Ordinary Time

I've mentioned before that I am easily bored by dinner options, so we tend not to repeat a meal in the sane month. We also are routinely trying out new meals as well. Tonight was one of those nights. I had bought some chorizo sausage on a 2 for 1 deal and thrown them in the freezer. They'd been in there for a while (meaning a few months, in case you were thinking years), so I decided to look up recipes which use chorizo sausage. I found Papas con Chorizo (potatoes with Mexican chorizo) and decided it looked pretty good. L. opted to make it for her night to cook tonight.  Everyone liked it. We served it with corn tortillas, Mexican corn, and diced red bell peppers. It was decided that it would be even better if there was some crema to go with it. I looked for crema when I was at Aldi, but it's an ingredient that is very hit or miss if it's going to be available. This week was a miss. At the end of dinner, J. commented that it would be good with a fried egg on top, to whi...

Since H. and R. had picked so many apples on Friday and they were covering most of our counters, it was time for J. to begin his cider pressing activities. He has kind of fine tuned the process this year to make it more efficient. This is a good thing because the apple trees are loaded. Step one is to grate the apples in a food processor. The next step is to press them with that guillotine-shaped thing there in the center of the table.  J. has it set up so that it has a jack pushing down a block of wood inside the strainer which is holding the grated apples. The key piece to this is the paint straining bag that holds the apples inside the strainer. It is so fine that only cider can come out. Plus they're cheap and washable.  The strainer is sitting in a foil pan with a spout cut out of it. In probably about an hour J. processed all the apples that had been picked and had about two gallons of cider. These early apples that he's using are pretty tart which makes a great tasting ...

A friend requested I post any new recipes I had, and since I'm still feeling more than a little queasy about money worries, that seems like an easy blog post for tonight. Plus, I really did make up a new recipe.  Tonight we had Indian Oven Baked Tilapia, which we all really liked. To go along with it, I found a recipe for a curried vegetable couscous, but ended up changing it significantly, because I rarely follow a recipe exactly these days. Plus, I made this one so it can serve as a vegetarian main dish as well.  Here's what I did: Chop a variety of vegetables into pieces that seem as though would work well in pearl couscous. Ours were kind of small. We had broccoli, carrots, onions, and garlic, so that's what we used. I thought we had some bell peppers, but we didn't. Summer squash could also work. If you want to add protein, drain and rinse a can of chickpeas and add it to the vegetables. Toss with olive oil and spread on a baking sheet. Roast at 450° until the veg...

My plan for children cooking one dinner each per week is still working well. They have all become excellent cooks who need very little assistance and neither J. nor I need to cook four days a week. Sometimes they choose to make something new, or to make something new to them, or because they really just want a certain dish. I get final approval because I just don't enjoy eating the same thing over and over. I generally need a month to feel as though we haven't just had something. There is great excitement when I agree to a favorite meal because there has been a long enough break from the last time.  [Interestingly, I feel the complete opposite about breakfast and lunch and will happily eat the same breakfast every day for weeks on end. No, I know none of this makes any sense at all.]  But back to dinners. Tonight was one of those nights where a family favorite made an appearance. L. made a copycat version of Panda Express' orange chicken.  If you want to try it yourself, ...

You all know that I really don't like to spend a lot of money on food, so it's probably not terribly surprising that I find the idea of foraged food intriguing. I actually have a pretty good sense of what wild food we have growing on our property, but what to do with that wild food isn't quite so clear, such as stinging nettle. This seemed like a perfect excuse to get some books. (Though isn't everything the perfect excuse to get books?) I was spurred on to acquiring these books because the tons of stinging nettle we have growing by the creek was coming up and I wanted to do something with it other than make tea or in a pasta sauce. Here's the first of several books I've found.  It's a beautiful book with interesting looking recipes, though probably a bit heavy on the mushrooms for some of my children's (and my) taste. It was Y.'s night to cook and she was game to try the nettle recipe.  It tasted pretty darn good and we will make it again. But I don...

With Easter being tomorrow, I needed to try my experiment using natural dyes to color some eggs. Here are what they looked like when I started. (They are hard-boiled.) (Those are weird shadows on the white eggs from the cabinet above.) I wasn't sure what to expect or it it was going to be worth the effort. A couple of days ago I tried using beets to color some eggs and this was the decidedly lackluster result.  Not very exciting, huh? Today I decided to try yellow onion skins, purple onion skins, and tumeric. (2 cups yellow or purple onions skins or 1/4 c tumeric in 2 cups of water, boil for 10-15 minutes, drain out dye matter, set aside to cool. Add 1 tbsp white vinegar to dye.) Out of the three the purple onion skin dye looked the most interesting.  Here are some eggs soaking in the dye.  Yellow onion skins  Top: tumeric, bottom: purple onion skins And the final product: L - R along bottom: yellow onion skins, purple onion skins, tumeric -- those are just blue eggs...

Today ended up being one of those days where I took care of a few tasks that have been hanging over my head. And as usual, each task was neither as difficult or as time consuming as I had built it up to be.  I started out with dealing with eggs. Remember all my moaning about the hens not laying? That is no longer an issue. Instead, if I don't deal with eggs every day we will be overrun. I think we're getting at least 13 eggs every day. And while the masses are enjoying having unlimited access to eggs, it is still difficult to keep up. So I decided to take a couple dozen and make some muffin tin omelettes. Many people like them and they are stored in the freezer which makes it a great way to them from going bad. Today I had some bell peppers that were languishing in the refrigerator, so I sauteed those with some onion and mixed in some chopped tomato left over from a previous dinner. I felt virtuous for not only dealing with some eggs but also making use of vegetables that might...

I spent a bit of time writing out a response to someone about ways to keep grocery costs low. The extremely short version?  Don't shop at expensive stores Don't buy prepackaged food Stick to ingredients  Make a plan and shop with a list Use meat sparingly  Don't waste the food you buy I can still feed nine people for a little under $200 week with this plan. It is doable and no one goes hungry. In thinking about it all, I realized tonight's dinner was a perfect example.  I had bought a lot of food for the holidays (definitely going over my $200/week budget.) I also admit to overestimating what we needed, though half the family being sick probably played into that. As a result, I had a refrigerator full of random vegetables that were going to rot if I didn't do something with them. Yesterday we had green chicken curry which took care of the two bags of green beans and tonight we had millet grain bowls. I love a good grain bowl because they just need little bits of var...

Some weeks I find it easy to do the weekly meal plan, and some weeks, such as this one, there doesn't seem to be anything I want to eat.  While I was weeding a flower garden on Sunday, I came across quite a few wild onions. (Yes, they were indeed wild onions and not death camas, and I have the 45 minutes of Googling to prove it.) So I washed off the mud and stuck them in the refrigerator. As I was not coming up with any meals, I thought about the wild onions and put something vague about wild onions and eggs on the menu. Over the next couple of days, this went from a vague idea to an actual plan. I had some extra asparagus and bell pepper that needed to be eaten and there was arugula and spinach growing in the garden, so those were added to the onions. Then, I realized that we have a huge stand of stinging nettle over by the creek. (Did you know stinging nettle is really good for you?) So I sent L. out to do some collecting. L. is well versed in stinging nettle, because a few years...

We sat down to dinner at 8:30 which was late even by our standards. Usually we get dinner on the table anywhere between 7:00 and 8:00. The reason dinner was so late is that I perpetually underestimate exactly how long it takes to make stuffed spinach pizza . The whole 'change the pony's hoof poultice' routine played a part in it as well, because I underestimate how long that takes as well. But people are willing to wait patiently for stuffed spinach pizza.  For the non-Chicagoans among my readers, thus is a type of pizza particular to Chicago. It's not deep dish because it has two crusts with the filling between (hence the name stuffed) and the tomato topping goes on top of the top crust. It is difficult to find out here on the edge of the onset map, so I'm glad I know how to make it. 

It's the season for soup, isn't it? The weather is cold and it's cozy to have a pot of soup cooking in the kitchen. Soups also tend to be an economical meal, which is a big reason why we've been having quite a few of them recently. (The checkbook is not happy right now.)  There have been a few in the past week or so that are so good, I thought I'd share them. (Don't get too excited, though, you're going to have to check a couple of books out of the library because I don't share copyrighted recipes.) The first is Julia Child's onion soup recipe from her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Don't let the book intimidate you, because it's really not difficult, it just takes a longish cooking time. But it is so good! While I rarely follow a recipe exactly these days, on this one I do. It is worth it. Even my children who have a tendency to pick out onions from their food eat this soup. Really, just try it. The next is one we made a few days...

When we adopted TM,  we traveled to Vietnam in July. Vietnam is a tad warm in July. We managed okay, though we're thankful for an air conditioned hotel room. One day we went to visit the historic town of Hoi An. It was a beautiful town. I would have loved to wander around it more than we did, but the heat, sun, and humidity were overwhelming and we could only manage a very little bit. I would love to go back someday to actually get to appreciate it. This afternoon when I went to check in the horses it felt exactly how Hoi An did. And with a record high of 100° and a heat index of 118°, it explains why I felt as though I was back in Vietnam. Needless to say we only went outside to care for animals, the rest of the day we were all hunkered down inside the house. I did finish the actual planning portion of school, for both us and the classes I'm teaching. Now I just have to do some sorting and photocopying and that type of organizing stuff.  Like yesterday, the heat also meant th...

The heat has reached us. Since there wasn't anything on the calendar anyway, I'm using these two days to stay inside and finish my school planning. (And for those of you for whom the heat has been around a lot longer than two days, my sympathies. I'm not really complaining because we've had it pretty good this summer.)  Every year it's the same. I think I have a really good start on the planning, but then when I sit down to put all of my scribbled notes into a coherent plan, I discover gaping holes that I missed and need to fill. That is what I spent the bulk of the day sorting out. I now have a finalized and workable plan up until the last four weeks of the school year. That's tomorrow morning's activity. Then the rest of the day will be spent creating student checklists, doing a couple of schedules for individual learning projects, and generally getting things in order.  And remember when I was so proud of myself for spending so little money on school? Tha...

I love chicken mole (moh-lay). There is a Mexican restaurant where I grew up that makes amazing mole. I've tried to make my own, but have never been happy with it. So while I make a lot of meals from scratch, this is not one. Instead, when I feel the need for some I order this from Amazon. A friend of mine, when I asked her for a mole recipe, told me this is what she uses. It's not inexpensive, so we only have it as a treat every now and then. I have tried every single mole sauce I can find around here, but none of those was nearly as good as this one. It's what we had for dinner tonight. If you like mole, I highly recommend it.

I had people asking for the doughnut recipe I used yesterday, so here it is. This has been in my recipe book for decades and I have absolutely no idea where I got it from. As much as I would love to attribute it, I can't. I will give you the recipe as it was written which makes twelve doughnuts. Twelve! Ha!! I triple it when I make it. I know I triple it when I make it because at some point in the past, I wrote out the correct amounts for the tripled recipe. Now when I open the recipe book, I see that marked in and think,"Oh, I must triple this," so I do. I often leave myself little notes like this. I never actually remember having done so when I come across them again, but am thankful for earlier me's foresight in knowing I wouldn't remember whatever little note I made. But on to the recipe. 2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour 2/3 cup sugar 1 tsp ground cinnamon 1 tsp ground nutmeg 1/4 tsp salt 2 eggs 1/3 cup apple cider 4 TBSP butter, melted Vegetable oil for frying [I...

This evening was our big June birthday bash/Father's Day celebration. For as long as I can remember, we have had strawberry pie for June birthday desserts. This was one of two. (This is an excellent pie. Click the link above if you've never made it before. Plus, it's also easy.) Making two strawberry pies this afternoon took care of one of those buckets of strawberries which was another plus. They are very ripe and if we don't use them immediately they will be past their prime.  Yesterday I spent all afternoon canning strawberry jam. I ended up with eight pints plus a little extra which went into the refrigerator. It's not necessarily a long process but the jam and the pie both took longer than I expected. I realized it all comes down to the size of the berries. Some of the berries were small. Some, depending on the child picking, were very small. So instead of coring nice big berries which would be done very quickly, I was coring very small berries which takes sig...

J. and I spent a good portion of the afternoon cutting back some of the many weeds and volunteer trees and bushes that seem to appear overnight. It feels like just a dent in what needs to be done. There often seems to be no way to keep ahead of all the growing that happens at this time of year. It does look a little bit tidier... for now.  This post is going to be all over the place tonight. We'll start with recipes. Several people had mentioned that they missed the weekly menu plans. So I thought I would share two recipes we made recently that we particularly liked. The first is One Skillet Lemon Butter Dijon Chicken and Orzo with Feta Sauce . This was really, really good. Everyone enjoyed it and it wasn't difficult to make. We did serve the feta sauce separately because some people really do not care for feta (I don't understand it myself), but this way they would eat. We will definitely be making this again. The other dish we had tonight. I've been searching and sear...

It is now too hot to think. (I know, I know, it can and will be much hotter, but I was wearing wool last week.) We had two days of spring and now we seem to be firmly in the middle of July. Really, I just want several weeks of 70's. Is that too much to ask? I fear it is. Everyone was laying about today as if they had melted. I did not lay about, I worked all morning in the garden, taught a riding lesson, and went to multiple grocery stores. I think I might have over done it. Okay, I know for sure I over did it based on the fact after teatime I felt rotten and lay down on the couch for a while. So instead of the long, highly-opinionated post about current events, tonight you get a recipe.  There was no way I was turning on any type of heat source for dinner, so we had hummus and fresh vegetables. I'm not sure I've ever shared my hummus recipe, so here it is. (I would attribute it, but I have no idea where I got it years and years ago.) Hummus (makes about two cups) In a food...

One of the more challenging aspects of parenthood these days I'm discovering is the tension between adolescents who are able-bodied and those who are not. As with all children this age, all of them desire chances to be independent. For many children, this independence is facilitated by bicycles. For other children, though they can ride a bike, distance and hills are challenging enough that it makes using the bike to get places pretty much a non-starter. The challenge comes when you want to allow children this very typical experience because it is appropriate for them, yet dealing with the blatant unfairness of it all with the child(ren) who just cannot manage it. I'm not sure this is a right answer, but we have decided to say yes to bike trips occasionally while at other times find different, more inclusive ways that everyone can participate. I find it to be an exceedingly fine line to walk.  Today was a day where I agreed for some people to ride their bikes to McDonalds to get...

Don't you hate it when you take a look at the recipe prior to starting dinner only to realize that it requires something that you should have started in the morning? For this evening's meal the ingredient was shredded cooked chicken, which is very easy to do in the crock pot but not so easy to do an hour or so before dinner. So, that recipe was moved to sometime this coming week and we punted. This usually means that either a. we order pizza because I don't have the energy to think or b. I look at the ingredients I have kicking around and see if I can come up with something that will pass for dinner using them. Tonight we went with option b. Sometimes I actually enjoy looking at the odds and ends we have and see if I can turn them into something before they go bad. Since we had some pie punpkins (gleaned from a nearby field which had been tilled under and we found a few survivors) I decided to make a roasted vegetable soup, using the basic idea behind my actual roasted vege...