Sunday June 30, 2013

After spending a few days trying not to cook in my kitchen because it creates far too much heat in a house without AC/swamp cooler and 102 degrees outside, I broke down and cooked for lunch and dinner.  Our Zucchini are starting to come up.  I mean we will ONLY have 19 zucchini coming off our plants this week.  I have been picking them small in the hopes that we can eat them quicker and they won't become overwhelming.  I have been pinning zucchini recipes on pinterest for months in preparation.  I went through and made a board "Zucchini Laden" last night.  Yes, I will be laden with zucchini and hopefully so many good recipes that I will enjoy eating as many as we can this summer.

I made a Zucchini Linguine with olives, garlic, etc.  Here is a link to the recipe.

The bread crumbs didn't turn out super great because I didn't let them cook long enough.  We cut the olives in half, but we should have sliced them.  The red pepper certainly has a kick and Madalynn didn't like that a lot.  I am not an olive oil and noodles fan, but maybe that is because I had far to much regular vegetable oil poured on noodles while I was living in Uruguay as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Note to self: read all the instructions before cooking so you don't dirty more pans than necessary.  I also added crumbed bacon bits on top.  I wish I had remember to put those on while I was cooking the zucchini so that they were softer.  It was a great option for lunch.

For dinner I realized that I had an entire bag of red potatoes that I bought like a month ago in a cupboard.  It has been hard to find a new spot for my fresh produce since Russ took over the toaster oven area making his cookies.  So, once in a while I do forget the produce that I have bought.  He asked for oven roasted potatoes with Lipton Onion noodle soup mix. They turned out the best I have ever made them!!  I was so excited.  In the future I used 5 larger red potatoes with two packets of seasoning and I scraped and turned them over at least every ten minutes.  I cooked up some frozen broccoli (totally forgetting I was going to make a salad to use some lettuce from the garden and at least one of the remaining tomatoes we got from Vegas last week) and of course added cheese.  It was Sunday.  I am allowed to add fattening ingredients once a week.

Each night I think about the meat that we have stored in our deep freezer: beef, chicken, pork and fish.  I decide which one we have not had in a while and then figure out what sides will go with it.  I have not ever been a mustard fan, so when I read honey mustard recipes I usually don't pin them or try them.  Well, i googled Swai recipes and the first one that came up was a honey mustard recipe.  It was AWESOME!!  I will have to try honey mustard again.  One of the reviews said they had to double the cooking time because it was watery when they opened it.  That is what I had to do.  After the original amount of time I opened up the foil and I left it open while I doubled the time.  Madalynn even liked it and usually she won't eat fish.  It was a hit.  I will have to make it again.

Here is the link.

Russ made Root Beer Floats, Chocolate Chip Cookies and it has been a great night.  I look forward to some adventure tomorrow.