Arizona, Mesa - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - Cooking Day

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY BROTHER MIKE!

I promised to cook today, so Greg boarded me in J.  Not really, but that’s probably what it looks like to the neighbors.  The inside of the door is made up of a panel covered in vinyl to match the dash, etc.  The panel was originally stapled to the door (just barely) before it was installed and it was starting to come loose.  Since we couldn’t restaple it, which would show through the vinyl, Greg decided to glue it.  He had to brace something against it to hold it tight until the glue dried.  It turned out well.

 

 

I did go on a cooking binge today.  I won’t have to cook for the rest of the week.  I had washed all of the produce we got at the market when we brought it home, but I wanted to get it into some things we would eat during the upcoming week.  Last night we had the corn on the cob and mushrooms with steaks – yummy.  I made a new recipe with the mushrooms, it turned out really good.

Roasted Mushrooms

1 lb. large to medium mushroom caps, about 8
3 T. olive oil
¼ c. butter
3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
2 tsp. fresh thyme (I used a little over ½ tsp. dried thyme)
1 ½ T. lemon juice
Fresh bread crumbs

Clean the mushroom caps and trim the stems level with the caps.  In a skillet heat the olive oil and just barely brown the cap side of the mushroom, this doesn’t take long.  Remove the caps to an ovenproof dish, stem side up, and wipe out the skillet.  Combine the rest of the ingredients in the skillet and heat until the butter is melted.  Spoon the butter mixture over the mushroom caps.  Top the caps with bread crumbs.  Bake at 400 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes until tender and the bread crumbs are golden.

First on the list for today was potato salad and hard boiled eggs.  The strawberries are sitting to dry off so they can be dunked in chocolate later.

 

 

Bacon and sausage have been browned to heat up for breakfasts later in the week.  Some of the sausage might go into spaghetti sauce.  The roma tomatoes, one of the large onions and cilantro (which was just 10 cents a bunch) went into the fresh salsa.

The pickling cucumbers and more of the onion made a nice salad.  The strawberries have been dipped in dark chocolate (it’s supposed to be good for you, right?).  The other dish is a pound of ground beef that has been browned and taco seasoning has been added.

Sugar cookies are ready for the freezer.  The oblong dish that looks like it is filled with gravel is an experiment.  I had partial bags of chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, pretzel sticks, rice chex, rice krispies and raisins.  It seemed that all of those should work well together, we’ll see.

I love the way these jar salads look.  At least a couple of them will be made into shrimp salads in a day or so.

The last thing on the list was making supper for this evening.  We had beef and noodles with mashed potatoes and green beans.  We’ve got leftovers from that and the fridge is stuffed.  The dishes are done and I’m not messing up the kitchen for the rest of the week.