What do you make for supper when it’s 4:50 pm, there’s nothing thawed (and no ideas brewing because ZERO forethought), and everyone crashes through the door growling with hunger?

This was the situation I found myself in Friday last week. It wasn’t like I didn’t have food in the house. I spent 500 dollars several weeks back and we were still well-stocked with the four main starch bases: pasta, rice, bread, potatoes. However, we’d worked our way through most of the leftovers — the spaghetti and meatballs, the sausage lentil soup, the sweet potato and egg bake, the never-ending mojo pork, etc — and it seemed there were no readily-apparent and easily-accessible moving parts to glom onto.

Back and forth I paced, between fridge and pantry, fridge and pantry, what to make, what to make, what to make. People moaned. I studied the the pile of assorted veggies my daughter had brought home. People sighed. I opened kitchen cabinets and pondered. People headed for the showers. And then, whilst standing in front of the fridge and staring at the pile of cold baked sweet potatoes leftover from the previous night’s potato bar, I got an idea.

I slipped the potatoes out of their jackets and cut them into thick slices. I smacked two cast iron skillets on the stove and wacked in some butter and bacon grease. Once the fat melted, I arranged the potato slices in a single layer and salted them heavily. While they sizzled and browned (I flipped them once), I opened two cans of black beans into a kettle, added some cumin and smoked paprika (and maybe a couple other spices that I can’t remember), and set them on the stove to heat.

I sliced a couple of the green onions and a handful of radishes that my daughter had brought home and dumped them in a bowl with a chopped avocado (yay, it’s not rotten!), the juice of a half lime, and some salt. I plucked a few green leaves from a rotting bunch of cilantro and tossed them in. I stuck a spoon in the jug of salsa and another spoon in the almost-empty jar of sour cream, and I dug a container of leftover grated cheese out of the cheese drawer. Supper was ready.

What’s this? everyone wanted to know.

“Sweet potatoes with black beans and toppings,” I said. “Here’s how you eat it,” and I fixed a plate so they could see. “It’s like rice and beans but without the rice.”

No one thought much of the meal — it was food, it was good, the end — but I was enormously pleased with myself. It was so ordinary — leftovers and canned beans and a hodge-podge of random bits — and yet it was creative and healthy and original.

And to think, only a short time before I’d felt like there was “nothing” to eat, ha!

What rabbit-out-of-hat dinners have you made lately? Enchant me, please. It’ll still be at least a couple days before I’ll get to the grocery store…

This same time, years previous: prism glasses, on getting a teen out of bed in the morning, the quotidian (5.12.14), maseca cornbread, the quotidian (5.14.12), rhubarb cream pie, hummus.

This same time, years previous: our sweet Francie, an honor, the quotidian (5.9.16), tomato coconut soup, the quotidian (5.11.15), immersion, black bean and sweet potato chili, happy weekending, one more thing, getting ready.

For a long time now, I’ve been wanting to improve my children’s knowledge of geography. Years ago, I tacked a world map to the wall in the hopes that it’d help them get their bearings (not sure how, really — through osmosis maybe?). We used to play the Ten Days in the USA game. At one point I let them play computer geography games. And there was a bit of real-life exploring: Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Peru.

But none of it seemed to help. They were still relentlessly (and embarrassingly) clueless. 

This spring, I’d decided I’d had enough. They ought to be able to at least identify the continents, for crying out loud, and knowing the names and locations of a few of the countries might prove useful. There was no need to memorize stuff, just the ability to navigate a map would be enough.

So I started researching — first geography books and then, when I realized that wasn’t exactly what I was after, atlases. I wanted something that was easy to read, informative, interesting to look at, and not overly juvenile.

I picked out a few atlases on Amazon and then, because of the higher-than-usual price tags and my own uncertainty about what would actually be useful (I’m no whiz at geography either, shhh), I made my husband sit down with me and wade through the descriptions and reviews.

After much deliberation, I finally made my choice. Not too scholarly and not too elementary, not too clunky big and not too eensy small, not too boring drab and not too gaudy colorful, this one, I hoped, would be just right.

And it is! It’s an absolute delight.

We frequently use the atlas to look up places that we’re discussing, reading about, listening to in the news, and once we even used it to look up the address of a blog commenter’s strange-sounding address to make sure it was real and not spam.

Most days, the kids take turns sitting down with me to read and discuss different sections. We spend a lot of time just looking at the different maps and comparing them to each other. For example, we study the global maps on cloud cover and then relate what we’re learning to the previous maps about land cover and and climate change and water sources and income levels and so on.

The more we read and examine, the more connections we begin to make. Why are places more populated along the coast lines? Why is this country so wealthy even though its climate is so inhospitable? What’s with all the lakes in our northern states? Why are there barren strips to the east of the mountains in the north and to the west of the mountains in the south? Cyclones are counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, and — Hey! Water goes down the drain counterclockwise here, too!

And it’s a great tool for story-telling. Here, I say, pointing to Qatar, is where your uncle met your aunt. Here — pointing to Hong Kong, Las Vegas, etc — is where your cousins live. Here is where Pip lives (we’re reading Great Expectations, remember). Here — pointing to Thailand — is where your dad hung out on the beaches for a month after hiking here — pointing to the Himalayas. Here, here, here….

It’s a lovely book, is what I’m saying.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (4.6.19), Thursday snippets, the quotidian (5.8.17), moroccan carrot and chickepea salad, rhubarb crunch vanilla ice cream, how it is, so far today, the family reunion of 2012.