Food For Thought

Food is a hot subject these days with cooking shows seeming to take over television and bloggers trying out new recipes and cookbooks for a year. Spending most of the last 5 years without a cookbook its hard to imagine needing one anymore. I've even gotten to the point where I look up a recipe and think "that would taste good" and make it with only half the ingredients called for and substitute the other half with random fillers and not even bother to measure any of it! For instance, today I was wondering if I could make a peach crisp with only three small peaches, and then remembered that I also had a couple of apples, so I looked up a peach and apple crisp recipe, saw that those flavours went well together and decided to make it... not having nearly enough ingredients for the full flavor I added things and left some out. No flour, so I ground up some oatmeal in my blender and used it instead. Not enough peaches and apples, I added some zucchini. Hardly any brown sugar, I added some white as well.

For those of you who are stuck back at the zucchini part, let me expand my thinking! When I was about 11 or 12 we had a HUGE garden and that year we decided to plant zucchini and see how it would do. Well, we had enough zucchini to last us a life time!!! The whole family ended up looking for ways to use up the zucchini! We ate plenty of zucchini loaf and started grating it and freezing it. Then my wonderful sister-in-law found a recipe for appless apple pie, which called for zucchini instead of apples! It was amazing! The texture was a little off but the flavor was great! The lesson learned, zucchini takes on flavor very well! Having learned that lesson at a young age I add zucchini to a lot of recipes when I am short on ingredients.

The result is a very tasty crisp, once again I have out done myself with hardly anything in the kitchen!!!

Last night was an experiment that turned out ok but not as good as planned. I decided to make tropical-ish chicken. Chunks of chicken baked in a mango sauce with pineapple chunks. I would have worked better if the mango's would have been ripe! Hate to leave you hanging, but I have to run and cook dinner (eggs and potatoes, nice and mindless and easy!). I will try to write more tomorrow.