#menu planning

I also want to make a special treat for my mom. She's been especially sad lately: I think after three and a half months, the initial shock has worn off and it's fully sunk in for her that my dad is gone. So I want to find ways to pamper her.

My mom's all-time favorite dinner is a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, which of course she usually only gets in November. So I think I'll surprise her, and our guests, with a Summersgiving dinner.

I didn't know until just now that there actually is a Summersgiving that some people celebrate, though unfortunately it's in June and we missed it. But who says we can't celebrate it in August instead?

I've planned out a menu that takes traditional Thanksgiving staples, but incorporates summer produce and light, sunny summer flavors. Here's what I have in mind:

Citrus-Herb Turkey Breast

Fresh Herb Sourdough Dressing

Lemon-Chive Mashed Potatoes

Green Beans with Basil & Cherry Tomatoes

Cranberry-Peach Sauce

Strawberry-Apple Crisp with Vanilla Ice Cream

They took a lot of photos of the Chief Menu Planner for the US Armed Forces, but I don't know if they ever ran the story

September 28

Today I took a shower, ran a load of dishes, made a half-assed meal plan and grocery list, played with and fed the kittens several times, and had a long discussion with the kiddo about his worries. All this productivity was exhausting, apparently, because I am pretty beat right now. I do have a little treat for all of you this evening though: a new picture of Zuko and Aang! Their foster posted them to Facebook today, and they are so big and soooo cute! I have a feeling their little paws won't touch the floor before they're adopted once they become available. Fingers crossed! 

Wednesday is payday so it'll also be grocery day, but my squirrel brain has reached new levels of hyperactivity after a week of bad news and grim predictions for winter. We absolutely cannot afford to buy 300 dollars worth of groceries, no matter how happy it would make my primitive survival-oriented limbic system. I keep telling myself that once I get a job we will be able to afford all the canned goods I want, but that same part of my brain points out that a lot of days it feels like we're barely getting by without me taking eight or ten hours of outside work on per day, and what's going to happen then? It's not a question with a lot of good answers. In the meantime, I'm trying to shave down the list to something more manageable by reminding myself that I should wait for coupons and clearance deals on some of this stuff, and hopefully there won't be another spurt of panic buying anytime soon. 

 In any case, the kittens are doing well and the kiddo is doing okay. The pandemic is so hard on him already, and the election is beating on his mental health nearly as much as it is on ours. We keep him sheltered where we can, but every other YouTube ad is about politics and the fearmongering is endless. And sure, a lot of it is justified fear, and there are things that are terrifying, but he is ten years old and has no way to contextualize this and understand that the world is not actually coming to an end. Talking him through his fear forces me to deal with my own fear and anxiety, set it aside, and give him the best answers I can. Things will eventually be okay because we will make them okay. There have been terrible presidents and terrible times before and we have gotten through them because people refuse to allow the worst to happen. Donald Trump is a bad man and a bad president, but he will not ruin us, no matter what. It may lack nuance, but it's what a ten year old with no political power needs to hear, understand, and be able to believe. Not a bad thing to remind myself of either, so long as I include the corollary that I had better be out there helping things not get ruined. 

The one kind of fun thing I did today (besides more solitaire) is meal planning. I tend to get into a serious rut sometimes where I'm cooking a few recipes again and again because they're right there at the front of my brain. Six or seven years ago, MIL and I sat down together and made ourselves homemade cookbooks out of three ring binders and page protectors. We traded our favorite recipes and filled the different sections with recipes we wanted to keep track of. Whenever I find a super good recipe now, I try to remember to print it out and stick it in the binder. I have found that the best way to get out of a food rut is to go back to that binder and find all my favorite recipes, then get a meal plan together that lets me make more of them. Nearly all of my recipes are super cheap, of course, but they're good! My current list of meals includes: 

Meatloaf Pot Roast Brats and Saeurkraut Tuna Casserole Spaghetti Butternut Squash Soup Lemon Garlic Chicken Beer Can Chicken Parmesan Chicken Pulled Pork Huevos Rancheros Lemongrass Chicken Quesadillas Tacoroni Beanie Weenies Shepherd's Pie  See, lots of easy, cheap meals right there for the taking! I'm going to put it up on the fridge so when I'm coming up blank on what to cook, I don't have to rely on my brain. That's a sucker's game anyway. I did the menu planning in the kitten room so as to complete two tasks at once, but it turns out kittens are very terrible at helping with menu planning and absolutely fascinated with how slippery page protectors are when they rub against each other. It was a challenging combination. Robinton was especially interested in this recipe for crab cakes, but I had to tell him that some recipes are for special occasions only. 

(for more about this book see my To Pearl from Gladys tag)

I was wondering what the Jewish Cook Book had to say about Rosh Hashanah, and here’s what I found. There’s considerable overlap with what I can remember her actually serving for a holiday, though we didn’t usually go to her for Rosh Hashanah in my childhood, she came to us until she wasn’t able to anymore and then went to my aunt.

The book’s recommended menu doesn’t include ritual foods, but the meal of course opened with kiddush, apples and honey, and challah, which I assume the writer doesn’t consider part of the menu proper.

Pearl, my grandmother, would serve a gefilte fish course followed by chicken soup with kneidlach, roast chicken, peas, a cooked green vegetable and maybe a kugel, a salad I don’t remember well because I have always hated lettuce, olives and pickles (she absolutely loved pickles and anything salty), and then cake and tea for dessert. 

My mother would skip the fish course and open with the soup--kneidlach from Pearl’s recipe, not the one from my mother’s family, which she only makes on Passover--and then chicken or turkey depending on the size of the crowd. The sides are less likely to be peas and kugel and more likely to be asparagus and couscous. She’s not as devoted to pickles as my grandmother was. Cake and tea are the same.

I haven’t asked my mother what she’s making this year, when it’s necessarily just her, my father, and my sister. Surely chicken, but she’s more open to recipe variation than my grandmother was (understatement; my grandmother was an extreme creature of habit). My sister’s on a strict modified-keto diet, so there’s always avocado and cauliflower these days, and she gets gizzards in her soup instead of kneidlach.

And what am I making? We haven’t decided yet. We’re essentially 95% pescatarian at home, and in fact the fleishig dishes we rarely use were damaged in the move, so eating meat, which Jewish tradition often considers fancier, would require using paper plates. I’d rather match the atmosphere than the food. Before we had a son with sensory sensitivities we would make fish, but these days if we want him to eat with us and don’t want to make fleishigs it’s pretty much got to be cheese.

Suggestions, anyone?

Image text (apologies for whatever a screen reader might do to the Yiddish words here):

MENUS FOR JEWISH HOLIDAY MEALS

With Thanksgiving only one week away, menu planning is officially in full swing!  We doubt our table is going to look as fancy as this one (the number of glasses is particularly impressive) but at least now we know how properly fringe our celery for garnishing!  

I super feel you on the food is hard. I've been having so much trouble lately and like, I want to eat food! but nothing is appetizing so I've mostly been surviving on granola and clemintines. I'm hoping that if I make brown rice for lunch and mac and cheese with bacon for dinner this week it'll make me feel better. It's also hard because I'm trying to clean shit out so I don't want to buy a ton of groceries.

Moving is the worst. The worst. It saps like, all will to anything. For me anyway.

I would just-- live on potatoes probably, except Dude doesn’t like to live that way, so. It’s probably good for me that I’m not ever left on my own, but. It does mean I gotta think it through. However, I don’t have to think it through alone. If I whine enough. (I know you got food Needs, and I have nothing but sympathy there. If I had any kind of meaningful restriction on what I eat I would probably be dead or miserably unhealthy by now because I am so bad at Coping.)

Dude and I sat together at the kitchen table and brainstormed, which helped a ton. And then, bonus, HE went grocery shopping, leaving me to clear out the guest room closet, which was AN ADVENTURE LET ME NOT TELL YOU. 

(behind the cut is a week’s meal planning, which is boring but people like food, right?? It is SO nasty out right now we’re basically snowed in so let’s talk about food.)