Friday Food: Fruit for Dinner

Friday 

Short version: Bull and potato skillet, still-frozen green beans

Long version: A. and Cubby weren't home at dinnertime, so the younger three had a skillet combination of shredded bull meat, sliced microwaved potatoes, the last of the enchilada sauce, and shredded cheese. Pretty tasty, actually.

I had some leftover hamburger, some of the potato, and some very forgettable squash. It was a variety called Atlantic Giant that is really grown more for size than flavor or texture. I mean, it's technically edible, but pretty wet, bland, and stringy. I gave the rest to the chickens.

Definitely a case of quantity and not quality.

Saturday

Short version: Barbecue pork, bread, leftover rice, orange slices

Long version: I had promised Jack and Poppy that I would take them for a special adventure, to make up for the fact that they kept being left at home when A. took the older boys camping in the fall. We went to one of our (relatively) nearby towns, where we went to a dinosaur museum and also ate lunch at a local place.

I did not order from the children's menu for them, which was a good call seeing as how Jack ate an entire giant burrito, plus some of Poppy's quesadilla. Kid's an eater for sure.

Anyway. 

It was fun, but I was very, very tired by the time we got home. So I just opened a couple of cans of the commodities pork, fried it in a pan, added barbecue sauce, and called it good. It was pretty good, actually.

I was even too tired to peel and cut up carrots or something. So instead I cut up some of the oranges I had just gotten at the grocery store. Fruit for dinner? Unheard of. (At least in our house.)

Sunday

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers (on buns!), green salad, green beans, chocolate soup

Long version: I made the buns because I'm in the midst of Christmas Bread Baking Season, which means that I'm baking bread every other day (because each batch takes two days) to give to various people. And that means plenty of opportunities to steal some dough for pizza or garlic bread or, in this case, buns.

The chocolate soup was supposed to be pots de creme, but it didn't set. So it was almost entirely liquidy. Kind of like really chocolately, slightly thick chocolate milk. No one seemed to mind.

Monday

Short version: Cafeteria chicken tacos, grapes

Long version: This was our first day back in school after three weeks of Thanksgiving break and remote schooling. Whenever we come back from a long break like this, I feel particularly exhausted after work. It's so much harder to get back into a routine than to just continue with one.

Luckily, the school cook had given me a bunch of extra chicken tacos, so I heated those in the oven--with extra salsa and cheese because they were amazingly bland--and served them with grapes. 

Yes. Fruit for dinner again. I don't know what's happened to me.

Tuesday

Short version: Pork steaks and sauerkraut, baked potatoes, green salad 

Long version: These were cheap pork steaks from the grocery store, but I do love pork and sauerkraut. I need to plant more cabbages to make more sauerkraut this summer.

And A. wants to get a pig. That would certainly ensure the pork supply.

Wednesday

Short version: Leftovers, squash, still-frozen green beans

Long version: We had church after school and didn't get home until about 6 p.m. That's why I made sure to have plenty of leftovers on hand, so all I had to do was heat things up when we got home.

A. had the last of the stir-fry with a bit of extra bull meat and some leftover potatoes. Luckily, he's not fussy about things like needing rice to eat with stir-fry.

Poppy, Jack, and Calvin had tacos with corn tortillas, cheese, and some taco meat I made with ground beef and black beans.

Cubby and I had barbecue pork and potatoes.

This was not the overly large and tasteless squash. This was a much smaller, pumpkin-looking squash that I baked when I was baking bread. Much tastier.

Thursday

Short version: Skillet food, steamed broccoli, salad

Long version: This skillet had the last of the shredded bull meat fried in some tallow, the other half of a can of tomato sauce, cumin, garlic powder, chile powder, rice, and shredded cheese.

I had the salad--shredded cheese, leftover taco meat, some of the broccoli, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

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

T.T.: A Highly Tedious Kitchen Task

I spend more time in the kitchen than the average person, and many of the tasks in a kitchen can be described as tedious. But one of the most tedious things I have ever done is skin hazelnuts.

I skinned said nuts in pursuit of homemade Nutella. A worthy goal, but man, standing there rubbing and picking at all those hazelnuts, I really had to question whether the end result could possibly be worth it. 

I more or less used this recipe, although I ended up with more hazelnuts than called for, so I had to adjust quantities somewhat. It definitely doesn't need as much salt as is called for--I used half the amount--but it does need all the powdered sugar. That's what kind of sticks it all together, so you can't skimp too much on it.

Anyway. I made Nutella. It requires skinning hazelnuts, which is definitely not as easy as the recipe would have me believe.

So the real question, of course, is was it worth it?

Yes. 

The homemade version isn't as smooth, because it doesn't have large quantities of palm oil in it like the commercial version. What it does have, however, is a much more pronounced hazelnut flavor. 

Because of all those hazelnuts. That I skinned. 

So there's your tip: Skinning hazelnuts is a serious pain, but it's worth it if the end result is homemade Nutella.

Unrelated photo that has nothing to do with either Nutella or hazelnuts.

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?