Can’t remember the last time I was so glad to see a week be over. The food was good, though. Here’s what we had (carb counts at the end of the post):
SATURDAY
Grilled ham, cheddar, and apple sandwiches; onion rings
Sometimes you show up at Aldi, and in the place where there’s supposed to be those wonderful, heavy sourdough loaves, they just have a torn-up bag with some stale, loose bread sprinkled around on the shelf. So, with a heavy heart, you buy some ciabatta rolls instead, and ask your husband to make dinner.
Sliced cheddar cheese, deli ham, slices of Granny Smith apples, and a little mayonnaise on the outside to help it fry nicely. Lemon meringue pie was supposed to be for dessert, but I got started way too late. The onion rings were from frozen, obviously.
SUNDAY
Gochujang pork ribs, rice with nori, raw broccoli; lemon meringue pie
I set the pork to marinate the night before, using a double recipe of this sauce:
5 generous Tbs gochujang
2 Tbs honey
2 tsp sugar
2 Tbs soy sauce
5 cloves minced garlic
But I didn’t feel like slicing the pork up, and I didn’t feel like slicing up carrots or onions, even though I had splurged on a real working $7 food processor from the Salivation Army. So I just dunked the meat in the sauce and walked away. I just walked away! Well, I sat on the couch and drank gin. On Sunday, Damien cooked the meat on the grill, and it was fab.
But someday soon, I’m going to go the whole nine yards and make bulgoki. We did have seaweed to wrap up the rice in. Guess who likes seaweed? The cat. Too bad.
I made some sort of promise regarding lemon meringue pie to a certain Amelia Bedelia fan, and it seemed like as good a time as any to get that over with. Oh lord, what a pain in the neck. I even bought ready-made crusts and bought boxes of pudding mix, but it still consumed far, far too much time. So much stirring! Meringue is pretty easy to make, though. I bought four boxes of pudding, for some reason, so I had way more pie filling than crust; so I filled up a bunch of ramekins.
Simcha Fisher, Person Who Owns Ramekins. Take that, alumni association.
MONDAY
Hamburgers, chips, strawberries
Nothing to report. I was expecting Damien home not too late, so I just made burgers for the kids, and set aside the ones for the adults to cook later. Then, after watching the kids tear into their burgers, I made myself a burger. What, do you want me to get anemic?
TUESDAY
Kielbasa, red potato, and cabbage with mustard sauce
A good one-pan meal, pretty popular. You just chop up kielbasa, slice up potatoes, and slice up cabbage (just don’t call it steak!), oil and season it, and shove it in the oven. The sauce is good, but way too oily in the recipe from Budget Bytes. I changed the proportions to 1/2 cup olive oil, 4 Tbs red wine vinegar, 3 Tbs mustard, and 2 Tbs minced garlic, plus plenty of salt and pepper. Much better.
As you can see, I had parsley in the house. I’m a big believer in fresh parsley. I don’t know if it actually makes food taste better, or if it just signals to the 8-year-old in my brain, “ooooh, we’re going to get something fancy!” but I like it.
WEDNESDAY
Chicken enchiladas
How, do you wonder, do I manage to fulfill all my obligations and still produce a fabulous meal for my family at the end of the day? Really all you have to do is plan ahead. Specifically, eighteen years previously, you give birth to a daughter who will one day offer to make enchiladas for supper. And there you go.
She used Pioneer Woman’s recipe. I mysteriously only bought half the sauce we needed, but they truly did not suffer by not being smothered into hot tortilla flab by all that sauce. I may make them this way deliberately in the future. So good.
THURSDAY
Chicken and chickpeas, yogurt sauce
This meal is normally almost panic-inducingly delicious, but I skipped a few steps, and it was just quite good, instead. I had about ten pounds of chicken thighs and 64 ounces of Greek yogurt to work with, but was short on red onions, and lost my cilantro altogether (but still had parsley, as you can see). I also would have liked some pita bread, and some grapes or pomegranates. Still, a pretty meal, and tasty.Full recipe in this previous post.
These particular chicken thighs had tons of skin attached, which is perfect for this recipe. 
Check out that skin. It would make a meal in itself, if you’re some kind of a weirdo.
I was too impatient to let the chickpeas and the onions get crunchy. Will definitely keep making, but the extra steps and garnishes are worth while.
I took tons of pictures, so here’s another one:
Mustn’t waste film.
FRIDAY
Ziti with jarred sauce
But I’m not going to swear I won’t be sneaking into the bedroom with a platter of sopressata, mozzarella, and sun dried tomatoes, just in case there’s a husband in there who likes that kind of thing.
***
And now for the carbs. I really struggled with working out carbs this week. I don’t know if my brain was just sluggish, or I chose recipes where the math was especially vexatious, but it sucked. If you’re cooking for a diabetic, please be alert when using my numbers!
GRILLED HAM AND CHEESE SANDWICHES:
I don’t seem to have written this down. Ham, cheese, mayo, and pickles are all low- or no-carb, though, so you just have to count the bread and apple.
GOCHUJANG meal:
Gochujang sauce
10 Tbs gochujang: 100
Total sauce:
Lemon meringue pie:
sugar: 400
30.6 per 1/8 pie
HAMBURGERS:
hamburger with salt and pepper: 0
mustard: 0
67.5 meal
CABBAGE, POTATO, KIELBASA:
cabbage: 4.1g per cup
2 Tbs green enchilada sauce: 2.25g
chicken, salt, pepper, chili powder, oil: 0
cheese: 2 Tbs., .5 g
salsa: (doesn’t want)
CHICKEN AND CHICKPEA:
Greek yogurt: 35g
chicken thighs: 0
yogurt 35g per 32 oz/65 Tbs
lemon juice :0
parsley: negligible
I JUST FOUND GOJUCHANG AT ALDI. Yes, I’m shouting 🙂
Here’s what we ate this week:
Sat: breakfast for supper, i.e. pancakes, scrambled eggs, and sausage links. Everyone happy.
Sun: birthday boy wanted Toppers pizza and breadsticks. And brownie trifle for the cake. Everyone very happy. Husband made some asparagus salad for those who wanted it because when you plant 250 crowns of asparagus, someone has to eat it.
Mon: Was going to grill chicken, but we had a lot of pizza left over so we ate that.
Tues: sweet and sour venison, noodles, strawberries
Wed: shamefully cheap hot dog night at the minor league ballpark. Fed everyone for $4 total.
Thurs: husband turned 42 so we had Perfectly Normal Beast sandwiches (along with spinach salad and pretzel “salad” the latter being one of those desserts that calls itself a salad so people like me can eat it with the meal without guilt). Green-frosted laughing planet cake for dessert.
Fri: tuna salad sandwiches because it’s too hot for anything oven-related.
Simcha, DAHLING! If you or your beloved daughter are making enchiladas by rolling them, then you are wasting time that could be otherwise spent in contemplating the trailing Glory of God that is manifested in sunshine and birdsong/the Milkway/the growth of the Hawaiian islands via volacano/haranguing people on how they make their enchiladas. Stack those suckers. Same enchiladas, any and every recipe, but at a fraction of the time. I love it when you write about food (and pretty much anything else).
I find all pies to be far too time-consuming, which is why in my 38 years, I have never made one. The reason they are too time-consuming is not because of the fillings, but the crust. My husband had the great good fortune to be raised by two farm women who make pies the likes of which are given prizes at the county fair. Literally. My mother-in-law renders leaf lard to make pie crust. There will be no store-bought crusts in our house, or the wrath of the ancestors would descend upon me. In the face of this pressure, I have elected to take the coward’s way and allow my mother-in-law to continue being the pie maker for our family. Unfortunately, we’re about to move 2,000 miles away from, which means I may have to finally grow up and make a pie. Which will of course never measure up to hers, because who can compete with that sort of dedication?
My grandmother (eternal rest and the Light of Heaven) was the most amazing cook…and she hailed the advent of store-bought pie crusts like it was the Second Coming of the Holy One. No use at all for instant potatoes, though she gave them a shot. Pie crusts? Different story.
I have made pies from scratch and I have used the pre-made pie crusts, and nobody died, and nobody pointed a finger and said “How DARE you!” because, well, a made pie is better than no pie.
And I don’t know if it was in your marriage vows that your pies had to measure up to your mother-in-law’s, but it sure wasn’t in mine… Maybe make a pie with the pre made crusts, bury the boxes deep in the recycling, and see what he says.
If a tradition of homemade pie crust is important to your husband’s family, then they can jolly well pass the torch to your husband.
THIS.
Well, I disagree with the people below who like store-bought crust because it is terrible (though, in fairness, maybe brands differ significantly), but PW’s pie crust recipe (with the vinegar) is the one I use and it doesn’t seem super-fiddly and it turns out well even with Crisco and not home-rendered lard. And it freezes, so you can make all the crust dough, freeze it in baggies, and thaw one in no time when you want pie. Also, my husband is from a background similar to your husband’s and so that means he’s in charge of things like canning that he grew up around and I didn’t; maybe your husband would make the pies if it’s in his genes like that…
I will never measure up to my mil’s cooking either, but at least I feel way ahead of both my own grandmothers, so that’s something.
I use Betty Crocker’s pie crust mix (in a box)…about $2 at Walmart….it takes some time to push it and shape it into the pan with my fingers (I haven’t ever tried rolling it), but it is the best tasting crust I’ve ever had (better than Whole Foods, any store bought, any homemade)….my family loves the chocolate chess pie recipe from the famous angus barn restaurant in RAleigh NC….so insanely easy and good! This time of year I must have a cream cheese and real whipped cream blueberry pie….my husband loves apple pie, but we both prefer it with a crumbled topping versus pie crust on top….I’m feeling really hungry now….
You can render lard in a crock pot and strain it through a coffee filter. The hard part, IMO, is finding the fat (we order pork from a local farmer and you can get the leaf lard for free, which is definitely a plus). I also found that having a decent rolling pin with sock and a pastry cloth made rolling out crust about 1000x easier. In case you do want to give handmade a try. Before that I thought making pie crust was absolutely miserable.
The Aldi store crusts, which are only seasonal, do use lard though and are IMO highly decent.
My husband and I have a bit, where we imagine our ramekins talking about us to each other in the cupboard at night. They believe they are too good for our household. They complain about how we only really use them on taco night, to hold the toppings. It’s so humiliating!, they say. The ramekins were a little disappointed that they only came in as runner-up in the Bourgie Awards, which is a fictional award given to the most bourgeois wedding present we received. First place went to the creme brule torch. Third place was, as I recall, the little fondue pot powered by a votive-sized candle. We are weird, but we have fun.
I’m glad you know you’re weird–I was about to assure you of it in case you had any question in your mind. But weird is the best company to be in anyway. I can’t wait to share the Bourgie Awards with my husband! Too bad it’s been 24 years and we can’t remember our wedding presents anyway. All the remaining neurons go to remembering the children’s names. And occasionally their locations.
I used to eat whole barbequed chicken a long time ago.
Your typos truly rock: Salivation Army