Hi, friends!
What’s on the menu this week?
I made a casserole to eat all week. I also made Mexican rice for burrito bowls* and managed to scorch the fuck out of the rice. It was salvageable, I just lost almost a cup of rice to being scorched on the bottom of the pot. I wasn’t thinking about that the main burner I use is the power burner. Had I just used a different burner it would have been fine, I think.
*why yes, I was like what am I eating this week that will need more all of those tomatoes coming in from the garden
Billions of people will tell you scorched rice is the best part!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_rice
Ooooh that all looks delicious!
Unfortunately my rice was charred brown and stuck to the pan so not something I was able to eat.
I ate too much today and don’t even want to think about food!
Yay! Glad brunch was so tasty and fun!
Oh dear, I cooked ahead for the week on Friday and forget most of what I made except for the strawberry simple simple syrup for cocktails and the carrot cake.
My kind of friend! Booze and desserts. In the early 90s did you get invited to “champagne and chocolate” parties? I did, almost every weekend for about six months, and then they just disappeared.
Now that the pandemic is over (it’s not, but Better Half and I are over 50 so we’re boosted to the gills, and at this point I’m willing to join my fiancée Lavinia who was swept away in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, thereby causing me to cast my amorous glance toward my cousin Mary, in whose home Lavinia died, but it was really my home because once Lord Grantham died off it would be mine–)
Where was I? Oh yes. I recently proposed a “champagne and chocolate” college reunion fundraiser party but wanted to sound out my most sociable friend and fellow graduate first.
“First of all, it’s nice of you to invite us all to stay with you because we all fled New York but we’re not bringing sleeping bags and sleeping on your floors because we’re all pushing 60. Second of all, I did host a very memorable ‘champagne and chocolate’ party, that’s where you and [Better Half] did your Carpenters impersonation, which, wow, I didn’t realize [Better Half] could get his voice that high, but that was in 1992 or something.”
There used to be a phrase in German that is/was pretty much the only way a German could, without invoking fines or imprisonment, express longing for the “Hitler Time,” as it is sometimes called, as if Hitler were like Comet Kahoutek and landed without warning on an otherwise friendly and peace-loving German nation. “Früher war es besser.” “Earlier it was better.” I find myself saying that more and more, but not out of Third Reich Sehnsucht, just out of general despair.
My younger daughter will have a kitchen in her dorm/apartment this year so is making me make her a cookbook like I did for her sister. That means I have to make recipes she wants this week & take pics. Tonight is spaghetti sauce, then chili, & penne ala vodka later in the week. Made chicken katsu last night.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ You are such a good Papa.
Your daughter can’t be old enough to have access to vodka????
Good point! I don’t think she thought of that or is planning on stealing my vodka with all the other crap when we move her back to school! My wife has been letting her drink thinking that will keep her from getting drunk & taken advantage of. She hasn’t shown much interest until the neighbors brought over some really fine wine. I think she just wanted to know what the fuss was about.
Good on you & your wife, Shaq, about taking the “Sneak” factor away from your daughter regarding drinking! It also helps her to know how to drink safely & know her limits in a SAFE environment!💖
Taking the mystique of drinking away by allowing it safely is what my family always did when we were young–and it was something our Grandparents did with our parents.
The rule was always, “We don’t CARE if you drink, but you’re gonna do it at HOME (or the home of trusted friends), and you’re NOT going anywhere else!”
So we learned that drinking just *wasn’t* that big a deal, AND that Drinking & Driving WAS a big deal, and 100% unacceptable.
It took *all* the air out of “doing the taboo thing!” and just made it something we *were* able to do, as long as no vehicles were involved.
Gotta say, in my opinion–and that of most of my cousins & their spouses (who’ve done the same w/their kids!), it definitely seemed to stop alllll of us from that thing so many kids do, where they go completely overboard once they move away that first time.
Because while YES, it’s fun to party with your friends–it also *wasn’t* anything we felt we needed to be “rebellious” about. It’s not that none of us ever got drunk (a couple even got a DWI/DUI–in their mid/late 20’s though!)… but we didn’t do the “go hog wild & *rebel*” thing so many of our college peers seemed to do.
Yeah in my family once you were 12 or 13 you were fine to have all the booze you wanted at family parties.
Same rationale – get drunk and stupid around your family who will laugh at you but you won’t get hurt.
Exactly!
Worth checking to see if her campus has any strict booze rules, too.
My college campus had a strict no alcohol policy in the dorms. Did not matter your age, huge no-no. Being caught with it was a write-up and loss of all scholarships as punishment.
I learned this when my (alcoholic) father put a 6 pack of beer to chill in the minifridge the day we moved me in for my freshman year and my RA lived nearby and saw it and was luckily like I will not tell anyone about this but seriously get it out of here RIGHT NOW to my dad.
They are a Jesuit school so drinking is definitely ok (which seems backward) but underage is probably a big deal. They had a beer garden for us parents at last parent weekend. One of her former middle school teachers that I was friends with told me about how she worked at the Safeway near the school & her job was restocking the beer fridge. She couldn’t keep it full or even close to stocked!
I stopped at Sam’s Club to get gas for the van, and ended up going in to get stuff for this week, too.
So at Casa de Em, it’s gonna be Rotisserie chicken (already broken down & in the fridge), and some pineapple spears (cut into chunks) appearing in meals. This week.
Turkey sandwiches’ll be for lunch the next two days, because we’ve got field trips at the summer program both days. The chicken will be lunches Thursday & Friday, along with suppers other days.
Tonight was definitely one of those “Oh, this is *different now*” moments, when I was breaking down the bird.
It’s the first time in probably 15 years, that I haven’t had a rapt audience of *at least* one dog, watching, waiting, and hoping i’smd drop the whole bird–or at least share a schnibble or two, as I took the meat off the bones.
And it’s also the first time in all those years, that I haven’t saved the skin & fatty-bits, taken out the kidneys, and broken all the “good cartilage-y bits” off the bones, to give to Lucy (14 & 15 years ago), or Lil.
*those* are the moments that’re gettin’ me right now… I KNOW I did the right thing on Friday, because my food-obsessed girl didn’t even attempt to *lick* the piece of McD’s Cheeseburger i held up to her nose…
But it’s been 15+ years, of “supervised chicken breakdowns,” and I kinda miss it, and will until the next pup decides it’s time to show up💝
I too have a rotiserie chicken in the fridge! Although mine is going into the aforementioned burrito bowls.
My 20 YO son came back from a big all day outside concert with a wristband that said 21+ and my wife and I looked at each other and said, well, at this point we have to trust him and the heavens.
My wife had to work late tonight, so I tried to make a simple dinner for myself starting with kupus salata, which is a Croatian white cabbage salad. Anyway, she has this super-sharp cabbage slicing thingie and I put a nice slice across my thumb and bled like crazy. I soaked blood through one bandaid but the second one seems to be holding. As much as I like kupus salata, I doubt I’ll ever try that again. But this slicer thing is really a great tool. It looks like a cleaver with two parallel razor-like blades running one above the other and it makes quick work of cabbage (and thumbs). It’s much better than the old mandolin for slicing cabbage. You could make a big batch of cole slaw in no time, but watch your fingers.
This is the cabbage slicer I’m talking about:
Oh fuck! That would damage a finger real quick. I’m glad you’ve stopped bleeding.
Eggplants are coming in which means it’s time for another batch of eggplant parm.