Multi-taskers Multi-tasking

 Well, babies don't have to multi-task because their whole effort goes into just being precious.

 The Golly Green Giant stopped by today. It was a very nice distraction to a very irritating day.  I could have used some of those tomatoes during school today as the entertainment was ... well... in need of some tomato throwing.  You know you have a bad day in school when you find yourself in your closet cleaning it out before lunch.  But as life would have it, we had to do something with all these glorious tomatoes. 

 However at the same time Sam had decided to take out cow tongue out of the freezer for dinner. Cow tongue.  And here my plan was to give it to some people who appreciate it.  But no, I had to try something that was going to be tasting me back.  I had to google to find a recipe.  I happened upon this one:  From an American Living in Spain.  But I added in garlic... I thought they ate lots of garlic over there.  Then again... this is an American living in Spain...

 So it was a tomato, carrots, onions, (garlic), pepper, cover with water, stick in the cow tongue and boil for an hour and a half. Then you try and take off the skin.  It was debatable what was the skin.  The white stuff clearly came off but what about that tough layer under that before the stringy meat part?  There was a debate about it.  I opted for removing anything that resembled taste buds but the ones who were trimming the skin (tongues have skins, right?) with our fine, dull, pathetic knives thought the gray matter should remain intact.  We are new to this, but thankfully cows only have 1 tongue so we won't have to worry about this again for a while.  Then we pureed the "stock" into a nice sauce.

 Another project going on during this time was canning tomatoes.  These are skinned (de-skinned?) tomatoes.  A woman I worked with years ago told me that you can just remove the skins, boil them up good and hard and then can them into hot jars and they will seal beautifully (like inverted jelly). 

 Meanwhile, Frodo gave up the tongue skinning process and Sam took over.  I seem to recall seeing friends of ours doing this project much more simply.  That said, after the skin was off... mostly... then we sliced it really thin (thinly?) dredged it in flour and egg and lighthly fried it to golden brown then stuck it in the above mentioned sauce.

 Meanwhile Galadriel was trying out a french baguette recipe.

 Delicious!

 Did I mention we were also making salsa at this time?  Now that was really good.

So you ask what was the actual dinner. Well, sit down because this is probably going to put your gut into a convulsion as it totally does not go together at all.  There was the fresh salsa and tortilla chips, tongue in a tomato veggie sauce, french bread, fried sweet potatoes (another project) and mozzerella sticks (that was Aragorn's contribution after he ran to the store to get the jalapenos and cilantro and something else or other for the salsa and came home with frozen mozzerella  sticks...)  Oh... he also came home with Mike's hard black cherry lemonade and some kind of "smart" ice cream 4 pack... it was perfect as there were only 4 people in the house who behaved today... actually I didn't behave at all but I'm the mom... I need my perks sometimes).  That's what happens when you send a man to the store for something. 

So, how did we like the tongue? Well, the recipe was very bland but with alot of pepper it was pretty good, albeit a pyschologically challenging dinner. :D

♥ Julie