“My grandmother was a tough woman. She buried three husbands and two of them were just napping.” — Rita Rudner
My grandmother is also a tough woman — tough to be very close to. My mom’s mom moved to Texas to be closer to all of us (and away from Illinois winters) 10 years ago. She adores cigarettes, has a harsh Rockford accent, lives in a trailer park, and has prepared her entire life for complaining to be an Olympic sport. But she also makes my kids a special Halloween bag of candy every year, grins and laughs when telling stories about them, and keeps photo albums for all of her grandchildren. She’s no grandmother you’d order up yourself, but she is what she is.
She was recently diagnosed with emphysema. This, of course, gives her more to complain about. But it also makes her scared and more human than she has appeared to me in all my 42 years. There’s not a lot I can do; the burden, of course, mostly falls on my mom. But I visited her in the hospital, held her hand when she cried, connected her with a pulmonologist here in Dallas, and am fixing her some meals for her freezer so she doesn’t have to cook. I’m trying to meet her where she is. She’s 80. She’s not going to change and has a terminal illness. I can’t do much for her but I can listen and I can cook.
So, with meals for Grandma in mind, here’s this week’s schedule:
Sunday: Our last meal with our extra guests for the weekend. Love them but can’t imagine actually having four boys. How do people do it? For a weekend, though, it was a blast. Tacos seems like an easy way to feed the masses, and I have half a brick of Velveeta left from some holiday meal we can use for queso. I’ll toss in some frozen corn (cooked, of course) and make some herbed butter with salt, pepper & cilantro they can add to the corn (I hate cilantro so I get brownie points for this without it ending up on my plate). Is 27 degrees too cold for a margarita?
Individual pot pies for Grandma
Monday: Sawyer starts tennis through his school today so we won’t get home from that until around 6 pm. Noah is climbing, so he’ll be home around 7:45 pm. Plenty of time to make something tasty that doesn’t require much pre-planning. I think I’ll try two new pot pie recipes from Epicurious.com: veggie pot pie and easy chicken pot pie (I’m going to try the latter in one large dish instead of two small). Salad on the side. I can’t make it this time because I’ll also keep some leftovers for Grandma (she doesn’t do spice), but I’m intrigued by this Moroccan chicken pot pie recipe. Yum. Definitely worth a try in the future.
Tuesday: Getting Noah from school at 3:30 pm, Sawyer at 4:45 pm as he has after-school chess. Noah is home much of this week, studying for exams. We had to cut back on his totally insane rock climbing schedule and reign it in to just insane a couple of months ago. If he does well this week, we go back to practicing five days a week. Whips me to think about, but he’s worked hard and this is his passion. Anyway, time to cook in the late afternoon/early evening. I have five pounds of potatoes from this weekend’s co-op pickup so we’ll have rosemary potatoes (good for breakfast leftovers and for Grandma), roasted or grilled chicken (depends on the weather), and a mixture of kale and spinach from co-op (sauteed with some purple onion, garlic and butter). Noah will just skip the chicken and eat more potatoes. UPDATE: Sirloin steak on crazy sale at Whole Foods. Ditched the chicken.
Wednesday: Grandma has a doctor’s appointment near here this morning so I can’t plan on a lot of time to myself for meal planning today. If I don’t have to go get her, we’ll have breakfast together (leftover rosemary potatoes, eggs & cheese in a tortilla is always a hit). Guitar lessons at 5 pm and my Mission & Social Justice committee meeting at church at 6 pm means I won’t get home until 7:30 or 8 pm. Fend For Yourself evening that could involve the rest of the group eating before I get home if we pull off breakfast.
Farfelle w/ golden beets, beet greens & pine nuts
Thursday: Keeping a friend’s 3-year-old for the latter half of the day while she has a much-deserved hair appointment. While I likely can’t work while he’s here, I can probably cook. Boys have their guitar recital tonight at 6:30 pm. Maybe Clyde can come home early and we can eat then, or we’ll just eat afterward. Either way, needs to be low maintenance. I have golden beets from co-op pickup and have no clue what to do with them. So we’ll go with this farfalle with golden beets recipe. If Sawyer doesn’t like it (always a possibility when introducing a new, weird vegetable), he can just have pasta with Parmesan. I’ll do everything but the pasta and final tossing together if we eat post-recital for a quick turnaround when we get home. UPDATE: While I’d already done the first step of this recipe (sauteed the onions) earlier in the day, an unexpected Dallas traffic jam gave me too little time to finish the rest in time to get to the recital. I improvised, tossing the amazing onions in with the pasta, more olive oil, cherry tomatoes, salt, pepper and goat cheese. The combination of the goat cheese and those sauteed onions was amazing.
Friday: Family breakfast as I’m going out to celebrate a girlfriend’s birthday. This fruit & oat muesli sounds good and can be made the night before. UPDATE: Forgot to make the muesli so improvised. Food was great. Family fellowship left a lot to be desired.
Saturday: Clyde is traveling next week for work so we’ll get together with friends for dinner, here or there. Plans in the making. UPDATE: Friends coming here tonight for arroz con polly y chorizo for the carnivores, dal curry soup for the vegetarians. Friends bringing salad, chocolate mousse and Scattergories. And there may be wine.
That farfalle looks fabulous. (Did I spell that right??) I am a huge fan of beets and pine nuts. (And goat cheese, which has nothing to do with this post. Just getting it out there for the record.)
Funny you should mention goat cheese (always a favorite subject of mine). That evening, I did the onion part earlier in the day, knowing we’d be tight for time trying to get dinner done before the guitar recital. Weird traffic around Dallas made dinner even more tight so I had to abandon the beet recipe. I boiled the pasta, added in the already sauteed onions (oh my god they were amazing!), cherry tomatoes, olive oil, salt, pepper — and goat cheese. The combination of the goat cheese and sauteed onions was divine. So I’ll let you know if I ever make it through the whole recipe, but the first step produced amazing results!
[...] some chicken in the freezer (Clyde can grill that up for us and have some leftovers to freeze for Grandma), sauteed spinach, broccoli (we like both; kids only like the latter), with some brown rice I [...]