Saturday: Vegetable barley soup
We’d been dodging this recipe for weeks, until Cheryl finally made it. Verdict: it was total balls and nobody liked it.
Sunday: Bangers n’ mash
This is a fast, easy meal to (almost literally) throw together. No recipe – just fry some sausages (or, as the Brits call them, “bags o’ mystery”), steam some broccoli, and mash some potatoes along with butter and sour cream and garlic powder and cheese and any other ungodly healthless thing you can think of.
Kids don’t like hot sausages, so we get mild Italian. The best gravy in my books is the Swiss Chalet Homestyle stuff. It’s expensive, so we use half a packet, which is plenty. It has gluten, but i manage.
This meal uses every pot i own, and every element on the stove. Comes together fast (cook the sausages only after the potatoes are boiled), but it makes for some horrid multi-pot cleanup.
Monday: Nachos
Nachos on Monday? What happened? Well, a tainted meat scandal and a genetically inherited inability to remember to thaw out the goddamned chicken threw our whole week off. We had two packs of beef, and one of them pulled a Steve Martin on us, in that it went prematurely grey. i used the other one for some Hail Mary nachos, which are usually our Friday-night-omigod-we’re-out-of-food play, which left us reeling for the rest of the week.
Anyway, get the spicy pre-shredded Mexican blend cheese for extra flavour for your lazy, shiftless ass.
Tuesday: St. Hubert Tourtiere
Awww yeah. Last week was full of win. Cheryl’s gambit to recover from Beefgate involved picking up some meat from a grocery store on her way back from an appointment, from a place called Giant Tiger which, until then, i had thought sold only carpets. When she got home, she realized the ground chuck was frozen and unusable. She was crafty enough to have grabbed a prefab tourtiere in case Beef Happened, which it did, and so we ate the pie. It was a good pie.
Wednesday: Domino’s Pizza
Oh. My. God. The hits just keep on coming. This one was a thousand percent my fault: after ferrying Cheryl and our youngest around to buy supplies for her weekend 2-months-late birthday party sleepover, and novelty facial hair for Moustache Day on Friday (because that’s more important than our family’s nutrition, apparently), i spun the wheel and pulled the car off the road, ramming my vehicle through the plate glass window of the nearest Domino’s so that i wouldn’t have to cobble together dinner at 8 o’clock at night.
Thursday: Korean Beef Bowls
Beef thawed. Back on track. Cheryl put this one together, and it was tasty, and gave me hope for the future. OUR future.
Friday: Slow Cooker Sausage & Chicken Gumbo
This is my favourite thing to make, ever. i still didn’t remember to thaw the chicken, but i sucked it up and used the defrost setting on the microwave. i always skip the shrimp, because eww. If you want to make it, be sure to leave a gap of roughly FOREVER in your day. Most of that time is spent dumping about a half cup of every spice you own into the crock pot.
i still don’t understand the purpose of the roux – the browned oil/flour concoction that you splash on top of a mountain of sliced veggies before drowning the whole thing in chicken stock and setting fire to it with so many spices that Indians be like “whoa – hold on there, buddy.”
Anyway, it takes a long time, but it’s delicious, and hotter than the devil’s ballsack if you add the two pinches of red pepper flakes. i made the mistake of putting in beef broth instead of chicken, and i worried i’d messed it all up, but it was still great: the scorched Earth spice policy obliterated every other flavour in the pot.
Saturday: Filthy, Fitlhy Chinese Takeout
It took forever for this third-rate Americanized Chinese to arrive, and i had already filled up on corn chips for half an hour before it showed up. i ate it, quickly and with my eyes closed, and it completely bricked my stomach, and then knocked me flat on me ass for the next four hours… all while the Little Girl Slumber Party raged downstairs. i’m lucky that Cheryl was awake and alert, and that everyone spent the night safely, because i would hate to present Shitty Chinese Food as my defense in court if any accidents had befallen our tiny guests while i was laid out in bed with a bad case of General Tso-Disgusting.
Your turn
You got recipes? Let me know, and i might make them. i’ll admit i’ve turned my nose up at everything everyone has mentioned so far (you drunks all cook with too much BOOZE), but i’m a little interested in this weird peanut butter-based soup that Jesse Scoble showed me.
Until next week, i’ll keep inexplicably wondering why i’m overweight.
