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What’s for supper? Vol. 462: Mutter love

Happy Friday! We’re about a month away from Easter, can you believe it? I don’t even know if I mean it’s that soon, or that far away. Either way, it feels unreasonable. 

A few months ago, I was having a spell of OH I HAVE RUINED MY CHILDREN’s LIVES, WHY HAVE I BEEN SUCH A WORTHLESS MOTHER ALL MY DAYS, so when an ad for the circus came across my feed, obviously I bought a bunch of tickets. So that is what we did on Saturday, rather than go shopping. 

SATURDAY
Pizza

We arrived in the city early and I took this photo which is just begging to be made into a meme. Feel free to use it if you need it!

We had some yummy pizza at Caesario’s, where the pizza is delightfully garlicky, and positively gloppy with stretchy cheese. Then we went to the arena where the circus was, and IT WAS LOUD. 

It was, to be honest, kind of incoherent — I mean, even for a circus. I been to circuses before, and they generally have some kind of loose theme, even if the various acts could be anything at all. This particular circus was, I guess, 90’s pep rally style, and they had a singing ringleader, a DJ who did absolutely nothing, a sassy robot dog, and a breakdancing red dragon. I dunno. The kids liked it, so that’s what matters!

Some of the acts were truly thrilling and amazing, but there was also a ton of filler, and some of the acts were actually a little dull, and the clowns were actually terrible. And this was Ringling Bros, not some rinky dink outfit! But as I said, the kids liked it, and we all had a good time. 

Got a kind of cool shot of the night sky as we went back to the car. 

And it was a fine way to wrap up February vacation. 

SUNDAY
Oven fried chicken, biscuits, glazed carrots

Sunday I ran out to the store and grabbed a bunch of miscellaneous things that seemed like they were reasonably priced, and I figured I would work out a menu later. I used the drumsticks I got to make oven fried chicken

Jump to Recipe

and biscuits. After I made the biscuits, I was pretty low on butter, so the chicken was cooked in mostly oil with a little butter, rather than my usual half-and-half. I mean 50% of each, not that I cook it in half-and-half. 

I used Recipe Tin Eats recipe for the glazed carrots, except, again, all olive oil rather than some oil and some butter. I made them early in the oven and then warmed them up later on the stovetop, because I knew the oven was gonna be busy. 

Then I went to make the biscuits

Jump to Recipe

and I’ll be durned, I was also out of white sugar. So I used brown sugar. I halved the recipe and made it into eight large biscuits. 

Meal turned out great. The chicken was gorgeously crispy, and I seasoned it nicely. 

And that was that. I think that was the last recipe I used all week. 

MONDAY
Aldi pizza

Monday I had  a lady check-up and a mammogram. I made the face you’re supposed to make when you get a mammogram 

but actually I have never found them to be terrible. I think if you have very small breasts, it’s pinchy, but that is not a problem I myself have encountered. I did ask the tech if I could see the images, which is something I do every time I get something imaged, and it was cool! With all the ducts lit up, they look like Power Boobs. I do like seeing the inside of my body, as long as it’s on a screen. 

I think it may actually have been Monday that I went shopping, because I remember we had Aldi pizza. I dunno. Anyway we had pizza. I think I probably spent Sunday filling out forms. I have gotten . . . a little behind on my forms, and I’m going through a season in my life when filling out forms is the main thing I do. I hate it and it sucks, but I got that mofo done.

TUESDAY
Carnitas, beans and rice

Tuesday I had this giant pork shoulder and no real plan, but I did have the ingredients for carnitas, so that was settled. Oh, I guess I did use a recipe for that

Jump to Recipe

although I pretty much wing it. Hack up pork, salt pepper and oregano, brown it, then simmer it with cinnamon sticks, orange chunks, bay leaves, oil, and Coke. 

You cook it way, way down and then take the meat out, shred it, and brown it up

While it was cooking, I made some okayish beans and rice. Just rice, kidney beans, diced jalapenos, diced tomatoes and juice, I guess probably garlic and onion, and I imagine cumin, salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper. We were out of chili powder, sadly. 

Served on tortillas with sour cream and cilantro. 

I have spoiled my family by usually making guacamole with this, so there was a little muttering, but oh well. I thought they were yummy. 

I think it was also Tuesday we got a call from the school saying that a certain child had insisted on being goalie and then, when child got hit with a soccer ball, flew into a rage and spent kind of a long time muttering about what fate the person who had kicked the ball deserved. This is not the first time we have gotten a call from a school, informing us that a child has engaged in muttering. I guess I’m glad they’re paying attention? But also, their father is Irish and their mother is Ashkenazi Jew. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Fishers gotta mutter about who’s gonna die. It’s our patrimony. Just let it go. 

WEDNESDAY
Pork quesadillas, chips and salsa, raw veggies 

Wednesday it got WARM. Well, warmer. The ducks wandered off their beaten path for the first time in many months, and found it confusing. 

They find everything confusing. 

On Wednesdays we get home around 5:00, so I was glad to have a quick meal to make. I heated up the leftover beans and rice, cut up a bunch of raw vegetables, and made quesadillas with the leftover carnitas. I also served tortilla chips and salsa. 

Most of the kids opted for just plain cheese, but I had mine with meat, and I thought they were fab. I also shocked myself by opting for vegetables instead of chips. 

THURSDAY
Cumin chicken, tomato salad, fries

Thursday we got our first duck egg of the season! This looks like an Annie (black swedish) egg to me. Usually they have started laying much earlier by now (it’s the amount of light that affects them, not the temperature), but you really can’t make a duck do anything. I was pretty glad to see this egg. 

This year, we are going to hatch a bunch of them and sell the ducklings, probably. I saw a gal on Facebook showing how she was incubating eggs in her crock pot, and to my delight, all the comments were interested and encouraging. Not a single person berated her for torturing a defenseless animal by refusing to use a certified Hen Bum Simulator with a bluetooth-enabled hygrometer. So that was nice. 

For supper, I looked at my freezer and rapidly cycled through several possibilities before landing on a vaguely middle-eastern meal. I started the chicken thighs marinating in Greek yogurt with lemon juice, lots of cumin, and a little water; and then I made a tomato salad.

It was supposed to be a Jerusalem salad, but the cucumbers had somehow both frozen and rotted since Sunday. So this salad was tomatoes, leftover feta cheese, leftover cilantro, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and a little red wine vinegar. 

I was planning to make pita, but realized we had fries in the freezer, so that was settled. I cooked the chicken for about an hour at 425 and they came out nice. 

Although there was some muttering from certain dogs who had, despite the best legal advice, convinced themself that mom was making an entire platter of chicken just for them. 

I put hot sauce on my fries, rather than ketchup, hoping the combination would make the whole plate reminiscent of gyros. 

Truth be told, everything was a tiny bit bland. Not a terrible meal for no plan, though. But everything except the fries needed salt. 

I had to stop at Market Basket on Thursday to get cheesecake ingredients, and they sometimes sell these packages of cheese ends at the deli — just miscellaneous cheese that was too small to cut or too misshapen to sell. You never know what you’ll get, and it’s like $2 a pound, so obviously I got some. 

Mine turned out to be mostly Swiss and provolone, which is A-OK with me. 

I also picked up some Passover stuff, which was mysteriously cheap ($4.99 for one of those five-pack cartons of matzoh??). We once again planned to separate Passover and Easter, but the calendar once again put them together, so I’m starting to amass my seder food.

FRIDAY
Pierogies, spinach quiche

Friday morning I made a quiche. Here’s my pie crust recipe

Jump to Recipe

and this was more than enough for a deep, 11-inch bottom crust. I used my new pie weights and my new dough crimper that I got for Christmas! I was flaking out a bit when I rolled it out, though, and next time I’ll put the crimper to better use. It’s fine, it just looks a little weird.

We did get another egg this morning, but rather than incubate it or put it in the quiche, I opted to put it in my pocket and then forget it was in my pocket. And yes, I muttered about this a bit. 

For the quiche, I think I used six eggs and 1.5 cups of half and half, and some salt and pepper and a bit of nutmeg, and I put in provolone, steamed spinach, and some leftover tomatoes. I did blind bake the crust, and then baked the quiche at 350 for, I don’t know, 35 minutes? It looks promising

although I wish I had used more eggs. Kinda low in the dish, oh well. Although probably I’m the only one who’s gonna eat it anyway, mutter mutter. 
I also have a big sack of frozen pierogies in the freezer which I intend to fry up, and I’ll probably serve the rest of the spinach as a salad. I’m really trying to get more vegetables on the table! 

Now I have a cheesecake about to come out of the oven, and then I gotta clean that egg out of my pocket, and then, let’s face it, I’ll probably eat some cheese ends. We had a two-hour delay for school today because there was basically ice falling out of the sky all night, but it’s melting now. I’m always ready for spring, but this year, BOY am I ready for spring. 

my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai

i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet

mutter mutter 

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Oven-fried chicken

so much easier than pan frying, and you still get that crisp skin and juicy meat

Ingredients

  • chicken parts (wings, drumsticks, thighs)
  • milk (enough to cover the chicken at least halfway up)
  • eggs (two eggs per cup of milk)
  • flour
  • your choice of seasonings (I usually use salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, and chili powder)
  • oil and butter for cooking

Instructions

  1. At least three hours before you start to cook, make an egg and milk mixture and salt it heavily, using two eggs per cup of milk, so there's enough to soak the chicken at least halfway up. Beat the eggs, add the milk, stir in salt, and let the chicken soak in this. This helps to make the chicken moist and tender.

  2. About 40 minutes before dinner, turn the oven to 425, and put a pan with sides into the oven. I use a 15"x21" sheet pan and I put about a cup of oil and one or two sticks of butter. Let the pan and the butter and oil heat up.

  3. While it is heating up, put a lot of flour in a bowl and add all your seasonings. Use more than you think is reasonable! Take the chicken parts out of the milk mixture and roll them around in the flour until they are coated on all sides.

  4. Lay the floured chicken in the hot pan, skin side down. Let it cook for 25 minutes.

  5. Flip the chicken over and cook for another 20 minutes.

  6. Check for doneness and serve immediately. It's also great cold.

 

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moron biscuits

Because I've been trying all my life to make nice biscuits and I was too much of a moron, until I discovered this recipe. It has egg and cream of tartar, which is weird, but they come out great every time. Flaky little crust, lovely, lofty insides, rich, buttery taste.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups flour
  • 6 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 Tbsp + 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp cream of tartar
  • 1-1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter, chilled
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups milk

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 450.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cream of tartar.

  3. Grate the chilled butter with a box grater into the dry ingredients.

  4. Stir in the milk and egg and mix until just combined. Don't overwork it. It's fine to see little bits of butter.

  5. On a floured surface, knead the dough 10-15 times. If it's very sticky, add a little flour.

  6. With your hands, press the dough out until it's about an inch thick. Cut biscuits. Depending on the size, you can probably get 20 medium-sized biscuits with this recipe.

  7. Grease a pan and bake for 10-15 minutes or until tops are golden brown.

 

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Carnitas (very slightly altered from John Herreid's recipe)

Ingredients

  • large hunk pork (butt or shoulder, but can get away with loin)
  • 2 oranges, quartered
  • 2-3 cinnamon sticks
  • 4-5 bay leaves
  • salt, pepper, oregano
  • 1 cup oil
  • 1 can Coke

Instructions

  1. Cut the pork into chunks and season them heavily with salt, pepper, and oregano.

  2. Put them in a heavy pot with the cup of oil, the Coke, the quartered orange, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves

  3. Simmer, uncovered, for at least two hours

  4. Remove the orange peels, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves

  5. Turn up the heat and continue cooking the meat until it darkens and becomes very tender and crisp on the outside

  6. Remove the meat and shred it. Serve on tortillas.

 

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Basic pie crust

Ingredients

  • 2-1/2 cups flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1-1/2 sticks butter, FROZEN
  • 1/4 cup water, with an ice cube

Instructions

  1. Freeze the butter for at least 20 minutes, then shred it on a box grater. Set aside.

  2. Put the water in a cup and throw an ice cube in it. Set aside.

  3. In a bowl, combine the flour and salt. Then add the shredded butter and combine with a butter knife or your fingers until there are no piles of loose, dry flour. Try not to work it too hard. It's fine if there are still visible nuggets of butter.

  4. Sprinkle the dough ball with a little iced water at a time until the dough starts to become pliable but not sticky. Use the water to incorporate any remaining dry flour.

  5. If you're ready to roll out the dough, flour a surface, place the dough in the middle, flour a rolling pin, and roll it out from the center.

  6. If you're going to use it later, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap. You can keep it in the fridge for several days or in the freezer for several months, if you wrap it with enough layers. Let it return to room temperature before attempting to roll it out!

  7. If the crust is too crumbly, you can add extra water, but make sure it's at room temp. Sometimes perfect dough is crumbly just because it's too cold, so give it time to warm up.

  8. You can easily patch cracked dough by rolling out a patch and attaching it to the cracked part with a little water. Pinch it together.

What’s for supper? Vol. 461: You can certainly try

Happy Friday! The kids have been on February vacation this week, and we’ve been surprisingly busy with various activities, parties, unavoidable whatnot, and of course snow. Snow snow snow. And food. Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers

Just a regular shopping day, with regular leftovers, supplemented by taquitos. I was pretty happy to have leftover vindaloo and rice from last week. 

When I went shopping whole chickens had been advertised @99 cents a pound, but when I got to the store, there was only one small bird left. I asked the meat guy if he had any more in back, and he said they had all gotten snapped up by people hysterical about the coming snow. So we complained a bit about people who live in New England but still get hysterical every time there’s snow in the forecast, and I guess he was so enchanted by my kvetching that he wanted to do me a favor, so he grabbed a big organic chicken and went out back, and when he brought it back, it was labelled 99 cents a pound. Score! I was only recreationally kvetiching, but it’s nice when it pays off sometimes. 

SUNDAY
Chicken ranch wraps, Storitos

Sunday after Mass, I ended up going on a bit of a wild goose chase. The original plan was that Damien and I would have a lovely Old Parents’ Day Out, toddle up to Brattleboro and visit the restored camera shop, get some tasty lunch from a Greek food truck, and stop by the convenience store that I’ve been told has a good selection of bulk Indian spices.

But poor Damien was sick and exhausted, so I went by myself, got sneered at by fancy camera people, was fairly grossed out by the spice store that was overpriced, grimy, and didn’t even have cardamom, and belatedly realized that ONCE AGAIN, I’d fallen for the old hippie trap. This town always promises it’s going to be a funky and whimsical hodgepodge of quirky graffiti, multi-culti eateries, and cozy used book stores. Just, you know, fondly preserved architecture all layered in jubilant palimpsest with glassy art galleries and fanciful urban updates. It always seems like it’s gonna be such a good time.

In reality, it’s all glum homeless men shuffling down the sidewalks and artsy people who don’t have time for you. And that is pretty much it. All the graffiti has been copied off Etsy, and instead of normal air, it’s just pot smoke, absolutely everywhere. SO much pot smoke. Bleh. The hippie trap! I fell for it again. I did meet a nice dog, though. 

Anyway, determined to at least get my money’s worth from the parking meter, I sat in my car with the seat warmer on and prowled through Facebook marketplace until I found a Polaroid camera, and drove off to get that. Nearly four hours later, I finally got home with the dang camera, and oops, I forgot one kid had a thing at the library, so we had to go right out again. But have I mentioned the car has seat warmers? Actually both cars do, but my car has been humbly waiting under the snow for a new fuel pump.

Seat warmers is one of those things that felt like unthinkably futuristic luxury to me when I was growing up. Finding out a friend’s mom had seat warmers was like finding out they were secretly a rajah or something. That, and skylights, and built-in microwaves, and the Barbie Dream house with the little hot tub that has a rubber bulb and, when you squeeze it, it makes bubbles in the water. I also had one friend who had a split level home with carpeted stairs, and I always felt like I was stepping into an alternate reality where everyone is a billionaire. Like, WHAT, you don’t have to open the front door by ramming it with your shoulder, and then immediately trip over a wood stove that’s draped with wet mittens? Instead you have some kind of FOYER? And a LIGHTED DOORBELL? With BOSTON FERNS? I was living amongst sultans, emperors, dwellers in a sumptuary futuristic wonderland. My friend Dena even had a waterbed!????!!!!

Anyway, if you are wondering if my new HRT is making my brain work better, no. However, sometimes when I gabble on and on about pointless things, people give me a chicken, so write that down.

Anyway, on Sunday, only a small group was home for dinner, so I just roasted up some chicken breasts and served them on wraps with lettuce, shredded cheese, and ranch dressing. I also got a cheesecake order and made a cheesecake. And that was that. 

MONDAY
Ina Garten roast chicken, steamed broccoli

Chicken time! I went with Ina Garten’s lovely, easy recipe, skipping the thyme and fennel. So basically plenty of butter, kosher salt, and pepper, and you stick some entire heads of garlic and lemons up in there, throw some vegetables around, and roast it without even touching it or basting or anything. It’s SO easy, tasty, and juicy, and comes out well every single time. 

While the chickens were resting, I steamed up a bunch of broccoli, and it was a yummy meal. 

I pulled out some of the garlic, because I like eating garlic, and weirdly it had turned blue in spots? I have no idea what that’s about. I did eat it. 

I think it was Monday that we got the first big snow dump of the week. This is snow that fell on top of several feet of previous snow, and we’re all kind of over it. Because we live on the highway, our road always gets plowed, so we weren’t stuck in our homes like some people, though! Some of my family in Rhode Island, who got way more snow than we did, had to manually shovel little tracks thrugh their streets so they could leave their homes! And they are vegetarians, so no one even gave them a reduced chicken. 

TUESDAY
Kielbasa, brussels sprouts, red potatoes

Tuesday, Corrie and I went out to buy party supplies. We went to uhhhh five stores. She’s crazy, I’m crazy, I don’t know. Anyway, we got the party supplies and got home and two of the kids were like, when are we leaving? For indeed I had forgotten I said I would get them to a thing and also another thing, I forget what. So we did that, with seat warmers. And eventually came home again. 

Dinner was a sheet pan meal of kielbasa, red potatoes, and brussels sprouts. This is a fairly divisive meal in the family. Some people are bananas for it, and some find it repulsive. So I split the difference and make it whenever I want to, but feel bad about it. I, myself, am in the bananas column, though. It’s so beautifully simple, and so beautifully salty. Here’s the recipe: 

Jump to Recipe

This recipe actually calls for cabbage, but you can just swap in brussels sprouts cut in half, and it’s even easier. You cook it for a while, then slop on the sauce and cook it a little longer, and boom, hot meal with a protein, a starch, and a green veg.

This is a meal that cries out for some kind of hot, chewy bread, like beer bread or hot pretzels, but I felt accomplished enough to have made dinner at all.

Yum. 

The older kids helped Corrie make her desired ice cream pies for Wednesday. It was a bespoke amalgamation of graham cracker crust, black raspberry ice cream, mint chocolate chip ice cream, twin snakes (which are gummy worms with two flavors, or something), and Skittles, all frozen together. 

Oh and I made the piñata, which was supposed to be a dragon egg shape. The kids basically grabbed me by the shoulders and made me repeat the words “there is no earthly reason to get papier mache involved.” So I just cut two ovals out of cardboard and attached their edges together with more cardboard (so basically an oval box), and then taped brown and gold scale shapes all over it, and everyone agreed it was a very fine dragon egg piñata indeed. Lucy and Irene mercifully agreed to make the desired treasure hunt, so I was off the hook for that. 

WEDNESDAY
BLTs, Pringles, ice cream pie

Wednesday was Corrie’s Actual Birthday, and also I got another cheesecake order, and also I had a rather intense interpersonal meeting, and then spent the rest of the day cleaning (?) I think? It’s a duck blur. But Corrie had requested BLTs for her birthday dinner, and no one was mad about that.

Clara came over, Corrie loved all her presents, and we had a good day. Lucy and Irene were away in Boston seeing Conan Gray, and I have been reliably informed that he did, indeed, wear his little sailor suit. 

We got more heavy snow, but the kids were spending the night in Boston, so I was glad they weren’t on the road. I’ve been spending about half my time in migraine town (thanks so much for that, Anthem/Blue Cross Blue Shield), and honestly even looking at the snow was more than I could handle much of the week. I mean everyone feels that way at this point. We better not have a drought this summer! 

THURSDAY
Calzones, fruit, birthday cake

Thursday was the party. The original plan was to invite lots of people for the party, then allow a select few to stay for a sleepover. But February vacation is a tough time to throw a party, because many people were sick or away on trips; and it turns out people don’t really do sleepovers anymore? Which I absolutely see the sense of.

So three kids came over and had a stay-late, or, I forget what it’s called. But they had their party and then stayed on to have dinner and have the FUN part of the sleepover, which is lying around drinking soda and eating candy, running around and yacking and getting into little fights while your parents hide in the other room. But nobody had to have a miserable night being too cold or too hot on someone’s floor, and no parents had to worry that their kids were in a house full of guns and vicious animals and sex offenders. So the guests stayed until about 11 and then went home, and it worked out great. 

It was a vaguely Dungeons & Dragons-themed party, but I never did work up any enthusiasm for imaginative snacks or decorations. Luckily Corrie had plenty of ideas. She made fancy labels, and the snacks were: Bugles (dragon claws), candy robin eggs (dragon eggs), punch (dragon blood), ginger ale (ale) and root beer (beer). The original plan was to twist brown packing paper into vines and transform the house into . . . I don’t even now what, an underground cavern with vines or something. But I was so tired, so we just taped up some gold foil tablecloths from the Dollar Store, and voila, it looked Different And Fancy. Good enough. 

The treasure hunt was set up so that the pinata was the prize at the end. I couldn’t find a baseball bat for the pinata, but a candle stick worked fine

I had been so proud of myself for remembering to reinforce the cardboard around the hanging part, so it didn’t immediately rip itself apart under its own weight and fall down. But instead, the zip tie it was hanging from broke, and it fell anyway. Luckily, these girls like stomping on things

so they got their candy! 

Dinner was calzones, which, happily, all the guests liked. I made twelve. 

They look dumb with the little food label on top, but I don’t know how else to keep them straight. Mine was olive, with a little ramekin of warm sauce, yum. 

Anyway, the kids are old enough that they entertained themselves, and I was just on standby. The one thing I did spend a lot of time on was the cake. She had initially requested a Kuo-toa cake, which I was not enthusiastic about. But we eventually settled on a D20 cake. For reasons I can’t explain, I persuaded her to let me try to make it three dimensional, rather than just piping a design on top of a flat cake. 

So I actually baked the cake on Wednesday. I used two hexagonal pans in different sizes, and put one on top of the other, then cut the top layer in angles. 

Then I just sat there staring at it for a really, really long time, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do next. 

I ended up carving up the scraps and building up the angled edges into equilateral triangles that reached the edge of the bottom layer. 

Then I sat there staring at it for a really long time again. I made some marks with a knife, and also some chalk, which, chalk is edible, right? Anyway, my kids have all eaten a lot of chalk.

Then I just did a bunch more carving and shaving and piecing together, and I mixed up a big bowl of very thick frosting (butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk) and basically spackled it all together. I came up with something that looked . . . convincingly geometric. 

 

At this point I realized that, for the result I was likely to get, I could have made things a lot easier on myself. If I had this to do again, I would bake a dome cake plus a large sheet pan of cake, and then cut the sheet into a bunch of equilateral triangles, then cut the dome into facets and stick the triangles on it. But my specialty is learning on the fly about things I hope never to do again.

Anyway, I ended up with this

and then piped the thick frosting into the cracks until it become one continuous surface. Then I stuck my finger in a cup of milk and smoothed the frosting out as best I could. I don’t usually bother with a crumb coat, but I had cut this cake up so much, it was half crumb at this point.

I also wanted to make the different planes of the shape more pronounced, because what I had was less of a icosahedron and more of a really bumpy hexagon. ANYWAY, I ended up with this:

So I jammed this in the fridge to chill and harden up a bit. This was on Wednesday. 

On Thursday, Corrie and I made our very first mirror glaze. I kept finding recipes with ingredients I have never even heard of, so I went with this recipe from Chelsweets. It only has five ingredients: White chocolate, sweetened condensed milk, unflavored gelatin, sugar, and gel food coloring; and you can work with it at a lower temperature than most recipes. I made a triple recipe and I think that threw off the heating times, but it still worked out more or less as she described.

We made four bowls: Blue, dark pink, lavender, and white with gold flakes. I wish I had skipped the lavender, because it just diluted the other colors. I also didn’t pour it correctly. But the main thing is, Corrie was absolutely delighted with the results. She threw some black sanding sugar over the top and declared it perfect. 

It was cool! It really did resemble one of those marbled resin RPG dies. So I let it sit for a bit, then trimmed off the drips and let it chill for a while longer. Then I piped lines and numbers on it. I thought perhaps I should put “11” on the top face, since she was turning eleven, but this suggestion was shot down with scorn, because it is a D20, so obviously it has to say “20” on top. Okay with me!

As I have repeatedly lamented, I have shaky hands and I’m not great at piping, but this turned out better than I hoped. I got a little confused about which way the numbers should face, but nobody noticed but me. 

The drawback of using white chocolate in this mirror glaze is that it loses its shine a bit after a few hours, but, again, I was the only one who thought so. I was afraid the glaze would continue to flow and travel right off the cake, or that the gold flakes would all drift down to the bottom, but that did not happen.

And she loved it! 

I actually liked the flavor of the glaze. It tastes mainly like sweetened condensed milk/white chocolate, which is a flavor I, a degenerate and uncultured swine, happen to enjoy. One of the guests said she loves Corrie’s parties because the cakes are so cool, which made me feel good. Then she corrected herself and said that the main reason she likes Corrie’s parties is because of Corrie, and THEN because of the cakes, and that made me feel even better. These kids are all right. 

The big kids got home safe and sound in time for cake. Then that evening we got some hard and scary medical news about someone I love very much, so I would really appreciate your prayers about that. I will tell you, this week, this month, and this year have been . . . difficult. Dih. Fih. Cult. For health, for relationships, for work, for finances. Many many opportunities for trusting in God. Which is what Lent is, so there you go. 

FRIDAY
Quesadillas, chips and salsa

We ran out of oil this morning, because of course we did; but Damien was finally able to see a doctor, and there’s even a possibility I’ll get my migraine meds this weekend. Tonight we are having quesadillas, and then on Saturday we are going to the CIRCUS, which I bought tickets for a while back. It’s hard to believe this post started with a gifted organic chicken and ends with a circus, and yet it’s still full of me just basically kvetching, but there you go. You think I’m kvetching here! You should hear what an earful God gets. At least it’s not snowing. I think it’s gonna snow tomorrow, though. 

Oh, I forgot to share my calzone recipe. Here you go!

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Calzones

This is the basic recipe for cheese calzones. You can add whatever you'd like, just like with pizza. Warm up some marinara sauce and serve it on the side for dipping. 

Servings 12 calzones

Ingredients

  • 3 balls pizza dough
  • 32 oz ricotta
  • 3-4 cups shredded mozzarella
  • 1 cup parmesan
  • 1 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 2 tsp oregano
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1-2 egg yolks for brushing on top
  • any extra fillings you like: pepperoni, olives, sausage, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400. 

  2. Mix together filling ingredients. 

  3. Cut each ball of dough into fourths. Roll each piece into a circle about the size of a dinner plate. 

  4. Put a 1/2 cup or so of filling into the middle of each circle of dough circle. (You can add other things in at this point - pepperoni, olives, etc. - if you haven't already added them to the filling) Fold the dough circle in half and pinch the edges together tightly to make a wedge-shaped calzone. 

  5. Press lightly on the calzone to squeeze the cheese down to the ends. 

  6. Mix the egg yolks up with a little water and brush the egg wash over the top of the calzones. 

  7. Grease and flour a large pan (or use corn meal or bread crumbs instead of flour). Lay the calzones on the pan, leaving some room for them to expand a bit. 

  8. Bake about 18 minutes, until the tops are golden brown. Serve with hot marinara sauce for dipping.  

 

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One-pan kielbasa, cabbage, and red potato dinner with mustard sauce

This meal has all the fun and salt of a wiener cookout, but it's a tiny bit fancier, and you can legit eat it in the winter. 

Ingredients

  • 3-4 lbs kielbasa
  • 3-4 lbs red potatoes
  • 1-2 medium cabbages
  • (optional) parsley for garnish
  • salt and pepper and olive oil

mustard sauce (sorry, I make this different each time):

  • mustard
  • red wine if you like
  • honey
  • a little olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • fresh garlic, crushed

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400. 

    Whisk together the mustard dressing ingredients and set aside. Chop parsley (optional).

    Cut the kielbasa into thick coins and the potatoes into thick coins or small wedges. Mix them up with olive oil, salt, and pepper and spread them in a shallow pan. 

    Cut the cabbage into "steaks." Push the kielbasa and potatoes aside to make room to lay the cabbage down. Brush the cabbage with more olive oil and sprinkle with more salt and pepper. It should be a single layer of food, and not too crowded, so it will brown well. 

    Roast for 20 minutes, then turn the food as well as you can and roast for another 15 minutes.  

    Serve hot with dressing and parsley for a garnish. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 460: It was the shroopiest of times, it was the doopiest of times

Happy Friday! The other day I thought of a really clever pun for this week’s food post title, and decided not to write it down because I would definitely remember it later. Now it is later, and, well.

It’s just as well. These things are always disappointing. One of my kids once had a dream about a fiendishly clever new advance in technology that would revolutionize the way we fight wars, and she woke and and DID write it down so she’s remember it. In the morning, she looked at her notes, and it said “bag of bees.” 

Anyway, I’m sorry it’s the first Friday in Lent and this post is gonna be full of the yummy things we ate for Valentine’s Day and for Mardi Gras and also because I’m a cooker of yummy things. Some years I come up with a putatively clever gimmick to shield the viewer from graphic (=meat) content, but we are solidly in bag of bees territory here, mentally. All buzz, no honey. I don’t know. Well, here is what we ate:

SATURDAY
Leftovers and french bread pizza

Saturday was shopping day, and I had the pleasure of paying for it almost entirely in cash earned from selling cheesecakes. That felt pretty good. 

Saturday was, of course, Valentine’s Day, so along with frozen pizza, I also got corn dogs as a romantic gesture, because only Damien and I like them. We didn’t eat a single corn dog like in Lady and the Tramp or anything. Don’t get the wrong idea. 

We all gave each other chocolate and candy, and for dessert, I decided to try my hand at one of those fancy decorated swiss rolls. I followed the directions from The Squeaky Mixer, which were nice and clear. (I see she also has a post for a master guide on decorated swiss rolls!) It was very pleasant using a small bowl and whisk for a change. I love my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, but it was nice to move more slowly. 

This recipe requires a very tender cake, so you can’t over mix anything. I did use the standing mixer to make stiff egg whites, which get folded into the batter. 

After you do that, you set aside a little bit and color it, and put that into piping bags (well, sandwich bags). The trick of putting the bags in cups and folding back the tops over the rim before filling them is SO helpful, especially if you just have a small amount in each bag

Then you grease and line a cookie sheet and pipe your design onto it. It opted for the old classic Valentine message: Shroopy doo.

Origin story: 

I wish I had spent a little more time coming up with an actual design, but I did manage to get the letters all backward! Then you freeze the design for a bit, to help it stay intact. 

Then I used a large bag to pipe the rest of the batter over the design. I took a pic just before I covered up the decorated part with plain batter.  

Here is where I made my first mistake. The pan is a rectangle, and you only decorate one half of it, because the other half is going to get rolled up and no one will see it. But I decorated the long half, rather than the short half. So at this point, I was locked into rolling a long, thin roll, rather than a short, stout swiss roll. Not necessarily a mistake, I guess, but not what I intended.

So you bake it for a short time (it’s a very thin cake), take it out of the oven, turn it out of the pan, and carefully peel the parchment paper off the bottom, revealing the baked-in design. I took a video of this part, and you can hear me breathing heavily. 

 

Here is where I made my second mistake, and this one was a doozy. I sprinkled the cake lightly with sugar and covered it with a damp towel and carefully rolled it up. 

The wrong way.

I rolled it so the design was on the inside. And I didn’t notice until it had cooled for about twenty minutes. So I unrolled and re-rolled it the other way, but of course it cracked, which is the one thing you’re trying to avoid with a swiss roll! 

I was annoyed at myself, but not devastated, because if something is going to go wrong, it’s best when the mistake is super obvious and super avoidable in the future. One has simply not to be a bonehead, and it will work out better next time!

So while it was cooling, I whipped the heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla, carefully unrolled the cake, spread it with the cream, and rolled it back up again, and let it finish cooling. 

It was, indeed, the shroopy doo-est of cakes. 

You can see that I festooned it with leftover molded chocolate from another project, and that really shrooped things up, I think. 

I actually used double the amount of cream filling, because, I don’t know, I like cream filling. When I sliced the roll open, it had a decent spiral, considering it was a long, skinny cake. (I know from watching Great British Baking Show that the spiral is very important.)

It was so bland, though. Next time I make one of these, I will do a layer of something with a stronger flavor on the inside along with the cream, and will  probably dress up the outside, as well. But honestly, I considered this project a success, because everything turned out well except for two things that are easy to correct next time. We live to roll another day. 

In the afternoon, we watched Yojimbo, and in the evening, we watched Moonstruck. Each perfect Valentine’s Day movies, in their own way. 

SUNDAY
Hamburgers, chips, king cake

Sunday our old friend Elijah was over, and it was another weekend where I felt powerless to resist making a bunch of big hamburgers (I had bought a bunch of ground beef while it was still on super bowl prices). I also got a sudden urge to make a king cake before Lent descended. I found a King Arthur Baking recipe and thought, oh yeah, I’ve used this recipe a few times before. Started putting it together and I was like . . . mmmmmm I don’t think I have used this recipe before. It calls for dry milk, which I didn’t have any of. It also calls for lemon oil or zest, which I also didn’t have, so I used orange zest. Then I tried to figure out what I could possibly use as a substitute for dry milk. You’d think wet milk is the answer, but that only works if you decrease the other liquid, which it was too late to do. I don’t even remember how I resolved it, but the dough I ended up with was less “soft and silky” and more “disgusting” and “something I don’t want to touch.” 

It requires two rises, and, by adding plenty of flour, I managed to coerce it into a reasonable shape. I added the cream cheese filling and then discovered there was a jar of homemade strawberry topping left over from cheesecake, so I spread that on, too.

Things are looking up! Many of us have untidy back stories, but we turn out well anyway! So why. not this king cake! All I had to do was fold over the margins and pinch them together, and carefully place the whole thing into a bundt pan. 

Well , . ., ,,,

I got the fuckin thing in the pan. Possibly the ugliest transfer possible. If there were king cake police, I’d be in jail for life for what I did to that dough. 

ANYWAY, I baked it, and it actually came out of the pan more or less intact, and I shoved a baby-sized rubber alien up in there, and drizzled it with three colors of icing, and threw some edible gold flakes on top because why not. 

It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. I did overbake it, so it was a little dry, but it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t filled so much as infiltrated with cream cheese and strawberry.

I was cutting it up and passing out pieces, and Damien’s piece was last, with the rubber baby clearly visible. He was in the other room, so the kids and I declared that whoever gets the baby has to buy everyone ice cream, and then we gave Damien his piece. In other words, we shrooped his doo. Shrooped it good. 

MONDAY
Pork vindaloo, basmati rice, naan, mango

Monday I salvaged my good name in the kitchen. This meal turned out absolutely delightful, and I was very pleased with myself. 

In the morning, I assembled my spices for this pork vindaloo recipe from Bon Apetit. 

Then you just pulverize them all together and marinate chunks of pork in the resulting paste. The recipe calls for pork shoulder and pork belly, but I just used a rather fatty loin, and it was fine. I only used half the number of guajillo chiles it called for, and it was still quite fiery. I would do it that way on purpose. Hot enough to really light up your head, but not enough to make it hard to taste anything else. 

So I set the meat to marinate

cut up the mangoes, set up the rice, and made the dough for naan. I used the King Arthur Baking naan recipe, and this time I really had made it before. I decided I would get fancy and weigh the flour, rather than measuring it by volume like I usually do. Well, I had to add so much extra flour to get the texture right, I don’t know what the point was! 

But they turned out so, so good. I made a double recipe, which should yield 16 flatbreads, but I divided the dough into only eight pieces, so they were a nice, generous size. I cooked them in a very hot iron frying pan, wiped it out with a damp cloth in between fries, and brushed the pieces of naan with melted butter on both sides when they came out of the pan. PERFECT. 

They were SO soft and nice, I was just delighted. Probably the best naan I’ve ever made. 

The whole meal was delightful. 

I got a little ramekin of yogurt to sooth my mouth when the meat got too hot. I want to make this again right away, but it doesn’t feel very Lenten!

TUESDAY
Mardi Gras

I have such mixed feelings about Chili’s having somehow become our traditional final place of debauchery before Lent. The restaurant was practically empty, but they seated us next to the bathroom anyway. It was fine. I ordered some kind of chipotle chicken bowl and it was perfectly fine. Then we followed up with our other, equally dubious tradition and headed over to Price Chopper to pick out individual tubs of ice cream.. I got a Ben and Jerry’s thing with a caramel core and pieces of blonde brownie. Damien was sick and Elijah was working, so we brought them to-go boxes. And that was our festal meal! Shroopy doo.

WEDNESDAY
Spaghetti and salad

On Wednesday I was the one who was sick, so Damien brought the kids to Mass. I spent the afternoon ruthlessly decluttering the dining room (four bags of trash, yay!), and for supper we had spaghetti and salad, and, just to round out the church basement dinner vibes, white bread with butter.

THURSDAY
Roast drumsticks, mashed potatoes, roast butternut squash

Thursday I was busy all day, and for the life of me, I can’t remember what with. So I threw together supper at the last minute. I just sprayed the chicken drumsticks with cooking spray and seasoned them heavily with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and chili powder. I roasted them and then put them in a covered baking dish in a low rack in the oven to stay warm, so I could use the broiler to make the butternut squash. I peeled and sliced up two squashes and laid the disks in a pan on parchment paper. I may or may not have sprayed them with cooking spray, but I definitely put a little heap of brown sugar on each one, and then sprinkled them pretty heavy with a lovely biryani masala by Spicewalla. 

I had a five-pound bag of potatoes, and the original plan was to bake them, but you really cannot make baked potatoes for seven people when two of them look like this:

Five potatoes total in the bag! I used to buy potatoes like this on purpose, and slice them into these ludicrously long french fries; but it was definitely not a deep frying kind of night. I just boiled them and mashed them, and I did a pretty poor job, too. Very lumpy. The squash was great, though!

I just adore Indian spices on squash. Really tasty and interesting. 

It turned out to be a pretty good meal despite the potatoes. 

And that’s-a my story. 

FRIDAY
Grilled cheese and tomato soup

I’m actually really looking forward to this meal. I may even throw some leftover rice into the tomato soup. The kids got an early release from school because there is a big storm coming. I saw the highway department pre-salting the roads before the snow even started, so I guess it’s gonna be a doozy. 

I guess we are gonna try our Fisher Family Mandatory Lent Film Party again this year. Damien and I are both exhausted and couldn’t come up with anything creative, so we’re going to watch Spartacus, which I haven’t seen in many years. I remember it being very sweaty. The kids have been lots of fun to talk about movies with lately, though, so I have medium-high hopes. 

In conclusion, you will have a lizard in your pocket. Be you. Shroopy doo. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 459: Superb chow

Happy Friday! We are having a bit of a “choose your own adventure” day today, except that it’s my car’s . . . throttle sheath pin housing, or something . . . that chooses our adventure. The rather implausible plot involves an ice skating field trip, the court house, adoration, and of course cheesecake deliveries, and it can either be slightly complicated but doable, or . . . not. Come on, throttle sheath pin housing! Or whatever! Don’t actually be the fuel pump that’s broken!

Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftovers + ravioli 

Just a regular day of chores, plus Corrie had a birthday party to attend. Did you know that many small movie theaters will let you rent out their entire place for a couple of hours and show a DVD of your choice, and it’s not as expensive as you might think? Is this only a small-town New England phenomenon? Anyway, it’s a neat option, especially when it’s super cold out, which it was much of the week. 

It was Benny’s shopping turn, and she chose ravioli for her frozen food/dinner supplement/treat, which I think is pretty cute. She’s not wrong; ravioli is delicious! I was actually still migrainey (I’m having a bad head month because we have new, terrible insurance and they’re still mulling over the likelihood that perhaps I want to inject myself once a month just for sport, and how can they possibly know if I really need this medication or not?), so I just shopped to get us through the weekend and then came home. Photophobia when everything is covered with snow is no joke, phew. 

SUNDAY
Hot wings, vegetable platter, hot pretzels, chips, potato salad; brownie sundaes

Sunday was, of course, the day of the Superb Owl. On the way home from Mass, I delivered a cheesecake with wild blueberry topping, which was very well received. I forgot how much tastier wild blueberries are! I used this recipe which calls for lemon zest, lemon juice, ginger, and thyme. I skipped the thyme and it was still yummo, a nice tart complement to the sweet, creamy cheesecake. 

I made a batch of potato salad following the recipe from Sip and Feast, which has you brining the potatoes for several hours before mixing in the mayo. I have made this before, and apparently forgot that I was the only one who likes this style of potato salad, oh well. 

The big kids went out to play D&D with Elijah, Benny made some brownies for dessert, and Corrie and I made some big hot pretzels. We used the King Arthur recipe, which has turned out great before, but the pretzels are a bit small. So I doubled the recipe but made a single recipe’s worth of pretzels. 

I did let the dough rise a little too long and it got a little crusty, so the dough was a little lumpier than it should be, but we forged ahead.

The dough needs to be rolled out surprisingly long! We got it to about three feet.

You bathe them in baking soda water for a few minutes before baking, and then you brush them with melted butter as soon as they come out of the oven. Heavenly. 

We ended up having these as afternoon snacks, rather than part of dinner, because I really wanted to eat them hot. Then we surrendered the kitchen and Damien made a huge bunch of hot wings using the Deadspin recipe except I just got a bottle of blue cheese dressing, rather than making it. 

Then we deliberately poisoned our minds and perverted our hearts with the halftime show, and had a lovely meal with the chicken, raw vegetables, chips, and potato salad. The chicken wings were scrumptious, as always. Damien also made a batch of plain fried wings without hot sauce, for those who are babies. 

For dessert, we had brownie sundaes. And that was that!

MONDAY
Strawberry chicken salad

Monday I did the rest of the grocery shopping. I figured we would have plenty of leftover chicken, and I was right, so I made a light dinner, and if people wanted more food, it could be wing time again. and roasted up some chicken breasts, and served that on salad with strawberries, almonds, and feta cheese. 

The strawberries are HUGE this year. 

TUESDAY
Pork spiedies, chips, hot spinach dip

When I made the list, I discovered that I was a little sad thinking about all the yummy Super Bowl food I hadn’t made this year. Then I realized I’m the chief of police, I can do whatever I want. So I cut up a bunch of bell peppers, red onions, and mushrooms, and started some pork marinating for spiedies

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and put together a little casserole dish of spinach dip. I didn’t really follow a recipe. I just cooked spinach in the microwave and squeezed out the water, then combined it with a bunch of cream cheese, sour cream, parmesan cheese, and I think provolone, and I guess garlic powder, salt, and pepper, and when it got close to supper, I baked it. 

I like spinach in many forms, but I gotta admit, smothering it in several forms of cheese is ELITE. 

The spiedies turned out great. I tried to convince myself to toast the rolls, but I was too hungry. Just slapped on a bit of mayo, and they were fab.

None of the kids would even try the spinach dip! Crazies. They liked the spiedies, though. 

WEDNESDAY
Spaghetti and meatballs

Wednesday, I started getting serious about all the baking orders for Valentine’s Day. I ended up selling six mini cheesecakes

and these are topped with a heart-shaped strawberry before they go out, very cute. I just cut the strawberries in half and use a little cookie cutter to make the shape.

I also made another full-sized cheesecake with blueberry topping, and then I cut up some leftover cakes into wedges, dipped them in melted chocolate with a little shortening stirred in (this makes the chocolate smoother, and it sets more firmly), and topped them with strawberry hearts. 

Aren’t they cute?

I had some leftover chocolate, so I made a bunch of heart and skull molds, and I used them for one rather gothic medium-sized cheesecake, which just sold, hooray!

For supper, I made some very pedestrian meatballs. Here’s my recipe:

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Then I tossed them in the crock pot with some jarred sauce, and supper was easy. 

Good old spaghetti and meatballs. Wednesday is a complicated day because we get home at 4 but then Benny has writer’s group right around supper time, and it’s only an hour, so it doesn’t make sense to come home in between. I passed the time by trying to remember the shortcut in between two roads, and I got lost for long enough that I just had time to check out Market Basket, which I HATE, and discovered to my sorrow that their cream cheese is, indeed, the cheapest in town. I also grabbed some ground pork because someone inquired about a Québécois tourtière, which I have never made before, but which I had a very slow and detailed dream about making. Now I can make my dreams come true, I guess. 

Wednesday I was supposed to have an interview for a writing gig, but it got cancelled. It’s their loss! Let’s see how easy it is to find someone else who can tell a rambling, pointless story about tourtière!

THURSDAY
Roast beef sandwiches, french fries

Thursday I finally pulled out the giant eye of round roast I got a while back, when it was on such a lovely sale I could not resist. I returned again to Sip and Feast for this deli-style roast beef recipe, which always turns out excellent. It’s super easy. You just season the meat very heavily,

roast it at 500 for half an hour, turn the oven down to 300, and continue cooking it until it’s as well done as you like. Then you wrap it up 

and let it chill for a long time, sharpen yo knife, and slice it thinly. 

I wish I had taken it out of the oven a little sooner, because I like it really rare; but it was still truly delicious, super juicy with tons of flavor from the crust. 

I cooked up a bunch of fries and set out horseradish and mayonnaise and sliced tomatoes, and then I made one final batch of sauce for cheesecakes, this time strawberry

and I figured I would eat when I got back. Another busy evening! Damien covered a meeting about the middle school’s upcoming trip to DC, and Benny and I went to an informational night about a newish charter high school in town.  Silly little kid thinks she is old enough to go to high school next year, so we’re humoring her by checking out all our options. Oh me oh my. 

To my sorrow, I had eaten so much roast beef while I was slicing it up that I wasn’t hungry when we got back, so I didn’t eat an actual sandwich. HAPPILY, I made a tremendous amount of roast beef, so we should have plenty leftover for Saturday when it’s leftover day. 

FRIDAY
Bagel, egg, cheese sandwiches

I can hear Damien wrestling with the car. He also just texted me with a list of places I need to be for the rest of the day, because I was sitting there with a marker and a paper plate trying to work it out myself, and it was obvious someone with a functioning brain needed to step in. The guy who just came to pick up a cheesecake with strawberry sauce informed me that my mailbox is missing a number. What I didn’t tell him is that I know that, and I already went out to buy a replacement number, but I got the wrong one. What I did tell him is, “Oh, it’s hard when there’s snow everywhere. Everything is white, not like when there’s grass.” I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but anyway we delivered the cheesecake.

I am going to try my hand at making one of those Swiss rolls with a pattern baked into the cake, for Valentine’s Day tomorrow. This plan includes at least three different things I’m really bad at, so I have high hopes! What is wrong with me! Nobody knows! 

P.S. It is the fuel pump.

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pork spiedies (can use marinade for shish kebob)

Ingredients

  • 1 cup veg or olive oil
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup red or white wine vinegar
  • 4 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 2 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 cup fresh mint, chopped
  • 8-10 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 4-5 lbs boneless pork, cubed
  • peppers, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, cut into chunks

Instructions

  1. Mix together all marinade ingredients. 

    Mix up with cubed pork, cover, and marinate for several hours or overnight. 

    Best cooked over hot coals on the grill on skewers with vegetables. Can also spread in a shallow pan with veg and broil under a hot broiler.

    Serve in sandwiches or with rice. 

 

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Meatballs

Make about 100 golf ball-sized meatballs. 

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs ground meat (I like to use mostly beef with some ground chicken or turkey or pork)
  • 4 eggs, beaten
  • 2 cups panko bread crumbs
  • 4 oz grated parmesan cheese (about 1 cup)
  • 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • salt, pepper, garlic powder, oregano, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400.

  2. Mix all ingredients together with your hands until it's fully blended.

  3. Form meatballs and put them in a single layer on a pan with drainage. Cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes or more until they're cooked all the way through.

  4. Add meatballs to sauce and keep warm until you're ready to serve. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 458: Eine Kleine Purse Broccoli

Happy Friday! It took me most of the morning to persuade my computer to turn on. But I DID persuade it, so I’ve got that going for me. Also, I slept extremely late, so I’ve got that going for me, too. But I slept late because it’s day 3 of a migraine, so I’ve got that going against me. Corrie is home sick, and we are watching Pingu. I truly can’t discern if that’s for me or against me. I like Pingu a lot, but it is LOUD. We’ll call it neither a win nor a lose, but a noot-noot, and get on with things. 

Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftovers

Regular shopping and chore day, nothing to report. My leftover buffet turned out pleasingly tidy.

I can feel my past self casting destitute eyes on all that parchment paper and just gazing with longing at such wanton luxury. Parchment paper is one of those things that, once I started using it, I can never go back. Parchment paper, Magic Eraser, ziplock bags, Swiffer, Scrub Daddy. I’ve been bashing myself a lot lately for how dirty I’d always kept my house in the past, and it just now occurred to me that it’s only recently we’ve had the budget for cleaning supplies like this. So I’ve been very hard on myself for not having kept things spic and span with the aid of a rag and some water. With twelve people in a then-650-square-foot house. Ah well. Sorry, past self.

(My house is still dirty, however. It’s just a mystery.) 

SUNDAY
Roast lamb with yogurt sauce, Jerusalem salad, pita

Sunday I went a little crackerdog in a productive way for once, and did a large amount of cooking and baking. The first thing I made was a double batch of rugelach dough. It’s not really in season (more of a Chanukah thing), but on the other hand, it’s always a good time for rugelach. This was a “thank you” package for a Patreon donor. 

AND HERE, I must pause and beg your pardon if you are a donor and I owe you a perk. I’m really sorry it’s gotten away from me so badly. Please, please, if I owe you something as a thank-you for your patronage, message or email me, remind me what it is, and give me your address! And I truly am sorry. I am a worm. 

Anyway. Argh. So, here is the rugelach recipe. While that was chilling, I made six little Valentine’s mini cheesecakes, all of which sold, so that was nice. 

Then I got some dough rising for pita for supper. I went to the Kitchn recipe, which I swear I’ve used before, but it felt unfamiliar, not sure why. Set that to rise and made a batch of yogurt sauce

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and discovered, to my sorrow, I had bought regular yogurt instead of Greek. At least it wasn’t vanilla, which I’ve also done, but the texture is just unsettling with the savory taste. Then I made a quick Jerusalem salad, which has different variations. This time I just did chopped tomato and cucumber, fresh lemon juice, parsley, a little olive oil, and salt and pepper. 

And then I got the lamb in the oven! Well, first I googled whether it’s safe to eat lamb that has been in the freezer for . . . uhhhhh really quite a long time. Google said yeah whatever probably, kill all humans lol. So I went ahead and scored the meat and prepped it according to Tom Nichols’ grandmother’s incredibly easy and inexplicably delicious recipe. 

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Got that in the oven. The kids were going to a movie, and Damien had to go to a retirement party, so we ate really early, which is something I always want to do anyway. My ideal meal schedule would be coffee around 9:30, lunch at 1:00, snack at 3:30, and dinner at 4:45. Alas, life is not like that. But Sunday it was pretty close!

Then I spent the afternoon rolling and baking rugelach. They turned out pretty cute!

By the time it was almost dinner, I was kind of tired of being in the kitchen, so while the lamb was resting, I opted to bake the pita all at once in the oven, rather than making them on the stovetop. To my delight, most of them actually puffed up and separated into two layers! Actual pita pockets!

They didn’t look like much (oven pita is paler than pan pita), but they were soft and pleasant, and you can’t beat fresh hot bread for dinner. 

The lamb turned out excellent. 

Juicy, tender, and full of flavor (and did not kill any humans). This is such a minimum effort, maximum results recipe. I served some crumbled feta, and it was a super yummy meal all around. 

Poor Damien actually had to leave before dinner, but I think he ate when he got back in the evening. Benny and Corrie and I just hung out and played cards and watched TV. And that was Sunday. 

MONDAY
Chicken caprese sandwiches chips

Monday I had signed up to give blood, and two neat things happened. One was that I passed the iron test, which I failed the last three times I tried to give blood. Two was that they tested my iron without me even noticing. I’m used to a finger stick test, but this time they did it with LASERS. It clips onto your thumb and I guess if you have enough red blood cells, it interrupts the laser? Or something? Anyway it was cool. And I was really happy about my iron levels. I have been eating fortified Cream of Wheat for lunch most days for months now, and I think that’s what did it. One of these days, I’m gonna get one of those iron fish to cook with, too. 

When we got home, I cooked a bag of breaded chicken cutlets that has been haunting the freezer for some time. Served on baguettes with basil, tomatoes, mozzarella, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper. 

And chips. Good stuff. The chicken is from Walmart, and I’ve found that their frozen chicken products that are breaded but uncooked are actually quite tasty, and they don’t take much longer than pre-cooked and frozen chicken. 

TUESDAY
Beef and broccoli stir fry, rice, wontons

Tuesday was chock-a-block full of meetings and appointments and by the end of the day, I was feeling like something you find in the drain at the end of the day. I had bought a small hunk of beef a few weeks ago, so I made a rather lackluster stir fry. I had my doubts about the amount of beef, so I rummaged further in the freezer and found some wontons, I think from New Year’s Eve. I just cooked them in chicken broth. Went to cook some rice in the Instant Pot and remembered that the pot was frozen into a bank of snow because I’ve been using it as a duck waterer. So I had to cook it on the stove like a peasant. 

So it was, yanno, food that was hot. It was fine. Kind of validating that, when I do go to the trouble to make my own sauce and broth, it really is a lot better. 

WEDNESDAY
Omelettes, sausage, biscuits

Wednesday I finally yelled at myself to go to the doctor because, well, for the last five months, the left side of my face tingles and goes numb randomly throughout the day, but reliably between 6:30 and 7:30 P.M. There are a number of things that could be causing this, and I’m leaning toward perimenopause because why the hell not? But I am getting a brain MRI to rule out MS, which I really don’t think it is, but once someone suggests MS, you kinda have to either run away from home and live the rest of your life in a cave in Tenneseee, or go get a brain MRI. Then I had regular errands and we got home not terribly late, so I started the sausages cooking and then quickly made a batch (a SINGLE recipe. I had to halve my own recipe!) of biscuits. Here’s that recipe, which makes 20 biscuits.

Jump to Recipe

I’m gonna have to go through and downsize all my recipes, le sigh. Anyway, this is a nice, reliable recipe and the biscuits are light and fluffy inside, with a fragile, buttery crust on top. 

It includes egg and cream of tartar, which sounds unnecessarily complicated, but it’s still very quick, and comes out rich and light.

While the biscuits were baking, I chopped up some ham and onions, shredded some cheese

and quickly turned out seven sloppy omelettes. I just cannot cook a tidy omelette to save my life. 

Tasty, though.

I wish the ducks would start laying again! Last year, they had started laying at this point again already. Oh well. Like the old Polish saying goes, you can’t rush a duck. 

THURSDAY
Hot dogs, spicy fries

And here is a picture of that!

A slightly more interesting picture is the one I took earlier in the day, headed out for afternoon driving, bound and determined to get healthier

It’s not stupid if it works. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Damien is covering adoration, and Corrie and I are now watching Milo and Otis. This movie really holds up! Delightful. 

I guess the Super Bowl is this weekend. I was at a thrift store and decided not to buy a potato spiralizer, and I have no regrets about that. I can say this because I did make potato tornados for the Super Bowl one year, using various techniques, and let me tell you, the issue with that whole project was not my lack of a potato spiralizer. Leave them potatoes alone, is what I say. I couldn’t help but notice, though, that, on the same day as I made the potato tornados, I made some sausage rolls, and those look quite tasty. We shall see. I also saw a recipe for fried mac and cheese balls which is basically the ultimate Lucy Chow, so I may make that. Gotta make a few cheesecakes to sell this weekend. 

But first, maybe a little purse broccoli. Just to balance things out. 

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Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

  • 32 oz full fat Greek yogurt
  • 5 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 3 Tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp pepper
  • fresh parsley or dill, chopped (optional)

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together. Use for spreading on grilled meats, dipping pita or vegetables, etc. 

 

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Tom Nichols' Grandmother's Leg of Lamb

Ingredients

  • boneless leg of lamb
  • olive oil
  • garlic powder
  • garlic salt
  • oregano

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 325.

  2. Slash the meat several times, about an inch deep.

  3. Fill the cuts with plenty of garlic powder.

  4. Slather olive oil all over the meat.

  5. Crust it with garlic salt. Sprinkle with all the oregano you own.

  6. Cover meat loosely with tinfoil and cook three hours. Uncover and cook for another 30 minutes.

 

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moron biscuits

Because I've been trying all my life to make nice biscuits and I was too much of a moron, until I discovered this recipe. It has egg and cream of tartar, which is weird, but they come out great every time. Flaky little crust, lovely, lofty insides, rich, buttery taste.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups flour
  • 6 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 Tbsp + 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp cream of tartar
  • 1-1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter, chilled
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups milk

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 450.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cream of tartar.

  3. Grate the chilled butter with a box grater into the dry ingredients.

  4. Stir in the milk and egg and mix until just combined. Don't overwork it. It's fine to see little bits of butter.

  5. On a floured surface, knead the dough 10-15 times. If it's very sticky, add a little flour.

  6. With your hands, press the dough out until it's about an inch thick. Cut biscuits. Depending on the size, you can probably get 20 medium-sized biscuits with this recipe.

  7. Grease a pan and bake for 10-15 minutes or until tops are golden brown.

What’s for supper? Vol. 455: There’s a crack in everything. That’s how you get more cheesecake.

In haste! In haste! For I am very behind schedule, and in the middle of a bunch of things, and also not getting anything done. Surely, at least, I can write about food. Here is what we had this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftover supreme, pizza pockets

Boy, Saturday seems like ages ago. 

SUNDAY
Smoked pork ribs, mashed potato puffs, vegetables and dip, strawberry shortcake

Sunday was Damien’s fake birthday (his real birthday was during the week, and we were too busy to celebrate). He spent the day making some incredible smoked ribs

Jump to Recipe

and I plunged back into the misty past and dug up a recipe I haven’t used since the early days of our marriage. It is from The Joy of Cooking,

and holy cow, this book is a trip. More on that later. 

The ribs turned out magnificent, as usual. He made three racks of ribs.

Corrie’s longing gaze speaks for all of us. 

They were incredibly juicy and tender, with a wonderful smoky, spicy, sticking coating 

I thought the mashed potato puffs came out great, and I thought they would blow the kids’ minds, but they found them adequate at best. Maybe they were expecting them to be like tater tots, and were not expecting the insides to be soft and creamy. Oh well! I had fun making them. Here’s the recipe. I think I made quadruple this amount.

Jump to Recipe

They are like extremely moist biscuits inside, like potatoes that are thinking about bread. I used instant mashed potatoes that were flavored with garlic or something, and I thought they were yummo. Cute, too. 

Probably you could make them more uniform with a cookie dough scoop or something, but I thought it was amusing when they fried themselves into these little bulbous shapes. 

For dessert, we had strawberry shortcake. Well, it wasn’t shortcake; it was angel food cake with macerated strawberry topping and whipped cream. But if you say “strawberry angel food cake,” people think you mean the cake itself is flavored with strawberries, and last time I tried that, it was CLAGGY. I was still a little gunshy after that cake, so I just bought a mix for angel food cake, and it turned out fine. 

Fine with DINOSAUR CANDLES, which is the best kind of fine. I mashed up some fresh strawberries with sugar and a little vanilla, and we topped it with freshly whipped cream. 

Not super photogenic, but delicious. And now Damien and I are the same age again!

MONDAY
Leftover pork with ramen 

Monday, I decided to see what kind of Valentine’s designs I might do for cheesecakes, which are selling fairly briskly. I tried a sort of heart design, overbaked the cake, and then cracked it while taking it out of the pan. 

So, tragically, we were forced to eat this one. Happy Valentine’s Day to us. 

For supper, I was planning ramen with some sort of Asian pork, but there was so much delectable smoked pork ribs leftover, we just had that, plus ramen. I stuffed a bunch of raw spinach in my bowl, ladled hot ramen over that, topped it with crunchy noodles, and just chucked the pork on top. 

Let me tell you, that’s the best thing that ever could have happened to that ramen. 

I spent most of the day de-Christmasing the house, and it felt pretty good. I packed things up in such a way that I will not be furious at myself next Advent, too. 

TUESDAY
Ina Garten’s roast chicken with potatoes

Tuesday I took a hard look at all the neatly packed and labelled Christmas boxes, estimated their volume, and admitted to myself that if I wanted them out of my dining room, I was gonna have to clear the landing off, because the mess was blocking access to the attic door, and the other access point has a whole other set of issues that I don’t even want to think about now. So, yes, clean the landing. 

For most people, a job like this would mean sorting books and toys, throwing out trash, and organizing, and giving it a good sweep. For our family, this meant picking up 4,000 Barbie dolls dressed in toilet paper dresses, stacking up dozens and dozens of canvases, sweeping up a bunch of broken glass, and of course moving the bunk bed where people have been storing their boxes and boxes of MISC.

Of course I got it partway down before I admitted to myself that there was no way it was gonna fit around that corner. I had already discerned that I couldn’t really take it apart. This bunk bed is so venerable, it’s been slept on by various children for something like 21 years straight, and the wood and the hardware had kind of melded together.

So, I sawed it in half! Then it fit down the stairs. I dragged it outside, and in the spring, I’m going to put it back together and make a little greenhouse with the giant glass panes I picked up back when I thought I was gonna build a sunroom. 

Gotta make sure the front of the house looks weird one way or the other, I guess. I’ll move it when there isn’t ice everywhere, trying to kill you. 

Oh anyway, I got some chickens in the oven in the early afternoon, using Ina Garten’s low effort, huge payoff recipe, with the thyme, lemon halves, and entire heads of garlic inside. I cooked it with carrots and onions, skipped the fennel, and added a bunch of quartered potatoes, including a separate pan with just vegetables. By the time we got home, the house smelled SO GOOD

and I was feeling pretty smug about having taken a big step toward making the upstairs livable again, and also having a gorgeous dinner ready. 

Well, it’s gorgeous in the pan. On the plate, you need to do a little more food styling than I was willing to do, because I was HONGRY. 

You will have to take my word for it that this was a deeply flavorful meal with crisply roasted vegetables and succulent chicken. And then, as is our tradition, Corrie pulled out the lemons and ate them, and I claimed the garlic. 

Also not gorgeous! It looks like I’m eating someone’s paw. But really, it was so good. I love this meal so much. 

WEDNESDAY
Pizza

Nothing fancy, just pepperoni, olive, and plain cheese. The only notable thing was that I forgot to defrost the dough, so I thawed it in its bags in a bowl of warm water. Which worked, but I was putting too much faith in those bags, and the dough got all wet, bleh. It was fine, I just used tons of extra flour. Lesson learned. 

I also took a bunch of chicken leg quarters (always a tricky cut to know what to do with) and threw them in the pressure cooker with some chicken broth and a bunch of vaguely Mexican spices. When they were cooked, I drained the broth and put them in the fridge. 

THURSDAY
Chicken enchiladas, beans and rice, tortilla chips

Thursday I had a doctor appointment in the morning — we somehow scheduled FOUR doctor appointments this week — and was glad, when I got home, to have the chicken already cooked. I chopped up a bunch of onions and started them caramelizing, and shredded some cheese. 

When I am making enchiladas, I usually coat the chicken with spices and slowly pan fry it, and then shred the meat. This time, I shredded the cooked meat, mixed it with onions and cheese, and added a bunch of seasoning. Guess what? It wasn’t that good. The texture and the flavor were both inferior. Oh well. 

They weren’t bad. 

Just not that great. The beans and rice I mad was pretty blah, too. Oh well!

Not a terrible meal. I just know I can do better. 
Speaking of which, I also made a cheesecake for an order and somehow got, like, an entire eggshell in there. I have never done this before and I don’t know how it happened, but dang. I argued with myself for a while that maybe the customer wouldn’t notice or care, or maybe somehow the eggshell would have settled down to the bottom and would blend in with the bottom crust, but eventually I acknowledged that I really needed to remake it. 

I also made six mini cheesecakes, testing out some more ideas for Valentine’s day decorations. I was afraid they were browning too quickly, so I carefully covered them with tinfoil. Then I took it off, and dragged the tinfoil over the tops of every single last one, and ruined the designs. 

Soooo looks like the family has another cheesecake to eat. Actually a cheesecake and six mini cheesecakes. Very tragic. And then I made another cheesecake. 

FRIDAY
Ziti

Damien is taking a kid to the last doctor appointment of the week, and I’m, well, I’m making more cheesecake. I do make very good cheesecake, and people keep buying it. This is essentially how I am paying for my new terrible health insurance, and ain’t that America. 

Oh gosh, I forgot I was gonna say more about the Joy of Cooking! I think I will just do a photo dump of all the pages that caught my eye as I riffled through the pages. In no particular order, here is a little tour of a very different world. 

Remember this when someone waxes nostalgic about the past. The past was kind of gross, and a lot of work, and judgy, whew! I would probably eat Emergency Fish Cakes, though. I just pray I never find out if I have it in me to put on my boots and pull the skin off a squirrel. 

In conclusions let me say: Obviously, a classic salmi, fully accoutered, is only for the skilled cook whose husband is a Nimrod and has presented her with more than a single bird. If she is less well endowed, she will have to base her sauce on the backs, wings and necks of he bird that is being presented and eke out her Espagnole Sauce with veal stock. 

And don’t you forget it! 

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sugar smoked ribs

the proportions are flexible here. You can adjust the sugar rub to make it more or less spicy or sweet. Just pile tons of everything on and give it puh-lenty of time to smoke.

Ingredients

  • rack pork ribs
  • yellow mustard
  • Coke
  • extra brown sugar

For the sugar rub:

  • 1-1/2 cups brown sugar
  • 1/2 cups white sugar
  • 2 Tbsp chili powder
  • 2 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 1 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 1 tsp paprika
  • 2 Tbsp salt
  • 1 Tbsp white pepper

Instructions

  1. Coat the ribs in yellow mustard and cover them with sugar rub mixture

  2. Smoke at 225 for 3 hours

  3. Take ribs out, make a sort of envelope of tin foil and pour Coke and brown sugar over them. close up the envelope.

  4. Return ribs to smoker and cook another 2 hours.

  5. Remove tinfoil and smoke another 45-min.

  6. Finish on grill to give it a char.

 

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Mashed potato puffs

Great way to use leftover mashed potatoes. Also worth mashing potatoes just to make these (or use instant!)

Ingredients

  • oil for frying
  • 1/2 cup flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 cup mashed potatoes at room temperature
  • 1 egg

Instructions

  1. Start heating several inches of oil in a heavy pot.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt.

  3. Add in the mashed potatoes and stir until smooth.

  4. Lightly beat the egg and stir that in until combined.

  5. When the oil has reached 385 °F (the surface should be shimmering but not yet smoking), carefully drop in blobs of the potato mixture, about a tablespoon's worth each. They should start to bubble and darken instantly; if not, your oil is not hot enough. Don't crowd the pot, because you want to be able to move the puffs around so they get cooked on all sides.

  6. Fry them in batches until they are a dark golden brown, frequently shuffling them around with a wooden spoon. As each batch is done, pull them out with a slotted spoon or deep fryer scoop, let them drain for a few seconds, and move them to a platter with paper towels to absorb the extra oil. They can be kept warm in the oven for a short time, but they are best when they are fresh.

Maria Obscura

Do you know how pinhole cameras work? I don’t, really, although I have seen what they can do. You block out the light in a closed-off area, except for one small hole, and direct light through that hole onto the opposite wall of the box. Then you will see a projected image of what’s outside, on the bright side — except the image will be upside-down.

People build pinhole cameras intentionally, but sometimes they happen spontaneously. I recently saw photos from an Australian man whose whole garage became a camera obscura. The door faced the setting sun, and the insulating material that lines the top edge had a tiny gap; so when the man stepped into the dim interior, he could see clearly his driveway projected on the ceiling. The colored recycling bins, the front of his car, and even the pavement were all clearly there, upside down.

It was such a compelling image: The workaday car bumper and plastic bins projecting themselves up above, turning jewel-toned in the darkness. They had something important to say, and the thing was just: “I exist.”

Worth saying, and weirdly beautiful, and obscurely sad.

That was the work of a camera obscura. But did you know that everything is always projecting an image of itself on everything, all the time? We can’t see these images, because they all mix together and make white light. When a camera obscura gets involved, the pinhole blocks out all the images but one, and that’s why we can see it.

Maybe I’ve garbled the science, it makes sense to me as far as I understand it. Sometimes I become aware of this ceaseless projecting happening around me. I briefly know that every created thing – not only living things but everything that is made – proclaims its presence out of the sheer insistent, witless joy of being here. Everything that exists comes from God, and it can’t help sending something of itself out into the world, just because it is good. It’s a very simple message: “God made me, and now here I am!”

Sometimes I feel it, when I encounter the goodness of creation hidden in the hearts of wet grasses, buried under layers of loam, sparkling remotely in stars we rarely see, or in other dear artifacts of creation: In human love, in innocence, in beauty, in truth. Sometimes I see it, and I know deeply that creation is good. Most of the time, I don’t. It’s just too dark.

As I write, where I write from, we are counting down to the darkest day of the year. The calendar is like a box that gets a little smaller every day, with less and less light, less and less warmth, at a sharper and more narrow angle away from the sun.

That has, in fact, been the history of mankind. When God made the world, he made it so bright, so vital, so very fresh and alive. The water didn’t just sit, it teemed with life. God made it, and it was good; and then he gave it to us, and told us to multiply. The created world was so good that it shouted itself, projecting itself everywhere all the time, out of the simple joy of being something rather than nothing. It was a garden: Something that makes more of itself; and God and man walked together through it, beholding it, enjoying it.

Then came the box. Mankind sinned, and fabricated walls, a boundary between us and the Lord, and in the shadows we strained to see any goodness.

We began to be people living in darkness, and the history of mankind became the story of that box getting smaller and smaller.

But the box was not impermeable. It could be pierced . . . 

Read the rest of my Christmas column for The Pillar, which includes a recipe for stained glass cookies. 

And a blessed Christmas Eve to all of you wonderful readers. I love yez all, but Jesus loves you more. 

Image: The Virgin and Child, Master of the Saints Cosmos and Damian Madonna, Italy, 1265-1285, tempera on panel – Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University 

 

 

Christianity isn’t a MAGA thing

When Walter Ciszek was a young Jesuit, he got his wish to go to Russia to minister to the spiritually starved people there suffering under an atheist communist regime. But when he was imprisoned on false charges of being a Vatican spy in 1941, he got a rude awakening. Some people desperately wanted to receive the sacraments and were glad he was there, but a lot more hated him on sight, just because he was a priest. Decades of propaganda had taught them that priests were parasites, oppressors and perverts. 

It was, of course, the government that had taught the Russian people to think this way. That is how oppressive governments often work: They don’t just openly present themselves as the enemy whose goal it is to make the masses miserable. What they do is much more effective and harder to undo: They make the masses complicit. They get people to spy on each other; they get people to mistrust each other. They tell disgusting lies about large groups of people, and they get them to wish evil upon each other. 

You probably think I am talking about the Trump administration. Well, I am, because they have managed to get a lot of American citizens to become complicit in our own country’s degradation. People in my generation grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which ends “with liberty and justice for all,” but now half the people I went to school with gleefully wave the flag over developments like beating and arresting peaceful protestors, threatening the free press and forcing the church underground. The Bill of Rights? What’s that?

This degradation has also affected American Christianity. One of my kids recently told me that when she sees someone wearing a cross, her first thought is “Oh, no,” because in 2025 America, the bigger the fuss you make about being a Christian in public (especially on TV or online), the more likely you are to be cruel. This is the experience she had going to Catholic school: Many of the kids who came from those wholesome, upstanding families that were the backbone of the community were often the same ones who doodled swastikas, mocked people with foreign accents and yapped about women being servants and incubators. Some of the teachers pushed back, but some of them didn’t. The Beatitudes? What’s that? 

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Image: Detail of photo by Heute (Creative Commons)

What’s for supper? Vol. 450: Two pies for every girl

Happy Friday! Brr, it’s cold. Boo, I’m fat. I finally dragged myself up on the scale because I figured I was thinking about it constantly anyway, and I might as well know what I’m thinking about, and it was . . . not great. It was three pounds less than the number I was very afraid of, so I’ve got that going for me. I gained most of it after I broke my toe, which is a ridiculous reason to gain weight, but there you go. 

This is the part where I’m supposed to announce that I’m launching a new plan to get back in the saddle and really do the work because I’m worthy of the effort, but in all honesty, who knows. It’s cold. It’s dark. I bought some bigger pants that fit better, and I drank some water today. Who knows. 

Anyway, totally unrelatedly, I need to tell you about my  adventures in the pie trade.

Right before Thanksgiving, I advertised on Facebook marketplace and some local groups, and got orders for eleven pies. I ended up making apple, mini apple, pumpkin, mini pumpkin, coconut custard, blueberry, and chicken pot pies. Then also, right before that, I made a cranberry curd tart and five mini apple pies for the school get-together. 

And then I tied my apron on one last time and made seven pies for our family: Two apple, two pumpkin, one pecan, one coconut custard, and one cranberry curd tart with walnut crust.

I’ve never seen so many pies, much less baked so many! It was just wall-to-wall pies all week long, and they were all — well, the ones I sold, anyway — as fancy as I could make them. I made a quick video to show how to make roses, which is actually really easy. For the record (for myself next year, really), here is the pecan pie recipe I used; here is the cranberry curd tart recipe; and here is the coconut custard pie recipe. I won’t include the walnut crust recipe because it turned out weird. 

I did make a profit (I think. I didn’t look too hard, but I do have a wad of cash now), and Damien suggested I use it to buy a freezer to make my life easier next time I do this. (I was shuffling things in and out of the fridge and stashing stuff in coolers, and it was not pretty.) So now I’m skulking around the used freezer market, looking for something dented and energy inefficient, so it won’t break in 18 months. 

And I’m trying to work myself up to mentioning pies on Facebook again, to see if anyone wants a Christmas pie. Or maybe a cheesecake! I do make good cheesecake. I struggle with decorating it in a way that looks professional, but I saw a thing where someone dropped colored batter onto the unbaked top and then used a toothpick to drag it into a design, and then baked the design right into the top. I could do that!

We did some fairly successful dragged-design cookies for the bake sale. Well, we were starting to get the hang of it, anyway. 

(Note Benny’s “mistletoe and kiss” design.) 

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention, we also made a million cookies for the tree lighting bake sale (a fundraiser for a trip Benny’s going on). I made a triple recipe of my reliable no-chill sugar cookie dough.

Jump to Recipe

I cut out large cookies, cut windows into them, and filled them with crushed Jolly Ranchers, which made pretty little stained glass-effect when baked.

When they were cool, I iced them.

I have a pretty bad tremor, so icing design is not really my forte, but they mostly turned out nice. With a few vaguely obscene exceptions. Anyway, we ended up with 55 cookies and they all sold, so that was a relief. 

One other thing that turned out nicely: I used the Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe for sugared cranberries, and oh, they turned out pretty, sparkly and frosty. Here they are drying, next to some freshly-filled chicken pies.

I put some on the cranberry tarts and a few to dress up the pumpkin pies. I also tried sugaring some mint leaves, and that turned out less pretty. A flatter leaf, like basil or even bay leaves, would have been better, because I could have let it dry flat. 

We had a really nice Thanksgiving! Most of the kids were able to come, and there was just so much laughing and goofing around, it was a delight. We had a pretty straightforward menu: Turkey, stuffing, and gravy that Damien made, and mulled cider, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, roast brussels sprouts and butternut squash with bacon (I drizzled them with honey and pomegranate molasses, ooh!), dinner rolls, and cranberry orange muffins that I forgot to add sugar to, and everyone said they actually liked it that way.

I had made everyone pick out a poem to read out loud after dinner, and then of course we had pie, and ice cream and whipped cream. Everything was yum dot com, and I love my family dot org (because we are a non-profit).

SATURDAY
Aldi pizza

By the time Saturday came around, people were pretty burnt out on Thanksgiving food, so we had Aldi pizza. It was just a regular day of shopping and chores, as far as I can recall. The recent past is a real mystery to me these days. I was, however, thinking of the time that I made an elaborate blown egg Christmas ornament for my high school boyfriend’s parents, and they said it was beautiful, and I said well, I didn’t have anything better to do, and they said, oh.
Yeah, I remember that pretty well. 

SUNDAY
Turkey sandwiches/Thanksgiving leftovers

Sunday I cut up the remaining turkey and we had sandwiches, or just whatever. Now that I think of it, I was sick and didn’t go to Mass, so probably I just schlumped around all day. 

We did paint the Jesse Tree ornaments. We usually do this as our day-after-Thanksgiving tradition, but this was our first free day. 

Haven’t gotten any greens for the advent wreath yet. Advent comes at you fast!

We also ate the very last of the pie!

And that’s enough pie for a while. I am thinking about Benny’s birthday cake, though, which I will be making Sunday, presumably in someone else’s oven, as you will see. We have two birthdays in the second half of December and two in the first week of January. And that’s why St. Nicholas and St. Lucy are on their own.

I am, however, thinking of making blintzes for Hanukkah this year. 

MONDAY
Hot dogs, onion rings

Monday I did the shopping for the Angel Tree thing, and it was fun to buy little kid presents and clothes again! It’s been a while. We all got home super late, so I just cooked the hot dogs and frozen onion rings.

I actually love hot dogs, and I think it’s crazy that the kids don’t. Fancy-pantses, alla yez. 

TUESDAY
Roast beef sandwiches, chips, lemon blueberry soufra

On Tuesday, we got our first real snowstorm of the season, and the kids had a snow day, hooray!

I had splurged on some roast beef because the rest of the menu for the week was mostly leftovers. I followed the first part of this recipe from Sip and Feast I dry brined the meat for 90 minutes, then blasted it at 500 degrees for 15 minutes, then turned the oven down to 300 and kept cooking it until it was rare. Then I wrapped it up and let it sit for a while before slicing, AND THEN THE OVEN BROKE. 

We had just replaced the heating element in March, so I’m kind of annoyed that it broke already (possibly something dripped on it and caused it to overheat in one spot in a way that wore it out prematurely), but I have to admit, that was THE luckiest timing for a broken oven. We’ve had ovens break right in the middle of birthday parties, on Thanksgiving, and on Passover, and this is so vastly preferable. Supper was already made, and also Thanksgiving was already made, and all those pies were already baked. I really can’t blame the poor thing for crapping out!

Anyway, the one sad thing was that I had been planning a fun little dessert surprise. I had a package of phyllo dough because I had changed my mind about making spanakopita for Thanksgiving, and also some leftover blueberries from the pies. So Staša clued me in to this lovely stuff called soufra. 

Soufra is Greek for “ruffle,” and you make this dish by brushing butter on sheets of phyllo dough, and then folding them into pleats and arranging the pleated dough in a spiral in a pie plate. In this recipe, you bake the buttered, pleated dough for ten minutes, then pour a custard over the top and then sprinkle it with blueberries, and bake it again. I was following this simple and clear recipe on Instagram, except I didn’t have orange extract, so I used almond. I also didn’t have heavy cream, so I used half-and-half, but decreased the amount. Also I was using duck eggs, which are considerably bigger than large chicken eggs. So I guess I should say I “followed” this recipe. 

But, did I mention, the oven broke? This is how I realized it was broken: Because the soufra started to brown, and then stopped. So I ended up pouring the custard on anyway, covering the pan with tinfoil, and roasting it for half an hour or more (the upper heating element still works). This just wasn’t getting me anywhere and the center just wouldn’t set, so I reluctantly decided to microwave it. This took way longer than I expected (maybe 18 minutes all together), but it finally firmed up. 

I think I took this pic after the broiling but before the microwave. It swelled up more, and a lot of the berries popped in the microwave.

So this poor soufra was not as crisp on top as I think it’s supposed to be, and parts of it kind of bulged out unexpectedly (you know how things bulge in the microwave), but it was actually still so good. I was afraid it would be flabby and rubbery because of the microwave, but it was just tender and pleasant. And pretty! We served it warm with the last of the vanilla ice cream from Thanksgiving, and it was very popular. 

There are many, many kinds of soufra, sweet and savory, so I’m very glad to know about it. I think it would be ahhhhhmazing with rhubarb. And I’m thinking about things like sausage and onion, too. It came together very fast, but looked like I had worked hard. 

Oh, so for supper, I had been hoping to toast my roll for the roast beef sandwiches, and also maybe melt the cheese over the meat. But I may have mentioned, the oven was broken. So I tried using a kitchen torch. 

This . . . sort of worked. But not really. But it was still an incredibly delicious sandwich (I had tomatoes, provolone, and horseradish sauce on mine),

and I’m absolutely using this method for roast beef in the future. Someday I’ll follow the whole recipe, which is supposed to result in roast beef like you get at the deli. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken/turkey noodle  soup, crock pot banana bread

Wednesday I dragged the turkey carcass out of the freezer and made soup, adding some diced chicken breasts that were left over from the chicken pot pies. I had been intending to make challah or something to go with the soup. But, oops no oven. My first choice for non-oven bread would have been naan, but I knew I was gonna be home late again. So I went with this slow cooker banana bread. I was pretty skeptical, but I figured banana bread is supposed to be really moist, so maybe it would be good. Here is how it went in:

You heat up the slow cooker for a few minutes, and then put the batter in and let it cook on high for 2.5 to 3 hours. I actually ended up letting it go for 3.5 hours, so it was pretty burnt on the edges. But it was still delicious!

I threw in some pecans left over from Thanksgiving, and it was very fine banana bread. I’m so pleased to know this is an option — both for times when I can’t use the oven, and times when I want a quick bread but I won’t be there to take it out of the oven. Yay, new things! 

The soup was perfectly fine. It was very simple, just broth, meat, carrots, onions, noodles, and pepper. 

It’s so dang dark these days, I really struggle to get a normal photo. I struggle with lots of things. This is the darkest month, right? It starts getting lighter pretty soon, dot argh. 

THURSDAY
Gochujang bulgoki, rice, cucumbers

I had been intending to heat up a chicken pot pie I made before Thanksgiving (I accidentally made too much filling for the two pies I sold, so I made a third one and froze it), but even thought Damien ordered the replacement heating element as soon as I told him we needed one, it isn’t going to be here until Monday. So I stopped at the store and got some pork and cucumbers, and in the morning, I made a gochujang bulgoki sauce. 

My original plan was just to marinate the chops and then broil them, but as I was staring glumly at the cluttered windowsill and thinking how unfair it was that the ground is covered with snow and we still have flies in the kitchen, I spotted a kitchen gadget I forgot I had bought a few months ago. It’s basically an oversized pencil sharpener with a handle, and you twist the carrot around, and these long, ruffled ribbons emerge.

I guess you are supposed to roll them back up to make flowers, but I decided to leave them unfurled, cut up the pork in thin strips, and made bulgoki. I skipped the onions and just set the pork and carrots marinating together. 

I did attempt to put the cucumbers through the vegetable sharpener, too, but they didn’t fit, so I just cut them up. This gadget will come in handy for when we make our New Year’s Eve shushi! You could probably also make potato flowers, if you cut the potato into a cylinder first. I guess parsnip flowers. 

We had to stop on the way home to buy boots for THREE kids, and GET THIS. We did it! It took, like, twelve minutes and everyone is happy. And the kid who didn’t get boots because she didn’t need boots isn’t mad! I cannot believe how easy I get off sometimes!

So when we got home I pan-fried the meat and cooked the rice in the Instant Pot, and it was a delicious meal. 

You can eat the meat/vegetables and rice with lettuce, but I had bought a bunch of nori when the international market shut down, so we had that. More food in little bundles, I say! Yum yum. 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

We made it, pals. I did manage to get the nativity scene set up last night. If you happened to drive by our house before it snowed and you noticed where I tossed that wreath I bought, please let me know. As soon as it warms up a little, I’ll dig for it, but I don’t know where to dig! 

I just remembered something funny. Right before Thanksgiving, I stopped at the store for some bread flour to make dinner rolls. Then I made the pies for the family, and I was like, “oh look, a brand new sack of flour!” and dug in. But of course it was bread flour. Let me tell you, those pie crusts were FIRM. Ha! Oh well. 

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No-fail no-chill sugar cookies

Basic "blank canvas"sugar cookies that hold their shape for cutting and decorating. No refrigeration necessary. They don't puff up when you bake them, and they stay soft under the icing. You can ice them with a very basic icing of confectioner's sugar and milk. Let decorated cookies dry for several hours, and they will be firm enough to stack.

Servings 24 large cookies

Ingredients

  • 1 cup butter
  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 1-2 tsp vanilla and/or almond extract. (You could also make these into lemon cookies)
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 3 cups flour

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350.

  2. Cream together butter and sugar in mixer until smooth.

  3. Add egg and extracts.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt, and baking powder.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter and sugar and mix until smooth.

  6. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to about 1/4 inch. Cut cookies.

  7. Bake on ungreased baking sheets for 6-8 minutes. Don't let them brown. They may look slightly underbaked, but they firm up after you take them out of the oven, so let them sit in the pan for a bit before transferring to a cooling rack.

  8. Let them cool completely before decorating!

5 from 1 vote
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Gochujang bulgoki (spicy Korean pork)


Ingredients

  • 1.5 pound boneless pork, sliced thin
  • 4 carrots in matchsticks or shreds
  • 1 onion sliced thin

sauce:

  • 5 generous Tbsp gochujang (fermented pepper paste)
  • 2 Tbsp honey
  • 2 tsp sugar
  • 2 Tbsp soy sauce
  • 5 cloves minced garlic

Serve with white rice and nori (seaweed sheets) or lettuce leaves to wrap

Instructions

  1. Combine pork, onions, and carrots.

    Mix together all sauce ingredients and stir into pork and vegetables. 

    Cover and let marinate for several hours or overnight.

    Heat a pan with a little oil and sauté the pork mixture until pork is cooked through.

    Serve with rice and lettuce or nori. Eat by taking pieces of lettuce or nori, putting a scoop of meat and rice in, and making little bundles to eat. 

A ruthlessly practical to-do list for December

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m not going to tell you what trending decor you need to buy to make your house look both WOW and NOW for Christmas this year. I’m not going to tell you what you absolutely need to pull piping hot from the oven while wearing themed oven mitts in order to make your children’s life magical rather than tragical. And I’m not going to give you any tips for sculpting your bod so as to show up at the office party looking like that baddie everyone’s . . . mogging on. Mogging about? 

I’m old, I don’t know what I’m talking about. 

I do dearly love giving advice, though. So as it is Giving Tuesday, here is my best, most practical advice for how to have a pretty good December. (Some of this is geared toward big, chaotic families and Catholics, but not all.)

1. If you’re planning to give money to someone who needs financial help, do it ASAP. A splashy last-minute miracle is nice to get, but what’s really nice when you’re poor is knowing that certain things — a present, a Christmas meal, or the electric bill — will be covered. 

2. If you live on the dark side of the Mason-Dixon line, start taking Vitamin D gummies every day, and keep it up until Spring. It may not make a dramatic difference, but it may help you feel a little more energetic and less sad as the darkness grows. Gummies are more expensive than pills, but I’m far more likely to remember to take gummies because I am a big baby. 

3. For the storage-poor among us who buy a mountain of presents: Clear a corner of the house now, for storing the landslide of Amazon boxes we are about to receive. If you have to, stash your regular clutter in a trash bag and deal with it later. I’m not a spreadsheet person, so I keep a running email in my drafts folder to keep track of what I have ordered, where I ordered it from, and what has actually arrived. Or you could tape a piece of paper to the wall, and attach a pen to it with a string, and really commit to keeping it current. Just do something other than stashing things here and there and keeping a running tally in your head, for that is the path to heartache and lost presents and horrible last-minute trips to Target. 

4. If you just had a baby or you’re sick, you don’t have to travel to anyone else’s house. You just don’t. It’s a normal, human, reasonable thing to say, “Oh, sorry, we can’t do that” and just keep saying it, and following through. Let your [insert irrational relative] be mad! What are they gonna do, arrest you? If you’re the husband/dad, it is YOUR JOB TO STICK UP FOR YOUR WIFE LIKE JOSEPH DID FOR MARY. Protect her and defend her and ask her what you can do so she can put her feet up at least a little bit on Christmas, and really do it, even if you don’t get why she cares about it. Your wife is more important that your [insert irrational relative].

5. If you’re feeling overwhelmed about all the Important Traditions you have accrued, ask the people you’re in charge of which ones they actually care deeply about, and see if there’s anything you can weed out. You may be surprised. But also ask yourself which ones you care about, because your preferences also matter! But also, consider delegating responsibilities — and then preparing yourself to be okay with results that are not exactly how you would have done it. In any case, a group conversation about expectations ahead of time in a calm, neutral way is almost always helpful for managing anxiety and overwhelm about big plans. 

6. If you’re using NFP, get ready to see your weirdest chart ever in December. Stress and a poor diet and lack of sleep will do that. I have no further advice; I’m just telling you you’re not alone. 

7. Consider doing screen-free hours for Advent if you can. This year, we are doing screen-free evenings from 7-10:00, Monday to Thursday; and then Fridays are for family movies (and weekends are whatever). This routine really tamps down Christmas frenzy and gives us time we didn’t realize we had, to do nice things like read books, pray as a family, listen to music, do crafts, or just sit around and yack; and it helps some of us sleep better. 

8. If you have little kids who will be getting dressed up, sort out tights and dress shoes now, and put them away. Also maybe write on your calendar on Dec. 24 where you put them away. So many, many things will be going on right before Christmas, and shoes and tights are always the first casualties. If you care about what your older kids are going to wear, have them pick an outfit and show it to you well in advance. Consider not caring, though. 

9. Christmas light timers are actually pretty cheap, and they are so worth it. Time and energy spent trying to make yourself get up and turn on the lights, or get up and turn off the lights, is time and energy you cannot spare. Buy the automatic timer. 

10. Buy more scissors and more tape now, and hide them. But don’t hide them so cleverly you can’t find them. And buy batteries!

11. If you’re going to take pictures at Mass of everyone in their nice Christmas clothes, and you want them to look even minimally cheerful and alert, take pictures before Mass, not after. Not only will there be less dishevelment and sulky expressions, your conscience will be more likely to allow you to say things like “You’re going to smile in a normal way in the next three minutes, or you’re going to meet a helicopter of fists” before Mass than it will after you’ve received the Body of Christ. 
Alternatively, just lean in to the whole Terrible Family Photo thing. You are who you are, so why struggle? Think of it as doing society a favor, so other people don’t feel like they have to live up to a photoshopped, studio-quality life. 

12. If you’re going to Midnight Mass with kids, wear thick poofy jackets even if it’s not cold. This is more decorous than sleeping bags, but it serves the same purpose. 

13. Build the thing ahead of time. That Barbie Dream House is going to take longer than you think to put together. Consider setting captives free before you wrap them, by which I mean cutting the 496 little plastic loops keeping toys in place in their packaging. Kids want to play with their new stuff right away, and there’s nothing more stressful than trying to make that happen while they shout at you. 

14. Get to confession during Advent. Just do it! Do a lame, half-hearted, grumpy confession if that’s the best you can muster, and let Jesus do the rest. Then, whatever else is going on, you’ll be able to say, “oh, but we got to confession, yay!” 

15. Disposable goods are your friend. Think about Christmas breakfast. Think about the stickiness. The crumbs. The spilled drinks with pine needles in them. Christmas is a really great time to use at least disposable tablecloths, even if you’re not a disposable tablecloth kind of person normally.
Relatedly: A little eggnog goes a long way. Consider buying little shot glass-sized Solo cups to encourage more digestible portions.

16. If you don’t use reusable wrapping (we don’t, because I think tearing open presents is fun), make sure trash bags are on your final shopping list. Then when you’re opening presents, have one person be designated to grab the wrapping paper, give it a thorough shake to dislodge any Barbie shoes or instruction booklets or teeny little allen wrenches, and throw it away right away. 

17. This sounds dumb, but have a plan for the day after Christmas. Even the most spiritually attuned family feels a sad little let-down after a highly anticipated event, so it’s a great idea to establish some kind of relaxing “day after” tradition — something easy to achieve, like watching a movie or listening to a certain album. Traditions are very powerful for making people feel secure and cared-for, and the predictability almost matters more than what it actually is. 

IN CONCLUSION! Do as much as you can ahead of time, try not to be too hard on yourself, and get to confession. Happy Advent!