetti sauce that had been hanging out in the refrigerator.

Also in the refrigerator was some roasted tomato and garlic sauce I had made the day before. That went on the kids' spaghetti.

Saturday

Short version: Pizza, rib meat, cucumber

Long version: I spent all day--almost literally--in the kitchen dealing with peaches, canning beef stock, and baking bread. While I was at it, I made one pizza crust, which I topped with the rest of the roasted tomato sauce, some of A.'s salvage ricotta that I had frozen, and grated cheddar.

Sunday

Short version: First dinner--pork ribs, cornbread, tomato/cucumber salad; Second dinner--Rib meat, leftover cornbread, peach pie and ice cream

Long version: A. asked me to take out the rest of the giant package of pork ribs I had frozen. I put them in the oven on low heat with A.'s rub on them (garlic powder, paprika, brown sugar, salt, black pepper, and chili powder) while we were at church in the morning, and when we got home, A. declared them done.

He couldn't wait to eat them, and also thought maybe he could save me from having to cook dinner, so he announced to the children that we would have our main meal at lunchtime and then they could have peach pie and ice cream for dinner.

Of course, I ended up cooking for lunch and then frying more rib meat for dinner, because the adults and one child were not that enthused about only eating dessert for dinner. But it was very easy cooking, and the three children who ate nothing but pie and ice cream for dinner were thrilled.

And then, of course, there were many more peaches to be stowed away for later. This time I froze them, Some peeled and sliced, some just pitted and unpeeled.

Monday

Short version: Trout, rib meat, potato salad, carrot sticks

Long version: A. took the kids fishing for the day in the mountains.

I'm still not over how unreal any photo taken in New Mexico looks. Even with a cheap phone and no filters or editing. It really just looks like this.

They returned with one rainbow trout. I fried that and served it with melted butter and parsley. There was enough for every kid to get a small serving. 

I had taken out some steaks, but I didn't want to cook them until the fisherpeople got home, and they didn't get home until pretty late, so instead I just fried yet more of the rib meat.

I made Real American Potato Salad as a Labor Day treat. I only make it when I have pickles, which I never buy, but now I have refrigerator dills made with the Armenian cucumbers. 

So! Boiled potatoes (boiled whole and dressed while still warm), mayonnaise, pickle juice and pickles, onion powder (I don't like crunchy bits of raw onion in potato salad), salt, and pepper. So good.

Tuesday

Short version: Rib steaks with herb butter, rice, leftover sauteed calabacitas, raw green beans

Long version: I didn't have any steak sauce left, so I sent two children out to the garden to gather basil and parsley, which I chopped fine and mixed with soft butter to top the steaks. And then they all told me they like that better than steak sauce anyway. Yay.

Wednesday

Short version: Spaghetti sauce and rice, leftovers, raw green beans, alliterative popsicles

Long version: I had slightly more ambitious plans for dinner, but when I got home I couldn't muster up the energy for much. I had brought home a bunch of the leftover spaghetti and meat sauce from the school lunch, though, so I just mixed the sauce with leftover rice and microwaved that for the kids. 

I got several compliments on this, which was pretty funny.

A. ate the rest of the steak and some rice. I ate some leftover steamed green beans with spaghetti sauce. 

I made the popsicles to celebrate Poppy's first day of preschool (they always start later than the older kids). I had a lot of peach and plum jam I had made with the fruit given to us by neighbors, so I pureed that and a little cream with my immersion blender to make peach and plum popsicles.

I do love alliteration.

Thursday

Short version: Judo food!

Long version: The kids' judo instructor gave a party for all the students who passed their belt test last week, and the families. He provided all the food: tortilla chips and nacho cheese, hot dogs, Puerto Rican rice (there was a name for this that I don't remember, but I do remember it had pigeon peas in it), and freshly-made funnel cake. And I didn't have to cook any of it. Hooray.

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

T.T.: Riesens for the Win

Do you know about Riesens? If you don't, I am sorry and am now going to educate you. Because anyone who loves chocolate and caramel should know about Riesens.

Riesens are chocolate caramels, you see. That is, they are chocolate-flavored caramels with a chocolate coating. Sort of like Rollos, which I suspect are a more well-known version of this sort of candy. But Rollos are vastly inferior to Riesens. 

And the reason (Riesen/reason, ha) for that is that Riesens are not made by Heshey's or Mars. They are not American. They are made by a German company. That's why the chocolate is actually good dark chocolate and the caramel is actually a very chewy, not too sweet caramel.

In fact, Riesens are made by the Storck Company, which also makes Werther's Original, about the only hard candy I consider worth eating. 

I had not had Riesens in many years, but I saw them at the grocery store in Taos and bought a bag on impulse. They proved to be just as popular with the rest of the family as they are with me. 

At ten dollars a bag, they are definitely not cheap, but there's actually almost a hundred caramels in a bag, and the bag lasts a long time. It's kind of hard to overeat them, because they're so chewy.

Despite their relative priciness, I think they're definitely worth it. They're all gone now, but the next time I see them at a store, you can bet I'll be getting more.

Auf Wiedersehen, my tasty little friends.

Snapshots: Fun With Produce

So much produce. So much processing. But so much fun, too! How can produce be fun? Allow me to show you.

I grew two new-to-me varieties of tomato this year: Cherokee Purple and Chocolate Cherry. When they're ripe, both are a distinctive purplish-red color. I harvested some of each this week, and noticed that the cherry variety looks just like a miniature version of the Cherokee Purple.

So of course I set them up in a little tomato tableau and called all the kids over so I could tell them: "Look! It's me and you four kids, but tomatoes!"

Only Poppy was very enthused about this. The boys just rolled their eyes at me.

One of those eye-rollers then appropriated the tomatoes to make this freaky bird-looking face.

Yikes.

And then I used the big Cherokee Purple--plus lettuce from the garden, bacon, Duke's mayonnaise, and toasted sourdough bread--to make my annual BLT.

Perfection.

Remember last week when A. started fermenting a bunch of our neighbor's grapes to make wine? He ended up adding some rhubarb and apples to up the acidity in the notably sweet and not acidic Thompson's grapes he was working with. After fermenting the mixture in an open container for a couple of days (to allow the majority of the carbon dioxide to escape), he strained out the solids and put the liquid in old wine bottles with airlocks.

The airlocks allow the bubbles of carbon dioxide to escape, but keep oxygen from getting in.

When they weren't bubbling anymore, the wine was done fermenting.

So how was it?

In a word, rough.

It tasted very much like the cider A. used to make, which has a very funky, strong flavor. I am not a fan, but it was certainly alcoholic. And as A. noted, you can't make peasant wine in an old tub and expect it to taste like fine wine aged in oak barrels or whatever.

Anyway.

We got a call on Friday morning from a guy who lives in the village and goes to our church asking if we would like to come pick peaches from his tree.

I trust you don't need me to tell you that we most definitely did.

The tree was right next to an old adobe chicken coop with a flat roof, so the kids actually climbed a ladder onto the roof and picked up there.

They thought this was the most fun thing ever, as I usually forbid them from climbing roofs.

A. and I picked from the ground.

Okay, so actually only I stayed on the ground. A. climbed a ladder.

We came home with about fifty pounds of white peaches.

That's a lot of peaches. Only one thing to do!

The next morning, as soon as I had fed everyone, I fired up the burners and got to canning.

Small pot in the back for the sugar syrup, red pot with boiling water to facilitate peeling, giant pressure canner full of water to function as my water bath canner.

One reason canning peaches is a pain is because they have to be peeled. Well, they might not have to be, but I know for sure that A. would be very disappointed to open a jar of peaches and find skins on them. And honestly, peeled peaches canned in syrup are one of the great joys in life. Might as well do it right.

Luckily, I was only a fraction of the peaches into peeling when I was discovered by a couple of small people who were delighted to help me divest the peaches of their skins.

Slightly less delighted by peach #200 or so, but they valiantly soldiered on with their puckery fingers.

Two jars of peach halves broke in the canner (the. worst.) but I still ended up with this.

Twelve quarts of peach halves in syrup and six pints of peach sorta-jam (sorta because I didn't add commercial pectin, just a few apples, so it's a bit runnier than a traditional jam).

In case you are wondering, processing that many peaches takes approximately five hours of continuous kitchen work. As I assured the children, it will all be worth it when we open those jars in the dead of winter.

Due to the fact that I had cooked a bunch of beef ribs the day before, I also had a lot of beef stock to deal with. Just as I had that in the pressure-canner and was thinking I was FINALLY almost done with the canning, A. and the kids returned from the neighbor's house with this.

Pears, grapes, and some sort of small plums. Guess I'm not done yet.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.
 

Friday Food: An Unusual Beginning

Friday 

Short version: Gas station food and snacks

Long version: We went to Cubby's football game a couple of hours away in the afternoon. 

Nice day for some 6-man football.

I had brought a bunch of snacks--cheese, summer sausage, carrot sticks, pistachios, animal crackers, graham crackers--and that all got eaten on the ride there and during the game. So when the game was over at 4:30 p.m., we decided to stop on the way home to get dinner. We didn't drive through any big towns to get there, though, so our options were pretty limited. Our first and closest choice was closed, unfortunately, which led us to the Allsup's gas station.

Allsup's is a somewhat famous convenience store around here. They sell hot food along with standard gas station snack things. So the kids all got either chimichangas or grilled chicken sandwiches, plus chocolate milk.

There were no tables at this gas station, so they ate on the curb, watching the trucks go by.

Fine dining, indeed.

A. finished what the kids didn't eat, and I had some leftover pot roast when we got home.

Saturday

Short version: Leftover chicken nuggets, posole, rice, cucumber and tomato salad, Otter Pops

Long version: The school cook sent me home with a gallon-sized bag of chicken nuggets the previous Wednesday, which I froze. We had our monthly Saturday Mass this day and didn't get home until almost 5:30, so I decided to use the nuggets. 

I re-heated them by frying them in cast-iron skillets of butter, which I suppose improved them, but I think I probably could have thrown them on the kids' plates stone-cold and they still would have been excited about eating chicken nuggets.

I did not share their excitement. I had fried eggs with salsa and half an avocado.

A. had some of his venison and tripe posole from the freezer. There were three half-gallon containers in there, so I figured I'd better start using some of it.

The Otter Pops were from the county fair parade. People on the floats just give our kids handfuls of them, and I throw whichever ones aren't already leaking into the freezer for some other time. This was the time.

Sunday

Short version: Italian steak, spaghetti with roasted tomato sauce, roasted calabacita, carrot sticks, pots de creme

Long version: I used the tenderized bottom round steaks and cooked them like Swiss steak, except I added oregano and a bunch of fresh parsley to the tomato sauce. I only have the parsley because A. started a bunch of seeds, thinking they wouldn't do very well, but they really did. So now I have a LOT of parsley to thin out.

It was really good tomato sauce. Must've been the parsley.

And good tomatoes, of course.

Monday

Short version: Pork stir-fry, rice, cantaloupe

Long version: I had been planning on frying some of the commodities pork after work, but then the school cook gave me about a pound and a half of leftover pork from the cafeteria. It was fairly dry, and didn't have any sauce on it, so I decided to use it for stir-fry.

I used one bag of frozen stir-fry vegetables, and added to that some cooked mushrooms I had in the refrigerator, plus some frozen peas. And the same sauce I always make, which is just soy sauce, vinegar, powdered ginger, and peanut butter.

The cantaloupe came from the commodities lady. It didn't look too promising, but it turned out to be surprisingly good. I mean, if you like cantaloupe. I don't, but other members of the family do.

Tuesday

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers, fried onions, boiled potato chunks, sauteed or raw green beans

Long version: It had been awhile since I had made cheeseburgers, and I was bummed to see that we don't have very much ground beef left. Need another cow, I guess.

The school cook had given me some leftover American cheese slices, which I used for these cheeseburgers. A. was particularly happy with this. A nostalgic taste, I guess.

Wednesday

Short version: Quesadillas, posole, raw green beans

Long version: I had made taco meat with some of the ground beef the day before, along with half a can of black beans. And someone had left a package of flour tortillas on the counter at school for the taking. So I took them and used them to make quesadillas with the meat and some cheese.

A. finished his posole from the freezer. And I had some of the taco meat with cooked green beans.

Thursday

Short version: Fried rice

Long version: I really needed to make some space in my refrigerator, which means using up leftovers. Therefore, leftover rice, leftover pork stir-fry, and a couple of eggs to make fried rice.

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

T.T.: Roasted Tomato Sauce

For years and years, I made and loved Finny's tomato sauce. She called it The Best Tomato Sauce Ever, and it is. If you ever get a chance to make it just the way she does, you should.

But I don't make it the way she does anymore. There are a couple of minor changes I made so as not to use aluminum foil, but mostly it's different because I don't typically have red wine in the house, and I can't easily get it, either. So when I'm slammed by the tomato harvest that needs to be roasted and frozen pronto, and the nearest red wine is 60 miles away, this is what I do. 

First, I use Romas from my garden. They make the best sauce, because they have much more pulp and much less liquid in them than a slicing tomato. You can use slicing tomatoes, but they will take longer in the oven and yield less.

I cut off the stem end and then slice them longways, laying them on my half-sheet pans as I go until I've filled both pans with a single layer of tomatoes. I do not line my pan with foil or parchment paper, because I would rather scrub a pan than throw something away, but it is easier if they're lined.

After the pans are full, I mound all the tomatoes up in the middle of the pans and douse them with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Mixmixmix until everything is all coated, then spread them back out in a single layer.

Any recipe that tells me to toss vegetables and oil in a bowl before putting them on a roasting pan is immediately suspect. I do not want to wash an extra bowl for no reason. 

I also put a whole head of garlic right on each pan with the tomatoes. Again, I do not wrap it in foil because I don't want to have to throw the foil away. All I do is wash and rub off the dirt from the outside of the head, but if your garlic is from the store, it will already be clean.

Ready for the oven.

The pans go in a 400-degree oven for about 45 minutes. I scrape and stir the tomatoes around a few times. When they're done, there will be very little liquid in the pan and some char.

I scrape the tomatoes up into a pile while they're still hot, mostly avoiding the black spots but trying to get all the jammy spots of tomato.

After the pans are out of the oven, I let them sit for awhile so they're not burning hot. It's much easier to handle the pans and the tomatoes when they won't burn you on contact.

When they're cooled a bit, I dump the tomatoes into the food processor and scrape the olive oil in there, too. Because the garlic wasn't wrapped, it doesn't squish out of the skins. I can just pull the skins open and pull out the garlic cloves whole. Those go into the food processor, too, along with a handful of fresh basil leaves.

Here is where we come to the biggest difference: The wine. If I had red wine, I would certainly use it, because this sauce is best with it. But it's almost as good with balsamic vinegar, so that's what I use. About two teaspoons.

After everything is in there, it just needs to be pureed, checked to see if it needs more salt or vinegar, and that's it.

Yum.

It makes a very thick, flavorful sauce, and it freezes perfectly in zip-top bags.

With very abbreviated labels.

What really makes this good is the method. The roasting concentrates the flavors and adds some caramelization that doesn't occur on the stovetop. All that garlic is key, too. 

It's best with wine, but the balsamic version is also delicious. I have even made it with cans of whole tomatoes--removed from the juice--dried basil, garlic, and the vinegar, and it's still good.

So even if you can't make it exactly like the original recipe, at least try roasting the tomatoes and garlic and see how you like it.

Snapshots: Canning/Football Season

Never having been a football fan, I didn't realize that the two seasons coincide. But they sure do.

When I got home from Taos, I found many tomatoes and green beans needing to be harvested and stuffed into jars. So I did that.

With some help from Little Pinkie, of course.

I had planned on canning three quarts of dilly beans, but since I had the giant pot of water boiling already to can the beans, I decided to stick a couple of jars of tomatoes in there, too.

I didn't even peel the tomatoes. The Ball Blue Book does not approve.

A few days later, there were more tomatoes, more green beans, and WOAH CUCUMBERS.

The giant ones were hiding on the other side of the fence behind the calabaza leaves. And that little curly green bean there was all curled around its own stem, like a snake. (There were more green beans, but I sent a bunch to Miss Amelia via the children.) 

Because those were the Armenian cucumbers, they were not at all bitter, despite their size. The skins weren't even tough.

I made them into refrigerator dill pickles, this time with Calvin as my helper.

He proved to have a great talent for jamming those jars absolutely full.

While I was dealing with the giant cucumbers, A. and Jack were helping our neighbor with her garden. That included picking grapes for her. She sent them home with many pounds of grapes. 

I knew the kids would never be able to eat that many grapes, so I suggested A. try making them into wine. They're green Thompson seedless grapes, which are definitely not a wine grape, but A. is always up for an experiment.

All of the children took turns smashing the grapes to release their juices.

And now the top of my woodstove looks like this.

Grapes for eating, grapes fermenting, tomatoes awaiting roasting, and meat defrosting.

The volunteer carrots continue to appear and grow to surprisingly large sizes. These two I pulled from the back garden under the roof's dripline.

Teaspoon for scale.

I didn't can those, though.

And last, football.

Cubby had his first game of the year on Friday, at a school about two hours away. We all went. They lost, but they learned a lot.

I took all of three photos, but one of them is actually an action shot.

The farthest kid in the white who looks as if he's about to hit the ground is Cubby. He's trying to get the ball on a kickoff here. He got knocked to the ground by one of the opposing players, but still managed to crawl to the ball and grab it. And I missed the whole play, because I was taking pictures.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.