Today, I bought dental insurance. That has nothing to do with what’s for supper. I just wanted to tell someone. I’m pretty excited, as this is basically me and Damien:
(Image by William Murphy via Flickr )
Why dental heath is not included in regular health, I’ll never know. I guess it’s because teeth are just inside your head and your skull, so how important could they be. Anyway. Onward!
SATURDAY
Regular tacos
This is my meal when I’m feeling merciful toward the kids. No fermented vegetables, no sprouts, no seasonings with diacritical marks in their names. Just ground beef with orange powder from a little packet, sour cream, salsa from a jar, and shredded cheddar cheese. Completely unchallenging food has its charms.
I had to put greens on mine because I am a mom and that’s the rule.
SUNDAY
Spiedies, raw peppers, blueberry tart
This recipe is really, really good if you have the time to zest lemons and chop fresh mint and such, marinate the meat overnight, skewer it, and cook it over the coals. It’s still quite nice if you just slosh in a bunch of stuff, chop some cheap pork into chunks, let it marinate for a few hours, and shove it under a hot broiler.
Serve the meat on toasted rolls with a lot of mayo. It comes out tender, juice, and a little spicy.
The original recipe is a NYT one which is currently behind a paywall. The quickie one I threw together was olive oil, lemon juice, red wine vinegar, kosher salt, oregano, crushed garlic, red pepper flakes. Basically Italian dressing but with extra lemon juice and red pepper flakes.
For dessert, Clara made a blueberry tart. Every single last damn time I go to write “tart,” I type “tard” first. I choose to believe this is because I have watched so much Dr. Who, and not because I don’t deserve to live in the 21st century. Anyway, here’s the picture.
If you zoom in, you can see that I accidentally sprinkled yarrow pollen all over it while trying to get an Instaworthy photo. If I could figure out the right SEO for this post, I could probably form a partnership with Gwyneth Paltrow and pass it off as a cure for yarrow allergies, uterine prolapse, and ennui.
Clara and I worked on this together, and it certainly did highlight the difference between our cooking styles; it certainly did. She is more of a “wait, stop, what is seven eights of a cup times two and a half?” baker, and I’m more of a “just mash faster, no one will know” baker.
Between the two of us, we came up with something tasty, anyway, although it was reluctant to leave the pie plate. To appease the Visigoths, we chose the kind of whipped cream that comes squirting out of a can.
I’ll get the recipe link from her when she gets home.
MONDAY
Chicken enchilada rice bowls, corn chips, pineapple
This meal looked better than it tasted. I was going for a “all the ingredients you love in Mexican food, but without a tortilla, for some reason” kind of meal. So I cooked up a pot of rice, then roasted some chicken with lots of chili lime powder. Then I cut up the chicken and cooked it again in green enchilada sauce from a can. I mixed together some black beans, chili beans, and diced tomato with chili peppers in it. We had limes, cilantro, sour cream, and shredded cheese, and corn chips.
It was. . . fine. I will just go ahead and make enchiladas next time.
The exciting part was I finally bought a pineapple corer from Aldi for like $3, and it was so cool! I thought it would just extract the core so you can peel it and get rings, but it cores and peels it, and leaves you will a continues spiral of pineapple. Corrie and I made a video, and we hope it blows your mind.
This is my first attempt at including a food video, and I hope it’s not terrible, because people keep telling me this is the only way to make some money, and if you can’t make money sharing a video of yourself testing a $3 pineapple corer, than is this even really America?
TUESDAY
Pizza
Tuesday was the final school concert of the year. If you wish to hear my views on school concerts, I can make that happen. This time, I dropped the kid off, nipped over to the liquor store and picked up some liquid courage in small bottles, and zipped back to my seat before the curtain. And now I have a brand new plan for school concerts.
I made a few pizzas before I left. There was a limited edition “everything dough” available, so I got some. It wasn’t everything, per se, but it certainly had poppy seeds in it.
Oh. You know about the “Make me one with everything” joke, right? This remains my favorite moment ever recorded on video. Especially the part where he leans in and goes, “Know what I mean?”
It’s so beautiful.
Oh, here are the pizzas. I only made four, for some reason.
WEDNESDAY
Chicken burgers
What was I even doing on Wednesday? I think I was writing like a maniac while Damien brought Lucy to the pediatric endocrinologist and then rock climbing. And that’s what chicken burgers are for.
THURSDAY
Deli sandwiches, fruit salad, chips, cookies
Actually, that was lunch. I had planned cumin chicken thighs, yogurt sauce, pita, and tabbouleh for supper, but in lieu of that, I took a nap, and everyone just ate more lunch. But what a lunch it was! One of my favorite families in the whole world, John and Aletheia Herreid and their wonderful kids were in town. The weather was great, Clara made a ton of cookies, we have a trampoline for bouncing and stream for floundering, John and my older kids swapped sketch books, Aletheia brought sunshine to the whole world as she so often does, and they brought cheese and beer and a luchador mask, and it was just swell.
FRIDAY
Ravioli
Just frozen ravioli. Not one of my most thrilling culinary weeks, but it was a good week. And thorough.
Ha! Simcha I can’t believe a video of Karl Stefanovic is one of your favourite YouTube videos. Don’t know sometimes if we need to apologise for our Aussie sense of humour. Stefanovic recently was stood down after 10 years hosting Today (got the morning lady viewers offside when he decided to trade the mother of his children for a young bride half his age) for being so unpopular and doing too many things like that video but 10 times more dorky. Anyway, don’t know why I felt a need to tell you this. The tard looks delicious.
Maybe tarts are actually a “timey wimey” sort of thing:)
I had a really strange week. The kids are all squirrelly, (not just mine.) Yes, bottles of that stuff Jesus made at a wedding, *help*. I made all the school lunches, and my husband made all of the dinners. I can’t remember anything about dinner except for the fact that he is kissed by the food gods. I wish I’d figured out this “work away from home” thing sooner.
I can’t eat pineapple because it has too much acid.
For a while, I thought I had hit upon a great, reliable dinner idea, Taco night. Ground beef with the orange packets, tortillas, homemade spanish rice (which I make very well, if I may say so), refried beans, all the fixings. Most everybody liked it. My husband avowed that he liked meals where people could build their own plate. The youngest didn’t like the beef, but he’d eat a cheese quesadilla. So I made tacos probably once a week. …and then one night, when I had made the beef and put it in the crockpot, and popped out to buy shoes for a kid after my husband got home, and intended to make the rice when I got back and put dinner on the table, I came home to find my husband making himself and the youngest burgers. I was informed that he “hated” tacos. 20 years of marriage and I’m just now learning this. But darn it, he used to eat those tacos. /sadly crosses tacos off the menu options/
love the video