if I pay $40 for a haunted house I better die
colder days, dollar produce, and a sheet pan roast
It’s nearly the end of October, which feels unbelievable. It’s gotten cold enough to think about turning on the heat, so I vacuumed the heaters, which is always more for peace of mind than it actually doing anything. I’ve turned on the ones in the bathroom and dining room so far, and they still smelled like burnt hair. I also bought the most ridiculous thing ever, an electric foot warmer (sort of a little envelope-shaped electric blanket for your feet), because my feet are cold from October to April at home no matter how thick my socks are, especially at my desk, and I realised I don’t actually need to live like this.
Jeff made one final trip to his dad’s trailer last weekend, to get it ready for the winter (there’s no heat there currently, so it won’t be practical for him to go once it gets cold). I’m happy he won’t be sacrificing a weekend day for more of what’s basically work for awhile, though I have enjoyed finding ways to fill the days when he’s gone. Last Saturday wasn’t bad, weather-wise, so Liang came to the north shore and we sat on the patio at Beere, enjoying the warmth of the tabletop gas heater while she told me about her trip to Japan. When the sun started to go down and we got hungry, we went up to Chicken Box to pick up food to take back to my place. She tried the chicken and waffles, and I got the sweet & spicy chicken sandwich. It was needlessly large but incredibly delicious, full of bread & butter pickles and red cabbage. We ate in front of the tv watching Stigmata, a seasonally appropriate movie that is maybe not particularly good, but it certainly is very 1999.
It’s been a pretty outrageous week, so I apologise for the brevity of this newsletter. We have an accepted offer on a place we’ve been trying to buy, and trying to sort out everything to complete the terms has been occupying a lot of our time and attention. I won’t say too much more in case it doesn’t work out, but it’s at least feeling like a possibility at this point rather than a fantasy. I know I should probably be starting to go through some of my belongings for our eventual move, but it’s hard to be motivated to do that when we still aren’t sure where we’re going, so the concept of having to move doesn’t feel totally real. And yet, that doesn’t stop it from feeling exhausting and terrifying.
On one day this week, Jeff and I were heading home much later than usual, so he brought us an order of oyster mushroom calamari from work. We reheated it in the toaster oven while I cut up some kale and romaine hearts for a repeat of last week’s caesar salad. The vegan calamari is one of my favourite things at Meet, and they actually have their own caesar that features it, but their dressing just isn’t classic enough for my tastes. Anyway, it was nice a way to use up the leftover dressing and make dinner in the ten minutes we waited for the toaster oven.
We got a couple questionable produce items from the dollar rack over the weekend: some onions, a couple pounds of roma tomatoes, and a bag of shishito peppers. Jeff made a simple tomato sauce that’s similar to one I make, just tomatoes and onions cooked down with lots of butter (mine uses olive oil instead) and some fresh herbs if you’ve got ‘em. He put it on the back burner while making breakfast and it made the house smell great, and then he blended it together into a nice texture while taking a break from watching Fellowship of the Ring with our nephew. We ate it on some linguine later that evening, and it was perfectly satisfying with just some ground pepper and parmesan on top.
The next day I picked through the shishitos and managed to salvage about half of them, which wasn’t really enough for a dish on their own, but enough to make me not upset about spending a dollar on the bag. I took a container of tomato-basil soup out of the freezer (see? a little gift to myself from last month), and roasted the peppers under the broiler until they were collapsed and just a little blackened, around ten minutes. While the soup thawed and warmed up in the pot, I cut the peppers open butterfly-style for grilled cheese sandwiches (we used extra-aged cheddar). This was way more amazing than it had any business being, and I was very happy to have just enough roasted peppers left to do the same for lunch again the following day.
We pulled some potatoes and carrots from the garden, and I roasted them with golden beets and spicy sausage using this recipe. I’ve made this one with the specified potatoes and brussels sprouts before, but it works with basically any hardy veg you have and the honey mustard glaze is so, so tasty. The mustard seeds are so good for texture. I roasted the beets for a few minutes before adding the other ingredients, since they take a little longer to cook through. My tip is to double the honey mustard, so that you can save some to drizzle overtop when you serve. More sauce is almost never a bad thing.
According to people in the comments, this is good with veggie sausage, too, but in that case you might want to make a couple of adjustments for the fact that the sausages won’t release any of their own fat while cooking. Use more olive oil when you toss the vegetables, and don’t forget to check the cooking time for the veggie sausage— if they don’t need a lot of time to brown, you may want to add them partway through instead of at the start, so they don’t dry out. I put dill on top, because it was too gross outside to go get parsley from the garden, and because dill is great with mustard.
We’re back to our usual Friday pizza night, and this past Friday’s we were really struggling to find things to put on them because of how low we were on groceries. And they still turned out turned out pretty good! We put olives and some teeny little jarred pickled sweet peppers on one, and tomatoes and capers on the other. Since we had fresh mozza, they both still felt pretty fancy.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats (or moving costs 😓) are much appreciated.
No newsletter next week as I’m participating in a virtual fan convention, and I have three panels to prepare for! I know a few of you reading this will be attending as well, so I’ll see you there, and for the rest of you, I’ll be back mid-November. Happy Halloween, and make sure you pick up some discounted candy.