Weekend cooking: yams & apple casserole, roasted broccoli, mashed potatoes

I am making yam and apple casserole, baked potatoes, roasted broccoli. To warm up the house, and my belly.

Someone gave me the yams, and apples, and also red potatoes.

Using yams is always kind of a struggle. They are a hard vegetable to deal with, literally. They take a long time to cook, they're hard to peel, and so on.

When I receive gifts of food from thoughtful friends, I use them. So when I received apples and yams so of course I googled "apples and yams." Recipes abounded. I am making two casseroles, one for my friend who gave me the ingredients.

The apples had to be cored, peeled and sliced, and the yams boiled, cooled, peeled and then sliced. Yikes, a lot of work. You layer the sliced apples and sliced yams. In a small saucepan mix cornstarch, apple juice, butter, brown sugar and lemon juice. Pour over the apple-yam layers. Bake, like, forever, and baste constantly.

There is only 5 minutes left on the timer and there is a lot of juice left. So much I wonder if I doubled the cornstarch. We will see in the end. I'll take the casseroles out and let them rest, and see how much juice remains.

While the oven was on I roasted broccoli too.

As for the red potatoes...they had been accidentally frozen. My friend gave them to me saying, "See if you can do anything with these. I'm going to throw them out." I love a challenge.

Unfortunately, this was not challenging. LOL. All I did was google "I accidentally froze red potatoes."

The first search result was from a frugal site, which was responding to a question, "what can I do with accidentally frozen potatoes?" I love the internet.

The red potatoes had been frozen whole, in a Ziploc. I squeezed them hard. The starch separates, and a lot of water came out. The skins slipped off easily, too. The meat turned a bit gray, but oh well.

I crumbled the meat into a baking dish and popped them in the oven with the other stuff I was baking. This would continue drying them. I did not add any spices, salt, butter or milk. Just a pile o' potatoes, baking uncovered.

When the edges were getting a bit brown and crusty I took it out and let it cool. I decided to make mashed potatoes out of them. Add milk, salt and butter. I think they came out OK. I like potatoes any way they're served. I am giving half to the friend who gave me the potatoes and she will let me know if they are palatable.

It's a gorgeous day. I am going to add oil to the car, and clean the interior. I'll zip over to the friend's house and deliver the food. Then I plan to vacuum my apartment and then take a nap. I want to read this evening, with tea. It's the weekend and life is good.

PS:
Nope, the casseroles are still too juicy. Maybe I did forget to double the cornstarch. Or the recipe makes it this way. I'll never make this again, it's taken hours. My personal favorite-to-try recipe I found this morning is a spicy African yam-peanut soup. I'll do that next time, if I ever get yams again.

Summer in my yard

I think the finest thing about summer, and there are many fine things, is to sit quietly in my chair by the window, reading, listening to the birds nearby and the train in the distance, the day waking up with each turn of the page.

That old comedian Roseanne might claim to be the "Domestic goddess" but I definitely am "Domestic Disaster." I don't know why the simplest domestic things confound me, but they do. This week I was taking a shower. I never take baths. Occasionally, the drain gets to draining slow, and you either put vinegar and baking soda down it or Drano, depending on how slow it gets to draining. I noticed this time that the water wasn't draining at all, but quickly rising over my feet, and on up to the ankles. "That's a lot of water," I thought. "The drain must be really stopped up." When I finished I watched to see if it would drain at all, and it wasn't. "How did it get so stopped up?" I wondered. "It wasn't even going slow yesterday. Maybe there is a stoppage in the system from the kitchen pipe or something." I could not attend to it then, It was Sunday and I needed to get to church. On the way home I bought Drano and a plunger. Plunging the drain yielded nothing. I plunged harder. Nothing, Then harder. I broke the plunger. Yet the drain yielded no drainage. I poured half a bottle of extra strength Draino and left if for half an hour. Nothing.

It was then I'd noticed the drain toggle was "UP". I don't know how that happened. I'm like the absent-minded professor or something, nose always in a book while the house burns down around me, belatedly looking up to ask, "Why are all the firemen here?"

Speaking of Roseanne, I'd stumbled across her new show last night. I didn't recognize her at all at first. I knew the voice was vaguely familiar, but didn't notice that she was the same woman as the one from the show from the 1980s for a few minutes. But I did get annoyed that she swore so much. Literally, every other word had to be bleeped. And this was in a speech where was sharing about how her philosophical outlook had changed during the time she was in Hollywood, and became afraid she was going to hell. That was what caught my attention at first. "Oh, good, a testimony" I thought. She spoke of moving to Hawaii and buying a nut farm. I don't know where she's headed but whichever it is the path toward it will be littered with profanity. I clicked the channel.

The field next door turns a pretty lilac-to-magenta color in mid-summer. Clumps of grass blades of a deep purple mixed in with the yellow and orange an the green make for a colorful array.

It's these guys that make it look purple:

The figs are getting ripe, as are the apples and the pears. Yummy times ahead.

Summer's a-going...

What a great day! The sun was partly hidden half the day behind fluffy clouds, which helped the heat index quite a bit. The humidity was lower and there was a breeze. I think the high temp today stayed below 90. This morning it was positively cool so I quickly baked a blueberry cobbler and steamed a bunch of veggies for supper (to have with brown rice and Asian sauce). Then I did the dishes, in hot water, no less!

The pears are ripe so I picked about 30 pounds of those, and about 5 pounds of apples. I also gathered a huge bag of figs. Inside again, I washed them all and the pears will be set to finish ripening at a friend's and the apples, we will prepare for drying on Friday. The figs will be bagged and frozen.

The cobbler came out great, and with the minor exception of accidentally setting my dish cloth on fire and searing my finger on the metal slider all went well. LOL, I am really a domestic disaster...

Church tonight and then television and reading my new book. A good summer day of one of the last summer days...before SCHOOOOOOLLLLLLL!