MacGyver gnocchi

The pace of work and home life this week continued to dictate yet again the need for dinner solutions that could be produced on a short turnaround. Gnocchi in the pantry and leftover sausage and kale in the fridge came to the rescue to help produce this cheesy gnocchi bake when MacGyver night rolled around on Thursday. 

It’s still a work in progress, but the basic infrastructure involves preheating the oven to 425F/210C; browning gnocchi in butter and bacon fat in a cast-iron skillet on the stovetop, then mixing in chopped, cooked kale and Italian sausage. I then added about 1 cup of stock and milk mixed together, and slid the whole thing into the now-hot oven to let it heat through for about 10 minutes. Then I mixed in somewhere around 1.5 cups of cream cheese, grated cheddar cheese, and grated pecorino romano, and put it back in for another 5 minutes or so. The sauce isn’t quite right yet, so I’ll be continuing to fiddle with it, but even as is, it was still pretty tasty and hit the spot at the end of a long, busy day. And since I'm on a short turnaround yet again, that's all from me for today.

50 weeks

This weekend marks 50 weeks of quarantine life - just two weeks shy of a full year since we went into lockdown - and the final weekend of this longest shortest month. I had a look back through my photos to see what this month looks like for the archive:

Snow We had snowfall or wintry mix with accumulation on 11 out of 27 days this month - beautiful to look at, but messy and slippery enough to mess with my regular exercise and grocery routines. We had an abrupt change from snow on Monday to 60-degree weather on Tuesday and, as much as I love my hibernation, I think I’m officially ready for spring.

Handwork More time indoors has meant more time spent on crafty pursuits, and this month I finished another two projects: a crocheted scarf and a zippered pouch. I’m also pursuing my interest in visible mending, and did an intentional repair on a favorite souvenir tea towel. 

Cooking Possibly my proudest cooking moment of the month was creating a complete meal out of what looked like a pretty bare refrigerator. Stumped about what to make for dinner, and not wanting to make an impromptu supermarket run in another wintry mix episode, I stumbled across a recipe for Belgian Endive and Ham Gratin. I didn’t have any Belgian endive, but I did have a heap of leftover braised chard, so I rolled that (along with some leftover rice pilaf) into slices of ham, as proposed by the recipe, and made those the base of the recipe instead. As a bonus, I finally feel like I’ve mastered making a Mornay sauce.

Baking As usual, there was a lot of this - chocolate cupcakes, whoopie pies for Valentine’s Day, Smitten Kitchen’s French Breakfast Puffs for Sunday breakfast - and I also cracked open 100 Cookies and made a big batch of chocolate chip cookies to give away and send in care packages.

Speaking of care packages.... I’ve been participating in the Lasagna Love initiative, a volunteer movement to provide a hot meal to people in our communities who may be in need of a helping hand for one reason or another. Over the holiday weekend, I combined a Lasagna Love delivery with a new-baby meal delivery for one of DP’s students - my favorite kind of community effort!

Other distractions Most of my sisters and I have become obsessed with Spelling Bee, one of the New York Times’ daily puzzles - so much so that we had to set up a separate chat thread to avoid driving the one sister who isn’t playing around the bend. We swap hints, complain about ineligible words (what do you mean “chillin’” doesn’t count?), and cheer each other on to Genius level and sometimes, the coveted Queen Bee.

And last but not least, I can’t overlook the other, happier milestone that we’ve reached this weekend - two years since we brought our furry housemate home from the shelter. Originally dubbed Trinity when she first came home, she has since acquired a variety of nicknames, the most commonly used of which these days is Chubthulu. Here she is in her favorite spot, doing what she does best: improving quality of life for all just by hanging around.

Day 12

Since we’ve officially been in social isolation mode, that is. Here’s the update from our version of this strange new world where most of us find ourselves these days.

Family & home We were already more than a week into a 4-week school closure for Miss B when the announcement came on Monday that the governor of Virginia had closed the schools for the remainder of the year. That hit me hard - I already knew it was serious, but that magnitude of serious was a little overwhelming to process. In terms of day to day life, it doesn’t change things dramatically; we had already figured out a schoolwork schedule, and we’ll adjust that as input from the school becomes more consistent. And all of our international moves have helped us build our skills as a self-sufficient unit. Being able to get outside is key, though - Miss B and I both joke about how usually we’d never leave the house if we didn’t have to, but now if I don’t get outside once every day, things start to get on top of me.

Work Since I already work from home and have for more than a decade, I’m pretty much carrying on as normal. Many of the people I work with don’t, of course, so I’ve been watching their adjustment from afar - and anear too, since DP has now shifted from going into DC most days to running online seminars and meetings from the basement. And even as a veteran telecommuter, it’s challenging to carry on as normal when a) there are so many people in your house, and in all the other houses, taking up internet bandwidth; and b) all everyone can think about most of the time is this situation. Sometimes work is a welcome distraction, and sometimes it pushes me around the bend. It’s important to pay attention to the distinction, and adjust accordingly.

Food Yesterday made me realize this forcefully. Still processing the news about schools closing for the year (and acknowledging the attending grief), I was struggling to focus, to keep my patience, to accomplish anything useful. At 4pm I took a break as planned, and went for a walk with DP. We made a familiar circuit on the college campus near our house, including a stop to admire some cherry blossoms (see above). When I came home, I went straight into the kitchen and made a batch of bread dough, another of salsa, and finished off with a batch of Cheesy Potato Gnocchi from Love Your Leftovers that uses up leftover mashed potatoes. And for the moment, anyway, my equilibrium is restored.

Action I’m trying to take some responsible productive action every day; today’s is continuing my effort to repurpose food waste into food production - new lettuce growing from the stump of a head of romaine:

Hope you’re staying well, staying safe, and staying home.

New babies

Most Saturday mornings I’m up around 7, so I can get to the farmers’ market before it’s overrun. This past weekend, I set the alarm for 6, much to DP’s disgruntled surprise.

“Why are you getting up so early?” he grumbled.

“We’re going to see the new baby today,” I responded, in my best “duh” tones.

“Huh?” he said, but then fell back asleep before I could explain that I was getting up to implement my three rules for visiting new babies and their parents:

1. Bring presents for the baby. I aim for two: a practical one that the parents will like, and a fun one that the baby will like. (We brought two Australian standards: this Bonds Wondersuit to help Mum and Dad build the autumn wardrobe, and this instant classic to entertain the baby.)
   
   
2. Don’t stay too long. This one requires some judgment of whether the parents’ need for adult interaction outweighs their and the baby’s exhaustion, or vice versa. This visit we stayed for 90 minutes, which was on the long side for me, but then I have been known to depart after 15 minutes – usually because the mother looked ready to drop and I didn’t know her well enough to say, “Give me that baby and go take a nap!”
   
   
3. Bring food. Ideally food that can be pulled from the fridge and devoured with one hand when ravenous but still baby-wrangling. I brought:

-       a batch of my favorite pasta salad, with a few handfuls of shredded parmigiano Reggiano thrown in to add protein and make it a more complete meal; and

-       this Upside-Down Polenta Plum Cake from Melissa Clark’s Cook This Now – I substituted a mixture of cranberry and peach jam for the plums.

All of the above were well received, and I even got some baby-snuggling time, so that's a win-win in my book on etiquette and enjoyment.

Mass quantities

Despite the length of time since my last post, I can't face doing another round-up write-up. It feels like too much of a chore, and counterproductive to the practice of meticulous mindfulness. (Or mindful meticulousness; I still can't decide.) So for the time being, I've decided to take a different approach: I'm going to work through my photo backlog, one at a time. I'm hoping having a well of inspiration to dip into will motivate me to get back into a more regular habit of doing actual writing, as opposed to rapid-fire updates.

In any case, this one deserves its own post: it's my family recipe for lasagna, and as well as being iconic, it is fairly massive, as you will see. To give you a sense of how massive: I made this in August for a Sunday lunch we hosted for a group of DP's students and their families - 12 adults and 15 children, including us. Given the numbers, I decided to multiply the base recipe by 1.5. And we had leftovers.

Lasagna alla mia famiglia
As noted, even this base recipe makes mass quantities - it involves more than 15 lbs (~7 kilos) of ingredients. (When I say it like that, multiplying it seems kind of insane. But then, like Nigella, I am never knowingly undercatered.)

One of the good things about this recipe is that you don't have to do it all in one go; when I made this last time, I cooked the meats and the sauce the day before. This made assembly on the day much simpler. 

Sauce
a double batch of Disruptive Bolognese (or substitute your favorite Bolognese-type sauce; the key components you need are ~2 lbs/1 kg of hamburger/beef mince, and ~48 oz/1400 g tomato passata or equivalent. More is better than less.)

Lasagna
2 lbs/1 kg pork butt (confusingly, this American term actually refers to a cut from the upper shoulder of the front leg; also known as Boston butt)
2 lbs/1 kg sweet Italian sausage
4 lbs/2 kg good-quality ricotta cheese4-6 jumbo/extra-large eggs
3 cups/~10 oz/~300 g grated pecorino romano cheese, divided
2 lbs/1 kg lasagna noodles (ready-to-cook are fine)

Preparing the lasagna components
1. Make the sauce as you normally would.

2. Heat oven to 350F/180C.

3. Slice pork butt thickly (it takes much longer to cook if it is one piece), place in a shallow roasting pan, and put in the oven.

4. Line another shallow roasting pan with foil; place sausages in this pan, and put in oven as well.

5. Cook both meats for 40-50 minutes, or until just cooked, turning once. (Remember that they will cook further in the lasagna.)

6. In a large bowl, mix together ricotta, *2* cups of the pecorino, and as many eggs as you need. (The consistency of this once mixed should be creamy and somewhat grainy, more of a batter than a cheesy consistency. You may get to this point with only 4 eggs, or it may take all 6. Likewise, you may need a bit more than 2 cups grated cheese, but save some to sprinkle over the top of the finished lasagna.) Put aside.

7. After both meats have cooked and cooled, cut into bite-sized pieces. Put aside.

(Please note that all steps to this point can be completed up to a day ahead. Refrigerate the components separately until you are ready to assemble.)

Assembling and cooking the lasagna
(If you are using ready-to-cook noodles, skips steps 8 and 9 and proceed to step 10.)

8. Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Add 2 heaping Tbsp of salt, a few drops of olive oil, and the noodles.

9. Cook noodles for no more than 10 minutes after water returns to boil. Drain noodles and return to colander to cool for a few minutes, shaking to distribute so they're less likely to stick together.

10. If not already on, heat oven to 350F/180C.

11. Cover the bottom of a very large roasting pan with sauce to a depth of ~.5 in/1 cm.
(Please note that when I say "very large" - my mother used an oval 18 in x 12 in x 4 in/~46 cm x 31 cm x 10 cm turkey roasting pan to make this. I make it in 2 rectangular 14.5 in x 11 in x 2 in/36.8 cm x 27.9 x 5.08 cm roasting pans. Either way, you should be aiming to get three complete sauce-noodles-cheese-meat layers in a pan, plus a noodles-and-sauce cover, so divide your ingredients accordingly. I assemble both pans at the same time, essentially treating it like one giant lasagna, so I can divide the cheese and meat by 3 and the noodles by 4.)

12. Place a single layer of noodles in the bottom of the pan, making sure they cover it completely with no gaps. (Slightly overlapping the noodles at the edges is okay, as is breaking the noodles to  get a good fit.)

13. Cover the noodles with a thick layer of the cheese mixture.

14. Scatter a portion of the pork and sausage over the cheese.

15. Generously cover layer with sauce.

16. Repeat noodles-cheese-meat-sauce twice more. You should now have used up all the cheese and meat, and have some noodles left.

17. Cover the pan(s) with the remaining noodles. Spread top with sauce, and sprinkle with remaining grated cheese.

18. Cover pan with foil and bake in oven for 45-60 minutes, until hot and bubbling. During last 15 minutes, remove foil to allow top to crisp.

19. When fully cooked, shut off oven, re-cover lasagna, and allow to rest for at least 15 minutes before serving.

20. Serve topped with more sauce and grated cheese.


Serves about 20. Can be halved or multiplied.

Long weekend

It's a long weekend in Australia! (Have I mentioned before that I find it endlessly entertaining that the Queen's birthday is a public holiday here, but not in the UK? Because I do. Also I have to make the most of it because this is our last Monday public holiday until, I think, October. Yikes!)

Here's the latest news from around here:

DP's birthday was this past week - can you work out how old he is from the candles? Appropriately given his profession and interests (and name), his birthday falls on a major event in military history, and this year his seminar students found out and celebrated by giving him a running real-time recap of happenings throughout that fateful day 73 years ago. I took the easy route by making his favorite dinner (steak au poivre and mashed potatoes) and baking his favorite cake.

Also this past week - family friends of ours are dealing with some medical stuff and, like us, are far from their family support networks. So, on the day when one parent was in the hospital overnight and the other parent was wrangling everything else (including three kids), I volunteered to bring over dinner. Pasta bake to the rescue!

I didn't really use a recipe for this - just made a batch of Disruptive Bolognese in the slow cooker ahead of time, then boiled up 3 boxes (about 3 lbs/1.5 kg) of rigatoni. I mixed it all up together with lots of grated cheese and some baby spinach (vegetables makes it a nutritionally complete main course!), scooped it into a disposable baking tin, and wrapped it up. (I also made up a smaller pan for us to have for dinner that night, killing two birds with one stone.) With a loaf of bread and a batch of blondies, it made a complete meal and was a pretty low-stress way to lend a helping hand.

And a good reminder to be grateful for little things - like Sunday breakfast with my own family.

And flowers to cheer us - even on the gloomiest winter days.


 

Ten things

Multiple aspects of life are not great at the moment – not anything I can discuss here, and not anything earth-shattering. Just things that suck some of the joy out of life. (To say nothing of what's been happening in my home and first adopted countries....) So I’m trying to focus on good things where I can. Here are some recent ones:

1. I got to go to Tokyo on a work trip last month! Just for long enough to whet my appetite for more, and with most of that spent inside a hotel, but I did get in a bit of sightseeing here and there - this is sunset in Shinjuku, which was my home base while I was there.

2. I also found time to track down the one thing that Miss B wanted most from Tokyo - a stuffed Totoro. (For those of you in the know - she already had the small white and blue ones, but has been longing for this one for ages. For those of you not in the know - if you have children or love animated movies, find and watch this film. It is utterly wonderful, and I say that as someone who has seen it dozens of times.)
 

3. Watching autumn turn to winter in Canberra - always beautiful, and familiar and strange at the same time. Red maple leaves are a lifelong sign of autumn, but finding them in the garden in May, amidst eucalyptus and other native Australian flora? Still getting used to that.

4. It only took 10 months, but our guest room is sorted and habitable at last. (Just in time, by the sounds of it, given the sudden uptick in requests following recent events in the US and UK.)

5. Celebrating DP's birthday - a perfect excuse to make a metric ton of buttercream frosting and get crazy with food coloring and piping bags. (You're never too old or too manly for frosting roses.)

6. Dropped by to meet our friends' new baby (and deliver a reheatable meal to his exhausted parents and exuberant big sister - I made this pasta bake, a loaf of bread, and a mini cake made from the birthday leftovers).

7. Went to Melbourne for the weekend to visit friends who have bought a Victorian hill station on a mountainside outside of town, and are in the midst of renovating house and garden. This is a glimpse of Miss B on our tour of the grounds. (Fun fact: did you know that the temperature drops 1C for every 100m you travel above sea level?)

8. Speaking of learning things, our conversations over the course of the visit inspired me to start listening to BBC Radio 4's History of the World in 100 Objects podcast - it's instructive and fascinating, and for those of you based in Canberra, timely, because the exhibition is coming to the National Museum later this year!

9. I also came down with a cold while there, which got a lot worse after I got back and which I'm still recovering from more than 2 weeks later. There's nothing like feeling abjectly awful physically to remind one to be grateful for feeling healthy and energetic most of the time.

10. And finally, a small thing which has improved my working life significantly in the last couple of months, after I gave up and admitted that I couldn't manage to keep track of my work just with digital tools - I admitted I needed a pen-and-paper system and as soon as I did, I came across a glowing recommendation for bullet journaling. If you're a similar devotee of analog tools, I whole-heartedly recommend it. It really has changed the way I work in some simple but effective ways, and I've already converted one skeptical friend, so do check it out if you're looking for a new way to get on top of things. I promise you don't need anything other than a notebook and pen!

Hope all is well where you are, and that you're keeping warm - or cool, as the case may be!