week (weak) in each hand

It’s hot in Brooklyn.
Really hot to keep having the oven on in the evenings. 

Since I can’t rush through that part, since I’ve done this backwards and keep making things that come together quickly but bake for a long time — I’m rushing through this part. 

Week 9. 12 August 2009.

Spoils: (only) 15 apples and a banana

We beefed this up with some things we got from the CSA, eggs and peaches and actually had a nice load of 29 lunches with fruit, hardboiled eggs and zucchini bread in all. And sandwiches, 19 “chicken” salad, and 10 PB+J. 

Week 10. 19 August 2009.

Spoils: more zucchinis, apples, peaches, plum (1), pear (1), celery (5 stalks), lemon, grapes, strawberries and 2 green peppers

Shopping list: butter, eggs (3), PB and jam, and some pantry items (wax paper and lunch bags)

EGGS

This week the big addition was eggs. People love hardboiled eggs. 

So everyone got an egg. And a little guaranteed protein.

 

We had apples enough for half the meals. The rest got banana bread since it uses fruit, so it’s sort of like fruit and we haven’t had it in a while.

C picked up the bread on Wednesday night, plenty of long loaves, 2 hoagies and a bag of 12 rolls. We find the PB+J work better on the rolls, less bread = more sense of sticky peanut butter. We left them out to keep them moist, and sliced and bagged last night to keep them fresh for assembly this morning.

And we made “chicken” salad for the sandwiches, with yellow and red peppers, red onion and carrot, also some cucumbers.

Cost: re-ups on PB and J and some pantry supplies, 23.30$

WEEK 5

Week 5. 15 July 2009.

SHORT VERSION

Spoils: 8 pints of blueberries, loaf of challah, eggs, apples (8), plum (1), red peppers, nectarine

Shopping List: butter
Cost: 0.99$

Delivered: 19 “turkey” salad sandwiches, 11 PB+J (4 strawberry, 7 grape) with fruit. 
Blueberry crumb bars in all.

how it feels to lose to pudding, or lose your pudding

Between getting a late start, and using the oven for two things at once I lost the battle. I went to bed before the pudding did. But, because it isn’t safe to sleep with the oven on, and it makes the house really hot, I turned the oven off first, and gave that pudding some time to think about what was happening. And how it can go differently next time.

But things worked fine up until then.
Zucchini bread went together quickly and used up all the extras, the zucchinis and currants (bought for the bread pudding, but with extra), and looked so happy and golden when it had the oven to itself. And it smelled really good in the house. Then I got the bread pudding together. Turns out 3-4 cups of bread chunks isn’t that much. Not really thinking this through when we were doing the bread pickup, we now have enough for weeks and weeks of bread pudding. Then this went into the oven in its water bath, on the top shelf of the oven.

I used the baking time to pull together the “chicken” tofu salad. For vegetables I used up the remaining yellow peppers, onion and a few celery from last week’s haul. We also prepped the bread, wax paper and napkins for the morning.

And here is where the train went left, while I blithely gazed to the right.

The smell of burning is pretty unique. But, oddly, it’s source was not immediately evident. And the baking went on.
It is typical, if you are sharing the oven for 2 (or more) different dishes, that you will need to extend the baking time slightly. Same heat + more raw ingredients in more dishes = longer baking time for all. The time was almost doubled when I finally pulled the bread from the oven. I hoped, with this, that the pudding would just hurry up, gulp down the newly available heat, and set up. But when the time was almost doubled from its proper baking time, and it was nearing 2am, I surrendered. I turned off the oven, closed the door, and went to bed.

The burning, it turns out, was the bottom of the breads. Too close to the base of the oven, the rest of the loaves baked perfectly, but the bottoms were black, like obsidian, bright and shiny.

(Shhh, we’re sleeping)

For extra measure the pudding got some freezer time this morning to make it a little easier to cut and pack for the meals. We were a little short on fruit, but I cut the bottom off the bread loaves and tried to balance out the meals between that and the pudding squares.

All told, this week was a bit more tenuous than I like, but the project demands adjustments, and experiments.

Cost: (including tofu for next week, and pantry supplies) 31.99$

A Small-haul Menu

Week 4. 8 July 2009.

Location A

This week was the smallest haul yet, which was lucky, because at the last minute I decided to leave my extension boards at home, I wasn’t in the mood for all the added weight.

Spoils: milk (1 quart), yogurt (goat milk, maple flavor), eggs (6), hummus, tofu chicken salad (6), blueberries, cherry tomatoes, blackberries, garlic (2), apples

This small haul will be a challenge.

We face our first week without any bananas. And very little produce. Because we can still collect bread, and we got milk and eggs in the haul, we decide to make bread pudding and hope it will hold together well enough to cut and wrap in the meals.

There are still a few zucchinis left from last week, so we’ll make another batch of zucchini bread to balance out the meals that won’t get apples.

I was hoping the tofu chicken salad I got in the box would substitute making it this week, but C, my valiant taste tester, discovered that expiration dates are sometimes accurate, so we’re back to making our own this week. We’ll stick with “chicken”, we don’t have the time for marinading the tofu for “turkey”. 
Hopefully new jams will revitalize the PB + J option for this week.

Shopping list: jam, PB, tofu, flour, olive oil, sugar, currants, lunch bags and wax paper (time to re-stock the SUM pantry)