Last Night’s dinner was one of my favorites: chicken fried pork cutlets, steamed carrots, mashed potatoes, and of course, gravy! This meal is the best comfort food ever. Just wish it wasn’t so much work to make from scratch, though now that I’m doing the steaks in the oven, it’s not nearly as annoying as it was back when I actually fried them in grease on the stovetop.
Though I didn’t get much of anything accomplished today, I did bake some cookies … and having tasty snack foods is important! LOL!
Tonight’s dinner was flank steak medallions stuffed with spinach and feta cheese, zucchini noodles, and a nice fresh salad.
Considering my day included the truck leaving me stranded in a parking lot and my hubby having to rescue me, I’m amazed I didn’t just call for some kind of delivery meals. But I was really looking forward to this meal, so I made it. Totally worth the energy expended!
I hadn’t planned on doing any cooking for Thanksgiving. As always, my plan has had to be altered. Isn’t that always the way it goes?
Mom insisted we come to her house this year –after two years of being at my house. I didn’t want to cook in her tiny kitchen, and I didn’t want her to do any cooking either. Just a day of sitting, eating, talking, and setting up her computer stuff. Therefore, the plan was to pick up some plates of Thanksgiving Day goodness from Threadgill’s and go to Mom’s with it. But … Threadgill’s doesn’t open until 10:30 that morning. We need to be on our way to Mom’s much earlier than that, so there went my plan.
So now there’s a whole turkey thawing in the kitchen sink and a slew of ingredients taking up space on my prep table and in my fridge. Tomorrow, I’ll be doing a lot of cooking to get everything ready to eat and packed up for easy travel and quick reheating. Ugh. Not my plan at all! Not at ALL!
It’ll be OK. I thought about buying already cooked turkey and side dishes but a) it would have been even more expensive, and b) I read the ingredients and gagged. So I decided to just go ahead and cook it all myself. Since I’ll be doing it the day before and can take all day to do it without the stress of people waiting to eat, I think it might even turn out to be fun. Well, maybe not fun, but at least it might not be a totally awful experience. I do, after all, enjoy cooking.
Still … it would be nice if just once one if my plans went AS PLANNED. I suspect this will never happen. My plans always fall apart. Always!
Me I need to go bake some bread. We’ll need it on Thursday, and if I do it today, we can have sandwiches tonight. I’d like to not have a mess in the kitchen after dinner. Be nice not to have to clean the kitchen before I start making a mess of the kitchen
Tonight was another locally grown dinner! In fact, except for the pork, it was all right from my back yard! Yippee!
First up is the breaded pork cutlet … pork supplied by the Richardsons. I love their pork cutlets. Since I dug up potatoes today, there had to be potatoes. I roasted them in a foil package with a few stray carrots that needed pulling up, some rosemary olive oil, some basil, and a head of garlic. And I had just enough tiny pear tomatoes for a little salad with some cucumber, carrots, and the last of the winter scallions.
NOM NOM NOM!
I don’t think I have the words to express how good the potatoes tasted. When I buy potatoes, I spend good money getting local, organic, tasty potatoes. These potatoes blew those potatoes away. Sweet and earthy with a texture like warm butter. I wish my harvest was going to be larger, but I am going to be thankful for every single bite of these potatoes I get to eat. LOL!
Tomorrow … garlic mashed potatoes with butter and sour cream. Can’t wait!
Not being able to face one more night of steamed or stir fried or roasted zucchini, I had to try something different. Unbidden, the thought “zucchini au gratin” popped into my head. Maybe I heard it somewhere. Maybe my brain thought it was being original. Who knows, but it lead me to read a few recipes for such a thing online. They all seemed way too complicated, and I hate complicated. Therefore, I scribbled the ingredients that were the same in all the recipes on a piece of paper and toddled off to the kitchen to wing it and make stuff up as I go along, which is when I most enjoy cooking. LOL!
Anyway, here’s the closet thing to a recipe for what I made tonight. These amounts made a respectable amount for a side dish for two people, so doubling it would be great for 3-4 people (or more, if you like small amounts of side dishes).
1 1/2 cup coarsely grated zucchini
Put it in a colander, salt lightly and toss, and place colander over a bowl to catch the liquids. Set on counter and ignore for about 30 minutes. You can ignore it longer. In fact, longer might be better. The less liquid in the zucchini, the firmer the final dish (I think). When you get back to it, squeeze out as much liquid as you can. I’m lazy. I could have squeezed out more. It’ll still turn out edible and tasty, but it will be more runny. Not a tragedy, in my opinion.
Next…
1 tablespoon butter (or, I suppose, margarine)
1 tablespoon flour
Melt the butter in a skillet, mix in the flour, whisk until it’s really thick and slightly darker than butter color. Bravo! You’ve just made a standard roux! Quickly add all at once and continue whisking…
1/2 cup milk
Congrats! You’ve made a white sauce … or gravy, if you prefer to call it that. Add salt, pepper, and then stir in the zucchini. I had this on low heat while I was doing it, because I wanted the zucchini to cook a little and the whole thing to thicken.
Pour the whole mess into a low, flat baking dish like a pie pan. Individual ramekins might be nice too, for a more formal dinner. Then break out the seasoned bagged stuffing.
Not that instant mix stuff. I mean the simple bags of dried bread cubes/crumbs with some seasonings tossed on one commonly sees around Thanksgiving. Since I bake all our bread products, there is often no stale bread around to make bread crumbs out of, so I keep the stuff on hand at all times. Very handy.
Usually, I would put it in my little food processor and turn it into finer crumbs, but like I said, I’m lazy. I just tossed a bunch of the little cubes on top of the zucchini mix in the pie pan, topped the whole thing with mozzarella cheese (all I had on hand), and bake it in the oven (middle rack) at 400ºF for about 20 minutes (until the top was browned and crusty).
Definitely a basic recipe that can be played with endlessly. I’m having all kinds of ideas. Mostly though, I wish I’d made enough for lunch tomorrow! Good thing I still have some zucchini that needs to be eaten!