… if I didn’t do School Woods, or my other cooking outlets. All last week, and this weekend, I executed various cooking plans, many without sufficient eaters to consume the end results, and one notable flop.
Last Monday, I made green bean salad and broccoli casserole. The salad got eaten up, alright, but I never found any other takers for the casserole except me – I had it for lunch, dinner and breakfast, and finally ditched the last of it Saturday. Wednesday I made this gnocchi gratin from Gourmet, but I used mustard greens and kale instead of spinach, and more of them, and goat cheese instead of ricotta. There’s still at least one serving of it left; Mark ate it willingly enough the first time, with an argula salad topped with leftover cheese & croutons from the green bean salad, but he did leave one large lump of greens behind. I also made spicey squash soup, that we ate Thursday, along with green beans cooked with onions and bacon. It was only a pound of green beans, so we ate them all up, but there’s still a big container of soup in the fridge.
Friday I was a soccer widow. I made sushi rice salad, from my recipe testing copy for Sarah Feldner’s book, and ate it topped with roasted golden beets and two beers, and vampires. I blanched the greens from the beets, and they’re still in the fridge awaiting some fate – as is the rest of the beets, drizzled with white wine vinegar, walnut oil, and pepper. I also made a banana cake. It was probably the notable success – at least the pictures are – this one’s my iPhone wallpaper now.
The last of the Gnocchi Gratin
Al was here, and I had all these ideas to make things that he likes – and clean out the freezer. So on Saturday I made fish & shrimp cakes, using a piece of tuna, and a handful of Costco shrimp from the freezer, held together with mashed potatoes. I poached the tuna in milk, and it boiled up all over half the stove. Despite the poaching, the tuna had the texture of chopped superball, but not much of any taste. I fried up one of the patties so Al and I could sample them, and they were OK, but more like good potato cakes with incidental hunks of fishlike substance. Only edible with large quantities of ketchup or tarter sauce. There’s a tray of 7 of them in the basement, that will probably go directly into the trash on trash day, although I might feed a bit to the cats. They already got the tuna poaching milk that didn’t go all over the stove.
Sunday I made the biscuit cimmy buns that Al likes – and fried potatoes and bacon and scrambled eggs. Between and Mark and Ethan, me, and Al and Emma, all that stuff did get eaten – there’s a little plate of potatoes in the fridge and one cimmy bun left for me. But then I thought I’d make pizza for dinner – to use up the last three slicing tomatoes of the season that came in my CSA box – and that didn’t work out so well. I set the dough to rise and made the tomatoes into a kind of tomato bruschetta topping – skinned, seeded, diced, and tossed with garlic and olive oil and Balsamic vinegar. But Mark had had enough pizza for the weekend – he opted for a sandwich for dinner. I shaped the pizza dough into crusts and froze them, and ate sushi salad myself. Today for dinner I made most of the tomato topping into a kind of cross between pizza bread and bruschetta – maybe the rest will be pasta sauce in another life.
Bruschetta posing for its closeup - tomatoes topped with mozzarella and that little round of goat cheese that was leftover in the fridge
