Thursday, February 26, the food

Last night I went to put the split pea soup in the freezer for next week and realized that I am running severely short on room in there. To free up some space, I pulled out a container of peaches I'd put up months ago, when my mother in law bought us a bushel of peaches. That was fun, even though a lot of them turned out to have spoiled in the bushel basket. Teach me to look before I buy, I guess! Anyway, I'd chunked and frozen these old peaches months ago and they were still pretty good, though they looked kind of sad. I made midnight peach smoothies using frozen peaches, skim milk, a little Splenda, and some vanilla extract. They turned out great! I'm going to do the same thing, probably tomorrow night, with the rest of the peaches, plus the frozen blueberries and the last of our bananas. It will be a fruit bonanza, just in time for grocery day. 

This morning was oatmeal and sandwiches again, ho hum. I need to find some better options for weekday breakfasts and lunches. Leftovers help break the lunch monotony, but breakfasts are pretty blah. I often skip them or move them to the end of the day when I'm up late and hungry. For dinner tonight, though, I made ham fried rice, and that was pretty good. I used another chunk of the giant ham, diced it up, and put it into fried rice with egg, peas, rice, and a packet of fried rice seasoning, then added a liberal quantity of soy sauce. Gotta get my salt and MSG in while I'm young enough that my cholesterol is still good, doncha know. 

On a side note, taking pictures of all my food really shows me how often I use my big pasta bowls instead of regular plates. Got those as a wedding present and totally forgot them for a couple of years, but now they're my favorite dishes. I've got a huge matching one to serve pasta from, but it doesn't see much rotation at all. When you don't have a dishwasher, you serve from the pan! 

After supper I had all this fat that I trimmed off the ham, so I decided to see if I could render it down a little. Pork fat is no good for you at all, but it's a lot of pound weight to just let go to waste, and Emeril says it's like liquid gold for flavoring stuff. I took all the fat, including the stuff I'd cut off the big ham and tossed in the freezer, and put it all in the baking pan for awhile at 350. I got about 3/4 cup of clear liquid fat, and quite a bit of burnt pork rind. The smell was unpleasant. I think there must be a better way to do that, maybe next time I'll do something different. I like to think that when I experiment with leavings and leftovers, it teaches me things without me having to ruin a meal for the lesson.  After that, I made a dozen corn muffins, so we'll have some of those for breakfast tomorrow.