Snapshots: Decked Halls

Yes, I have decorated for Christmas, with my usual flair.

You could say I'm a decor minimalist.

Very minimalist.

I always wait to get our tree until about the middle of December, since it's a real one and it stays up until Epiphany.

Let's see what else . . .

Lately egg-carton ships are all the rage for the boys' unending war games. I appreciate their creativity, but my table always ends up looking like this.

Sigh.

Heating season is definitely underway. I make a fire pretty much every morning. 

The kids all wish we had one of those glass-fronted stoves so they could stare into the flames. We don't, however, so they have to content themselves with short stints of staring while I have the stove open to start the fire.

Very occasionally, if I know it's going to be a warm day and I need to clean the ashes out of the woodstove, I'll turn the furnace on in the morning instead. And then we have this:

A pose specific to heating vents.

We'll close with the traditional Morning Walk Photos.

Winter sunflowers.

And tumbleweeds in the barbed wire.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: The Inevitable Turkey Leftovers

Friday 

Short version: Turkey slop and leftovers

Long version: Turkey slop is something I learned from the MiL. It's just leftover shredded turkey re-heated in gravy. The resulting sloppy turkey is then served over leftover mashed potatoes or dressing.

Heating it on the stove is key, by the way. Leftover store poultry re-heated in the microwave is a terrible thing. Oddly, home-raised poultry meat can be re-heated with none of that leftover poultry taste. 

Anyway. 

Everyone got to choose what they wanted as their sides.

I had a salad with arugula, leftover green beans, shredded cheese, and leftover bacon in it, because I really don't much care for leftover turkey re-heated in any way at all. Picky Mom.

Saturday

Short version: Frankenpasta, leftovers, salad

Long version: We got several boxes of Annie's macaroni and cheese as a secondary commodities item, which I thought the kids would love. Cubby made a couple of boxes for lunch on Friday, and it was waaaay too salty. I mean, the directions say to use unsalted butter, and we only have salted, but still. The butter alone can't account for the excess sodium.

There was quite a bit left, so I made some more plain pasta, to which I added the too-salty macaroni and cheese along with some sauce from the freezer. The sauce was originally leftover spaghetti sauce from the school cafeteria, which has ground beef in it. I had added to it some leftover roasted tomato sauce I happened to have in the refrigerator that needed to be frozen, so the resulting sauce tasted much better than the cafeteria version.

The resulting mixture of pastas and sauces was eaten with great enthusiasm by the children, which was a satisfying recovery of some foods that on their own weren't all that exciting.

A. had a plate with the last of the leftover mashed potatoes, green beans, and some of the barbecue shredded bull meat with cheese on top, plus some turkey and gravy because there wasn't a lot of the beef. 

And then everyone had some of the fresh bread I had baked that afternoon. And Cubby and Jack got out the container of leftover turkey and started eating plain cold turkey. Okay.

I had the salad. Of course. It was more arugula and leftover green beans, one of the very last of the garden tomatoes from the counter, some kalamata olives, shredded cheddar cheese, and diced turkey. If I cut the turkey up small and mix it in with something strongly flavored like kalamata olives, it's okay cold. About the only way I will eat leftover turkey.

Oh! I think I never showed you my laughably giant barrel of kalamata olives:

Pint jar for scale.

This is what happens when I buy things online and therefore have no sense of its actual size relative to anything else. That's what 4.4 pounds of olives look like, in case you were wondering. (They are very good olives, though, and olives don't really go bad, so it's fine.)

Sunday

Short version: Turkey enchilada casserole, carrot sticks with ranch dip, pureed squash, salad, chocolate chip cookies

Long version: Heavily spiced sauces are a good way to make the eternal post-Thanskgiving turkey more palatable. I made the enchilada sauce with a couple of cans of "low sodium pasta sauce" that are frequent secondary commodities items. Despite the name, it has very little spice in it and is mostly just a plain tomato sauce. I added cumin, chile powder, vinegar, onion and garlic powders, and more salt to it. 

The casserole was layers of sauce, corn tortillas, a bit of leftover black beans, chopped turkey, some randomly cooked onion, and cheese. Everyone enjoyed it.

The squash was the same kind I had used to make the pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, except this time it didn't have any sugar, cream, spices, or eggs in it. Butter and salt are much more reasonable for everyday squash consumption.

I had the salad. Which was exactly the same as the night before's salad, and which used up the very last tomato from the garden that had ripened on the counter. 

So long, tomatoes. See you in 2022.

Monday

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers, leftover Thanksgiving dressing, fried mushrooms and onions, pureed squash

Long version: These mushrooms were getting pretty sad and definitely needed to be used up. I made Poppy's day by letting her wash them for me. It kept her occupied for a good fifteen minutes, including the ten minutes she spent washing and drying the blue plastic tub the mushrooms were sold in.

Tuesday

Short version: Ground beef tacos in homemade corn tortillas, frozen peas, pureed squash

Long version: I had about a pound of ground beef I hadn't used for the cheeseburgers the night before, which I simply browned and combined with some of the leftover enchilada sauce. 

Poppy helped me make the tortillas, too. 

She does love helping in the kitchen (for now).

Last of this squash! Time to cook another one.

Wednesday

Short version: Beef stir-fry, rice

Long version: We were getting pretty low on fresh vegetables, so I used a bag of frozen stir-fry vegetables to make, uh, stir-fry. I only used one bag, plus leftover mushrooms and onions and the last of a bag of frozen peas, so it was a meat-heavy stir-fry.

No one complained about this.

Thursday

Short version: Multi-cultural pizza, salad, leftover soup, carrots, dried cranberries

Long version: Multi-cultural because I put the rest of the ground beef taco meat on the pizza. It was actually really good.

The children ate the carrots and dried cranberries before dinner, while they were all in Cubby's room reading and listening to his CD player. Carrots and cranberries are the perfect party food, obviously.

A. ate the last of the turkey soup I had made on Sunday, thereby finishing the turkey exactly a week from the day it was cooked. Well, except for the five quarts of stock and meat I froze.

I ate the salad. Of course. Leftover hamburger, leftover black beans, roasted carrots, shredded cheese. Pretty basic.

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

T.T.: For Friday Food Fans

This year one of my duties at the school is taking care of the library. Our school is too small to have a real library and a real librarian. My only professional experience in libraries was as a page at the public library in high school, but I have been an avid library user my entire life, and I really, really love books.

So imagine my excitement when I was told that we had some money on hand for new library books. And I got to make the list of what to order.

Buy books? And not even with my own money? OKAY!

I pulled many of the titles I ended up ordering from the Common Core list of recommended supplementary titles. The new books came in over the Thanksgiving break, and when I went back to work yesterday, I had several boxes and envelopes to open, all full of new books. It was like Christmas came early.

I figured one of the perks of my job is that I get to read some of the new books myself, right? Right.

Although I was tempted to bring the entire box of new books home and read them all right away, I limited myself to just a few. And the very first one I read is the one I'm going to recommend right now. This one:

It's like this book was written just for me.

This is an extraordinary book. The majority of the book is a collection of profiles of families all over the world. Each family was photographed with all the food they eat in a week.

Say hello to the Aymes family in Ecuador.

The photograph is followed by a detailed breakdown of each food, its quantity and its cost. And following that is a two-page narrative about each family's life and food situation. 

In addition to the family profiles, there are many charts and graphs that show things like percentage of urban population for each country, the number of McDonald's restaurants in each one, average meat consumption, and on and on.

It is an extraordinary book. Despite the Common Core recommendation, I'm not sure it's really for kids. It's pretty long and detailed.

I'm sure enjoying it, though. And if you come here for the Friday Food posts, you probably will, too.

It's a relatively old book--published in 2008--so it might be at your public library. And if it's not, you can find it used at various online sellers for about seven dollars. 

Snapshots: A New Perspective

The horses have been moved from our neighbor's pasture across the road back into the paddack by our house. That means that when I go out in the morning for my walk, this is now what I see.

Spare a little hay, missus?

Bill goes straight to the hay window.

Most nights are below freezing, so the walks are getting colder.

I turned on my way to the schoolhouse and went down a different road. 

There's a windmill on this road, too, but it faces the sunrise, so no silhouette on this one.

The garlic and potato patch in front of the house is pleasingly tidy this time of year, with no weeds to mar its neatly laid out rows.

If only we would get some rain so the potatoes and garlic will actually grow. Then again, I guess weeds would grow then too, wouldn't they?

And last, but certainly most random, my sister shipped up some things in an old shoe box. The box was immediately claimed by Jack for a base for his guys.

Let no box go unused, is our motto.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.
 

Friday Food: Turkey, Etc.

Friday

Short version: Chinese food (at a restaurant!)

Long version: This is where we stopped on our way home from the zoo, etc. for dinner in a small city about 90 miles from our house. A. and Cubby have a particular fondness for cheap Chinese food, so that's what we got. A. ordered one of the family meals for four that came with hot tea, fried shrimp, egg rolls, rice, sweet and sour chicken, spicy garlic chicken, beef with bell peppers, and some other kind of chicken dish with vegetables.

It was a lot of food. None of it particularly good, but certainly plentiful, and the children enjoyed themselves very much. It was pretty fun to eat out with them for once.

Saturday

Short version: Beefed up (heh) Chinese leftovers

Long version: I had brought home all the leftovers from our Chinese meal. To that I added the rest of the tenderized beef bottom round steaks (do you appreciate my joke up there now? yeah) that I hadn't cooked on Thursday, plus some broccoli, more soy sauce, vinegar, and ginger. I just fried it all together to make something like fried rice. It was better than the original version, honestly.

Tasty, but not photogenic. Which describes most of my cooking.

Sunday

Short version: Brisket, baked potatoes, steamed broccoli, pureed calabaza, chocolate-covered peanut butter balls

Long version: Brisket cooked with half an onion, mustard, vinegar, and some more of the tomato juice from Miss Amelia.

These peanut butter balls (but you only need half the amount of chocolate). Always a favorite.

Monday

Short version: Sloppy bull sandwiches for the kids, leftover brisket and potato for A., salad for all

Long version: A couple of months ago, I put a pressure-canned jar of bull meat through the food processor (not in the jar, though), to further break it down. I froze that the resulting finely shredded meat, and it was this that I used to make something like sloppy joes.

I added some extra tallow and bacon grease to the meat, because the bull meat is very lean and therefore dry. Then I put in the other half of the onion I had cooked the day before, and then some barbecue sauce. 

I was making bread, so I made some rolls for the children, and they had their meat in the rolls. It turned out well.

A. had the last half of a leftover baked potato, fried in bacon grease, with the rest of the brisket.

While I was cooking, this was happening on the kitchen floor right behind me.

A Magna Tile ramming ship, constructed by Poppy and handily located exactly in the middle of the kitchen.

Tuesday

Short version: Taco meat skillet, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: I had about a quart of ground beef taco meat in the freezer, which I combined with rice, arugula, some salsa, grated cheddar cheese, and sour cream to make a skillet meal. It was fine.

Wednesday

Short version: Fajita tacos, carrot sticks, pureed squash

Long version: Fajita meat, but no peppers. I did add the rest of the cooked onion, but it wasn't real fajitas. Good meat, though. I marinated it in oil, vinegar, garlic powder, salt, cumin, and chile powder. Marinating definitely makes a difference.

 Thursday

Short version: The whole Thanksgiving shebang

Long version: Well, maybe not the WHOLE shebang. But quite a bit of shebang.

Of course I made the stock first thing with the neck and all the innards except the liver. Have to have that first because it's used for so much else.

Turkey--onion, celery, thyme and rosemary from the garden, and a wrinkly apple just for fun in the cavity. I also dry brined it the day before and basted it a few times with turkey stock while it was baking.

Gravy--standard turkey juices+cornstarch

Mashed potatoes--the usual butter/sour cream/milk

Dressing--a whole loaf and a half of sourdough bread with lots of onion and celery, even more butter (like a cup, plus some more on top), sage, and some of the turkey stock

Green beans--my garden beans from the freezer, with finely diced onion and bacon

Cranberry sauce--whole cranberries simmered with sugar and the juice from half an old orange I found in the refrigerator. Mashed when the berries got soft, but not strained.

Pumpkin pie and pumpkin custard with sweetened whipped cream.

Pictures!

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

Happy Thanksgiving!

The cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie are made . . .

As is some pumpkin custard with the remaining pie filling.

And there is a 25-pound turkey ready to go in the oven.

It was the same price as a turkey half the size, which is why A. bought it. And it's been taking up a quarter of my refrigerator ever since, because a 25-pound turkey is REALLY BIG.

I hope you have a lovely Thanksgiving, full of whatever makes you grateful.*

*And of course, this goes for those of you who aren't in the U.S. as well. I still hope you have a day full of good things, holiday or no.

Remote Living: Going To the Zoo

Heads up: This is a very long post. Just thought I should warn you to settle in.

Going to the zoo is sort of a cliche for parents of young children, right? Zoos are fun! They're practically made for kids! It's a perfect place for a family-friendly outing!

All true. But most people don't drive 400 miles round trip for that outing. We do. So I thought I would explain how any sort of family outing for our family looks*. 

This particular outing came about because I was reading a book about sharks to Poppy and Jack, who were enthralled with a photo in the book of one of those underwater tubes that go through a big tank in which the sharks swim all around. "I wish we could see one of those," Poppy said wistfully.

I actually had no idea where the nearest aquarium was, so I looked it up. Okay. Albuquerque. Where there is also a zoo and botanical garden.

That's not close to us, but it is at least within the realm of possibility for a day trip. I considered that Thanksgiving break was coming up. And that I now have four fully mobile children who do not require strollers, diapers, or too much special care. And that they can all handle a three-hour+ drive without complete meltdowns.

We could actually do this. So I talked to A.--who is always willing to take a trip anywhere--and we decided on the Friday before Thanksgiving.

The zoo/aquarium/botanical garden complex opened at 9 a.m. I wanted to get there as early as possible, so we wouldn't be getting home at an unreasonably late hour. To get there at 9 a.m., we would have had to leave at 5:30 a.m. I decided to shoot for a 6 a.m. departure.

The night before, I had all the kids pick out a book and two toys to take with them in the car. I added a couple of books of mazes and puzzles that I had intended for Christmas but figured could be put to better use on this trip. I also put together a backpack with masks (required for indoor exhibits), snacks, and sunhats to carry around the zoo.

I got up at 4:30 the morning of and put together a bag of food for car snacks and a cooler of food for either lunch or dinner (tuna salad, bread, carrot sticks). I filled a water bottle for each person and made sure we had the extra gallon of water in the car, because we don't go ANYWHERE without the extra gallon of water. Last, I made some fried egg sandwiches for breakfast in the car.

While I was doing this, A. was putting food out for the chickens for when it got light, feeding the dogs, and filling containers with water to bring to the sheep.

I woke the kids up around 5:45 a.m., helped them all dress appropriately, and loaded everyone up. It was 6:15 a.m. when we pulled out of our property.

We stopped at the pasture down the road where the sheep are so A. could fill their water. We stopped at the village pump house to turn off the water pump A. had turned on the night before to fill the well. And then we had to turn around when we were about two minutes down the road because I forgot the zoo backpack.

Sigh.

But! We were still on the road by 6:30 a.m. And then we drove drove drove. I judiciously apportioned snacks and the entertainment to make sure I had something to appease the troops in hour three when everyone reeeeealllly wanted out of the car.

We got to the aquarium a little after 10 a.m. The kids were so excited by the giant tanks.

River otters!

Jellyfish!

SHARKS!

Next we went to the botanical gardens.

Giant wisteria tunnel!

Children's garden with little caves!

And a slide!

We had to drive over to the zoo, and considered getting lunch on the way somewhere. However, we didn't want to take the time, because it was already 1 p.m. and we had a long drive home (obviously). So instead we ate our tuna sandwiches on a bench next to some somnolent crocodiles and started the zoo rounds.

Lions!

Ducks to feed!

A carousel!

After seeing everything--and completely exhausting that little camel rider up there--we got back in the van at 3:30 p.m. And drove drove drove.

We took a break in the small city 90 miles from home to eat dinner at a Chinese restaurant. It added an hour to the trip home, but the kids were so thrilled to be eating in a real restaurant. They never, ever do this, and it was a big deal. In fact, it was the first time in Poppy's entire four years that she ever actually sat in a restaurant to eat a meal. It did mean we didn't get home until about 8:30 p.m., though.

So for those of you keeping track at home, our outing was about 14 hours, 400 miles, and 4 extremely tired but happy children.

Worth it.

*Mostly I just wanted to post a bunch of pictures, though. Because it's my blog, and I can.