cook: back to school, back to breakfast burritos

Second Harvest always delivers groceries to my high school for the students in the special day classes, but there's always a surplus with an invitation to the faculty to take and not waste food. I took carrots, celery, and an onion and added them to my veggie and bone stock. 

My Labor Day weekend was devoted to home cooking. I once tried to share my recipe after giving my neighbor, Cecilia a bunch of breakfast burritos. The thing is, my breakfast burritos always differ with each iteration. Enchilada sauce. Pico de Gallo. Jalapenos. However, soft scrambled eggs and beans are always ingredients in a breakfast burrito. And this time, I added the chorizo leftover from chilaquiles for dinner to my refried beans.

 

I also decided to add potatoes to the breakfast burritos by microwaving a potato for 4 minutes and then cubing and seasoning and frying in olive oil and butter.

 

I then slather the chorizo beans onto a tortilla and sprinkle with cheese and then microwave for 30 seconds to melt the filling and soften the tortilla enough for folding. Then potato and eggs on one end and fold up the sides before rolling.

And then wrap in foil...so easy.

I made 6 of these burritos for breakfast next week. And will give 3 to Cecilia who raves about my burritos.

cook: tomato all ways in 2 different lasagnas and soup

Our tomato crop did not produce until later in the summer, and it's become a 3-week harvest.  

After one harvest, I pureed a big bowl of tomatoes and put up 2 jars of marinara.                  

 

For another harvest, I cooked and refrigerated jars of heirloom tomato soup and cream of heirloom tomato soup. I didn't add cream to the larger jars of tomato soup, figuring they could keep longer at the back of the refrigerator until I simmered them with the additions of cream and chopped basil to slurp alongside grilled cheese sandwiches. The little jar, already prepared, came with me to school for lunch.      

And with jars of pasta sauce I made the previous day, I prepared a couple casseroles after buying fresh lasagna pasta, frying Italian sausage, mixing ricotta and scallions, and cooking a béchamel.    

 

One of the lasagnas was vegetarian, for which I grated and salted and squeezed dry a few zucchini squashes to incorporate with noodles, sauces, and cheeses--this casserole went into the freezer to eat sometime this fall or winter.

 

The other lasagna I prepared as a carnivore delight with leftover Bolognese, the Italian sausage...

 

...and pepperoni (decided to leave hubby's salami out).

Both lasagnas had more marinara and béchamel, and of course, ricotta mixed with scallions and grated Parmesan and Romano cheeses.

Both also had layers of rustic cut mozzarella.

Into a 350 degree oven atop a sheet pan went my carnivore lasagna...

... while I grated zucchini and mixed the vegetable with panko and egg to fry into fritters and eat with lasagna for dinner that evening.

After making Bolognese sauce, we were still harvesting lots of tomatoes, which I pureed and removed to a bowl. I then sautéed onion and garlic and added them into my blender with even more tomatoes.   

More of these heirloom tomatoes were yellow and green, but when cooked turned into a rich red.

 

While the tomatoes were simmering down into sauce and then processed in my canner, I also decanted my harvested oregano? marjoram? Either way, the herb smelled divine. My oregano jar was empty, and I use that herb a lot for Italian and Mexican cooking. I denuded all the twigs of their tiny leaves...

  

...and crushed the leaves in between my palms to shred and fit into the spice bottle. Done!

Also done were my two jars of marinara after that satisfying pop when pressurized.

I didn't add any lemon juice to the tomatoes, figuring the acid in the fruit themselves would be enough. And the next evening after a long day of running and then swimming and then working at school came my satisfying meal of cream of heirloom tomato and basil soup and grilled cheese. Afterwards I was in my happy place of sewing.        

And today is the first day of September and drove through a light rain to work and put on a hoodie, heralding the end of tomato season. Patrick pulled up all the tomato plants to get the winter crop into his garden. I'm tired already, but am looking forward anyway to a productive school and creative year.

cloth: lumbar pillow #1 in progress

I’d been admiring the projects of the weekend quilter on Instagram, and last week I spied her book at the public library. Score!                  

Also I’d been searching images and quilt patterns to sew a lumbar pillow, and I found one I loved in my new public library checkout. 

I played with a color combination of Kona medium pink and light peach, but didn’t care for it in combination with the Cloud 9 mustard solid I had. And so I found a cantaloupe and dark pink to instead stitch squares to snowball into the rectangular strips for a lumbar pillow that I decided to gift to a grandniece. In sewing the directions, I misunderstood or maybe the directions in the book are just wrong. I drew a line bisecting the squares to “snowball” onto my strips, and then sewed a 1/4" seam on either side of the line (to use the leftover half-square triangles into coasters_.

After trimming the half square triangle off the strip, I then had to slice a 1/2" along with the dogears off the strip to square up the rectangle. 

 

In hindsight, I should have made the bisecting line of the 5 1/2" and 4" squares the bottom stitch line, drawn another 1/4" seam to be the line to cut off the fabric and sewn another 1/4" seam above that cut line in order to use the cut-off triangles as half-square triangles into another project of coasters. I went ahead and just sewed the smaller rectangle strips together.

I rather love the colors of this abstract-patterned pillow and hope a little girl will like it too. Tomorrow I'll find a utility fabric like muslin on which to layer with batting and quilt the top, use more utility fabric to sew a pillow insert, and do I then make the back of this pillow cover unquilted? I guess I'll know after I've quilted the top.

clay: a vase + a mug

I finally made it to clay club despite a flurry of tasks to complete (dental appointment, quilting, summer cleaning) before school starts. For two days I finished this Hans Christian Andersen vase (it’s his quote) and this Sadie mug on which I’m going to decal an iron oxide image of her after I've dipped it into white glaze.                                    

In the meantime, Zan finished her candelabra.                          

She copied the structure of my candelabra but gave it her own flourishes of dragonfly, lotus blossoms and cattails. It's lovely, and now I want to make another candelabra.

In the meantime I'm inspired by the bouquets Patrick brings home. Next Saturday, instead of making a lamp base, maybe I'll rehearse with a candelabra or some low candlesticks. I once made a lotus bloom adhered to the top of a lidded pot. But I'd love to stick my votives into a lotus atop a lily pad.

So that's the plan for Saturday Clay next.

cook: how to cheat making bolognese sauce

I was uninspired about what to do with hamburger patties, which we needed a break from in the dinner rotation. I decided to cook the ground beef into something else. I remembered serving favorite neighbors a homemade Bolognese sauce over handmade ravioli from our favorite ravioli house. However, Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese is a 4 to 5 hour process, and I only had 2 hours to get dinner on the table. I decided to use up leftover jars of marinara sauce and heirloom tomatoes I had whirred in the Vitamix instead of slowly simmering crushed tomatoes. I chopped red onion and celery and grated a carrot which I sautéed in butter and olive oil and then added the ground beef to lose all its pink.

 

I then added a small pour of whole milk and sprinkles of nutmeg, and you're supposed to then simmer until all the liquid is driven off. That wasn't gonna work in my time frame, and so the milk furiously boiled off.

 

After the meat and vegetables were almost dry, I then added a glass of Chardonnay...

...and furiously boiled again and then added the tomatoes and marinara sauces and vigorously boiled again, and voila! Bolognese sauce in 2 hours.

I served the Bolognese atop pappardelle pasta. And here's my lunch of leftover Bolognese atop pappardelle (which I had been too famished to photograph after the previous night's dinner).                       

I realized later that the missing ingredient in this Bolognese was pancetta, but I've leftover bacon which I just might add to the Bolognese that's left.