Well, breakfast was pancakes today. I went onto the HH website to see how she expected me to make my pancakes (my normal recipe uses apple sauce instead of oil and apple cider instead of milk, and I make it in a large pan in the oven, not on the stovetop). Problem #1: The recipes for this week aren't conveniently located with the meal plan, you have to go searching for them in her recipe index. I found what I assume was the pancake recipe, made it, and was a little shocked that this was supposed to feed four people since I only managed to get 8 small pancakes out of it. I mean, it fed us, but we weren't all that hungry, and Samuel ate three of them.
Maybe I used the wrong recipe? Maybe I was supposed to understand that she meant to double it?
Anyway, we went out to play and when we got back it was Samuel's naptime. I'd hoped to feed him lunch before putting him down to bed, but he was having none of it, and instead took a piece of bread and butter and a glass of milk to his room. I assumed these were acceptable, since the meal plan told me to give him 'cinnamon toast' for a snack and milk at lunch.
Problem #2 came up pretty quickly when I went to start the soup - this meal HAD no recipe. I couldn't find one. I looked through the lentil recipes and the soup recipes and it was nowhere, so I assume I am just supposed to know how to make lentil and vegetable soup from scratch on my own? Well, I skimmed the stock, heated it, peeled and chopped the vegetables (and this was another thing - how much of these vegetables am I supposed to use? What if I use too many carrots and run out of them for a later carrot recipe?) drained and added the lentils and went to make the dumplings.
There also was no dumpling recipe. So I had to Google 'dumpling recipe', and find one I could make with only the ingredients she gave me.
Problem #3 - No word of a lie this lunch took me over an hour to make. We all sat down to our soup at 2pm, none of us terribly hungry because we'd filled up on bread and butter while waiting for the soup to cook.
The soup I had made used 3 carrots, 2 onions, 2 stalks of celery, 1 cup rehydrated soaked green lentils, 6 cups turkey stock and 1/3 sweet potato. I know the potato wasn't on the grocery list, but it was in my fridge and I didn't want it to go bad. The dumplings used butter, flour, b. powder, milk, salt and seasonings. It was decent soup, nothing to write home about but certainly edible. I've made better dumplings. There was certainly a tonne of it left over, a least half the pot, so guess what David will be taking for lunch to work tomorrow. Or maybe I'll freeze it.
With all of that soup in our stomachs from lunch, none of us was really eager for supper, especially when I told David what it was. More beans. My friend Martha gave me a good idea, though, rather than cook the onions, beans and collard greens separately, why not saute them together, with a bit of that garlic butter I made earlier? That didn't sound half bad! (By the way, what on earth is a collard green? I bought kale - is that similar?)
I skipped making the hoe cakes for one reason only - we are swimming in food from day 1 over here. I rehydrated double the amount of beans and lentils, made 6 cups more broth than I needed, and have copious leftovers from the two meals I made. No need to make more food. But in the interests of the challenge, I will make them sometime this week.
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