Autumn's Bounty

After last week I realized that I needed to cram the rest of Pumpkin Season in pretty quick before the pile of little pumpkins at my grocery store disappeared, and thus: Autumn's Bounty. No recipe for this one, as the only canonical ingredients are "pumpkin" and "yam" and then a picture that definitely includes red and green things that are neither pumpkin nor yam, so I just roasted some tomatoes and Brussels sprouts and orange starches and that was that.

Bountiful enough for ya?

This was another triumph of the Stardew Valley...anti-curse? Blessing? Both of the children ate a dinner consisting solely of four roasted vegetables and did not complain about it. Ivy doesn't like tomatoes, but she liked this tomato. It's almost unnerving.

Ultimately, whomst among us can resist the overwhelming bounty of autumn?

I do not know what this verdict means. She struggled with the idea of averaging out her feelings about each individual vegetable and came up with...this.

Anyway, some of us are extremely delighted that "autumn" has finally gotten to the part where it isn't just "still summer" and some of us have become a sentient pile of layers on the ground at the bus stop.

ASSESSMENT: This is the most uh...overpromising of dish names, for what turns out to be pumpkin and yam. But video game theming did once again brainwash my children into some actual nutrition, so I can't complain.

PROJECT STATUS: IT'S SO COLD OUTSIDE!!! I feel alive. Here come all the coziest recipes.

Pumpkin Soup

My relationship to autumn tends to go something like this:

Aug 1st: I am ready for autumn. It has been summer for a long time. I know that summer is not over, but there's a chance it's about halfway over, and the only things I care now about are cinnamon and ghost stories.

All of September: Oh, right. This part is actually summer. I lose my will to keep plants alive. I become skeptical of most of the ghosts stories. The percentage of them that can be explained by sleep paralysis is very high. Still quite bullish on cinnamon. I sometimes let my fingertips wistfully brush against the sleeves of the flannel shirts in my closet.

Every day in October: *checks forecast* not yet *checks forecast* not yet *checks forecast* not yet *checks fore--oh crap, it's October 24th already? *Scowls at forecast* time for pumpkin soup I guess.

And then it's Christmas, somehow.

*tears up in frustration at the word "seasonal"*

Pumpkin soup joins the long list of "sounds good but I'm going to do it the hard way" recipes, although roasting a couple of pumpkins rather than opening a can isn't quite the same jump as making stupidly bread-y donuts -> buying a good donut. Roasting, in and of itself, is not hard at all and in fact I have done it many times without incident. But breaching the unyielding winter squash exoskeleton is, for me, always an unpleasant adventure. Just trust me that the moment below was in fact the middle of a heroic struggle.

Woman did eventually conquer nature. This time.

This was a good and mostly easy (once you're past the death struggle) soup. I am choosing to believe that the less-than-ecstatic expressions below are due to the fact that it is 85 degrees outside, rendering the pumpkin 35% less flavorful and about half as nutritious.

ASSESSMENT: I JUST WANT TO NEED A JACKET FOR MORE THAN TWO DAYS IN A ROW

PROJECT STATUS:  The high tomorrow is supposed to be 60 degrees, in which case I will probably just start snorting bumps of cinnamon off the back of my hand and fully believing in ghosts again.

Maple Bars

Time to make the donuts. (Doughnuts? I'm pretty sure doughnuts is right, but it looks unbearably fancy to my simple peasant eyes.)

Maple bars are, of course, in the category of Sounds Great But Also Like A Huge Pain, so I had been sorta simultaneously putting them off/looking forward to them. Probably should have just...put them off for longer!

The going rate for a bar-style donut in these parts is about seventy American cents, and I am here to tell you that having someone else fry up some dough for you is worth at least twice that, especially if you inexplicably choose a recipe that calls for bread flour (????) and ignore your inner voice that has baked approximately one million things over three decades crying out that bread flour should not go in donuts (????) because it will be dense and bread-y and not donut-y. Because when you do that, you end up with extremely disappointing bread-y not donut-y donuts that took half a day's work.

Sorry, I meant "not doughnut-y doughnuts"

Now, the question of why I trust random blonde ladies with food blogs above my own actual knowledge of how flour works is one for...a therapist, probably, but here we are, with a heavy chunk of maple-ish bread that fortunately had a high enough sugar content to garner good reviews.

In better news, the high today is only 77, which means it's...time for earflaps.

ASSESSMENT: BREAD FLOUR. COME ON.

PROJECT STATUS: The number of times I've typed "donut" and "doughnut" today has now hit critical mass and I'm probably going to have to go procure some from a licensed vendor who uses appropriate flour.

Tom Kha Soup

I told myself I would go back to making soup once the weather broke and lo and behold, earlier this week we had an extreme cold front that brought the high temperature down to about 82 degrees. It was a really good day. I wore a sweatshirt for a few minutes. The high today is 96. It's October 10th. My sweatshirt is back in its drawer.

Anyway, "try my hand at Tom Kha Soup" was one of my stated goals from the outset, which is funny because of three listed ingredients, I actively dislike two of them. Such is the incredible lure of a Thai-flavored broth, I guess? I had to specifically search for "Tom Kha shrimp" because it seems like the default version is chicken, which sounds much better to me. But, alas, we do not eat the chickens in Stardew Valley. We are pescatarians.

Middling reviews from the children. Thumbs slanted, faces iffy. It should be said that after giving her rating, Anna noted that she did not especially like the texture of the chicken, which makes sense given that there is no chicken in the soup and what she was eating was mushrooms. I guess if you ever want to trick a hardcore carnivore into eating this you can pretend that it's full of chicken and you are just bad at cooking it.

ASSESSMENT: It's just...so full of shrimp and mushrooms.

PROJECT STATUS: My back still hurts but I have learned to enjoy my time on the torture mat. It distracts me from the weather. No more soup until the high drops back under 90. 

Pancakes, Hashbrowns, Fried Egg, Complete Breakfast

There are a couple of factors weighing heavily on all of my decision-making this week, and they are as follows: 1) I am solo parenting, and 2) three days ago I pinched a nerve in my lower back and I am finding it excruciating to walk, stand, sit, lie down, exist in this be-curséd corporeal form, etc. You would think that my number one goal in recipe selection, therefore, would be "least amount of standing required to prepare," but no, it was in fact "least likely to cause anything in even the ballpark of whining from my children." My patience for whining, which is, on my best day, rather lower than one would hope after a decade of parenting, becomes absolutely non-existent in the face of complicating events.

And thus, Complete Breakfast...for dinner.

The beauty of this meal is that it incorporates three other Stardew recipes within it: Pancakes, Fried Egg, and Hashbrowns, which makes this pitiful attempt to placate my daughters the most productive output I've had in quite a while.

ASSESSMENT: This is the best batch of hashbrowns I have ever made, lending credence to the idea that all great art requires suffering, or perhaps that I have finally landed on a recipe that works for me.

PROJECT STATUS: Man. I don't know. My bottle of ibuprofen and this medieval torture device I bought on Amazon and I will have to get back to you on that.

Cookies

When Alex and I were first conceiving ways to make this project more complicated than necessary, one of the ideas was to add some element to the "cookies" recipe to make it seem as though they had been pulled out of a trash can. In the game, you can dig around the garbage in town (don't get caught though, people uh...don't like that for some reason) and sometimes pull out useful things and there are often cookies next to Evelyn and George's house.  My personal theory is that Evelyn is such a masterful, perfectionist, Michelin-star-craving baker that many batches of perfectly good cookies end up in the bin. At least that's what I tell myself while gifting them to some other random townsperson. At any rate, I had been mulling over various things I could sugar-glue to a batch of chocolate chip cookies to give it an edible yet trashy sheen for several months when my 10-year-old came home from school and said "I want to make chocolate chip cookies." And letting her do that seemed a lot easier than, you know, whatever nonsense I was planning.

Since Anna was the one making the recipe this time, it didn't make sense to record her reaction to it.

ASSESSMENT: Chocolate chip cookies are a perfect food, and I feel very good indeed about having created a small human who can provide them for me.

PROJECT STATUS: Delegated

Farmer's Lunch, Coleslaw

Things got very theme-y this week as I decided I was due for a Farmer's Lunch, having embarked on some Actual Gardening Out of Doors. I have to admit I wouldn't have thought to pair an omelet with a side of parsnips, but then I've never been a farmer before, have I?

Worth it just for the reminder that I can eat eggs midday anytime I feel like it

Anyway, I wasn't about to waste a +3 Farming buff on a day when I wasn't literally attempting to coax living things out of the ground, come on.

No reaction shot from the children, because they were enjoying non-farmer's lunches at school at the time, but let's see how my beautiful pea shoots feel about it:

No complaints

I also threw in some coleslaw this week, which as you may recall I kind of tried to make in July? Maybe? Anyway, I included all the listed ingredients this time, and also made some schnitzel, which I highly recommend!

Appraisals of the coleslaw were mixed, with Anna presenting a favorable rating with a face betraying a deep well of ambivalence, and Ivy giving it a so-so rating that she seems quite confident about. The schnitzel was enjoyed by all.

ASSESSMENT: I'm so excited to be a farmer now! Real salt of the earth type. I expect any day now someone will come to a diner and interview me about my political opinions.

PROJECT STATUS: Sowing, reaping, etc.

Ice Cream

Look, I think we allllll deserved a break after the snails, I'm not a monster. I'm just an anxious person with weird coping strategies. Clearly the people around me, many of whom are innocent elementary-aged children, were due for a Stardew recipe on the pleasant end of the spectrum. I, on the other hand, was in a mental space that required some culinary hair-shirting, and "ice cream" seemed like it provided the most baroque possible path to having a treat. It's also a fun way to celebrate the fact that summer will never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never end.

Yum!

Since the only ingredients listed are milk and sugar, I had to decide what flavors would be represented by pink, green, and white ice cream all on one cone. I considered several combinations, some of which would have been amusingly unappealing, but finally landed on raspberry, lime, and vanilla. (I did goose the color of the lime ice cream with a couple drops of green food coloring.) 

And then. I made. The cones.

*Hold for applause*

ASSESSMENT: "It's hard to find someone who doesn't like this." My sample size was admittedly small, consisting of one husband, two children, and one mother-in-law, but as far as I can tell this is accurate. 

PROJECT STATUS: Going to go distribute these to the townspeople, finally make some friends

Escargot

I would not characterize my children as especially picky eaters, but they do tend to be deeply skeptical eaters. Any dish that is set before them is met with concerned frowns and many, many questions: what is in this, what else is in this, what is that red thing, what are those green flecks, is that onion, is that sausage, is the black pepper spicy, etc. etc. It doesn't mean they won't then proceed to eat whatever concerning combination of ingredients I have given them, it just means that all meals have to run the gauntlet of inquiry first.

UNLESS...

I say "I need you to try this Stardew recipe so I can take a picture of your reaction." In which case, they will just...do it? Without asking questions? Even if my follow-up sentence is "It's SNAILS" with absolutely no reassurances attached?

It's SNAILS

Although Ivy did hang back a little bit on this one to gauge her sister's experience first.

 ASSESSMENT: Snails are an inoffensive yet slightly expensive delivery system for a stick of butter and some garlic when you consider that those things could just be smeared on a baguette instead.

PROJECT STATUS: Probably going to start claiming that every meal is a Stardew recipe just to elide ingredient-suspicion going forward.