weekly bits #19

my 29th birthday, fall festivities galore & burned focaccia

Haaaapppppyyy HaLLooWeeEEnnnn!!! It’s the spookiest day of the year and as of yesterday, I’m another year older. 29 and feelin’ fine! It’s fun to be in the last year of my 20s — I suppose there’s a little bit of that ooo, I’ll be 30 soon societally baked-in unease, but I don’t really think that comes from me. Mostly I just feel surprised I’m not older already.

Shall we?

1. We started off the week with a new plant Sam snagged from our neighbor’s driveway — “free to a good home!” And we, thanks to Sam, are a great home for a plant in search of one. We don’t know what kind of plant it is except that it’s indoors, and while we have yet to find her perfect place within the house, she fits right in. Unfortunately shortly after this photo Leonard took a nice chunk out of one of the leaves for a snack, which he has since learned is unacceptable. I love the purple coloring of the leaves underneath…it’s like a giant Swiss chard!

2. Thanks to a day totally thwarted by renovation mishaps, I found myself with a mass of over-proofed sourdough…dough. Sourdough dough? Dough for bread made with sourdough starter. Or just ‘sourdough,’ probably. Anyway — I abandoned it during an impromptu 8-hour reno work day and almost threw it away before I remembered the best and easiest thing to do with over-proofed dough is to use it for focaccia. I tossed it in the fridge for a few days and when the time came I let it warm up a bit on the counter, coated a sheet pan with olive oil, stretched and dimpled it and boom, focaccia! Add some more olive oil and toppings (like rosemary and garlic) and bake it on the bottom rack at 400 degrees or so for ya know, awhile. I made the horrendous mistake of popping it on the top rack for a quick broil at the same time Sam started cooking something on the stove, so my hopeful 30 seconds of browning time turned into 3 minutes and I absolutely burned the shit out of it. So…you win some, you lose some. But — salvageable! Just needed to slice off the burnt bits on the top, and it actually tasted really good.

3. The focaccia went particularly well with a too-soupy shepherd’s pie I made this week, which was delicious albeit more like stew with mashed potatoes streaked throughout. I love a shepherd’s pie this time of year, and any recipe that involves a ground meat is a favorite because it’s just so stress-free to cook. I browned some ground beef (though I think lamb is more traditional) in a big cast iron skillet, then removed it and sautéed some finely diced carrots, celery, onion, garlic & mushrooms in the beef juices. Added some tomato paste to cook for a minute or two, then Worcestershire sauce, stock, and some soy sauce (adds a really nice depth of flavor IMO) and let it simmer with the beef added back in while I made mashed potatoes, about 20 minutes or so. Much butter, sour cream, and cream for the potatoes. Too much, turns out, because while they were delicious they were way too runny for my purposes — I also didn’t help myself by adding more liquid to the meat mixture and totally forgetting to add some flour to thicken it. Alas. Notes for next time. I topped the soupy meat mixture with the mashed potatoes and baked in the oven for another 20 minutes, let it sit for maybe 5, and dished it out with a desperate effort to keep the potatoes from completely mixing in with the rest. Thankfully we had the focaccia to mop up the extra juices, and while a bit “informal” as they might say on the Great British Baking Show, tasted delicious.

   Below the paywall, how my grandpa saved our bathroom renovation, a spooky corn maze, a Crumbl cookie mystery, all of my birthday deets and more…