Here’s why I don’t like to cook. First, you have to hang
around the kitchen a lot. To watch, listen and smell for signs of food
over-boiling or burning. I tend to have a short attention span. One minute I’m
in the kitchen spreading butter on bread, the next I notice something happening
with the horse out the window so I have to pull boots on and go outside to see
what’s up. Ten minutes later the garlic bread is burnt. Or the pasta has boiled
to mush. Or the tomato soup has boiled over. Again.
Second, you never have $500 dollars worth of exotic spices
and special ingredients in your kitchen with which to complete the recipe, so
you have to substitute. Also, I just cannot stand the idea of putting two cups
of refined white sugar into anything. This is where I really get into trouble. Today
I decided to tackle the two rather large zucchinis (that didn’t even fit in the
kitchen sink) by making some muffins. I used gluten-free flour, until I ran
out. I added hemp, chia, flax and quinoa because I love to think I’m making
something healthy. I brought up the dry ingredients to the right quantity with
some rolled oats.
Then it came to the wet ingredients. Eggs, vanilla, olive
oil, but I’m not adding sugar, so I poured in some maple syrup instead. But
that made it really wet, because syrup is wet whereas sugar is dry. Hmm. Add
some more oats. And some quinoa flakes for good measure. Pour in the cocoa
powder, mix well, spoon into muffin tins. It still looks really wet. Oh well.
Hopefully we have muffins in half an hour, and not 48 servings of chocolate-flavoured
zucchini porridge.
That used up one third of one zucchini. I have four more. I
am planning to force them on dinner guests tonight but I still want to use up
some on my own. I am not going to waste anything that grows in that garden. I
am determined. Mother Nature is up there laughing because she is making me cook
and bake. I’ll show her.
Next, I seed the rest of the two large zucchinis and slice
them into strips like they do in the pub. Of course, my veggies are so large,
the strips are rather curved. I’m quite proud of the way my gluten-free
breadcrumbs turned out. If it wasn’t for this food processor, I would never set
foot on the business side of the kitchen island.
The Farmer doesn’t like me in his kitchen on Sundays. Any
other day of the week, fine, but Sundays he likes everything and everyone in
place and on schedule. Throw a half-confident, disorganized cook into his
kitchen prep area and he gets very stressed. So I move my stuff out onto the
porch. We have another stove there. I take my zucchini slices and dip them
first in egg, then roll in breadcrumbs. So far, so good. Now comes the tricky
part. You have to have the oil hot enough in the fry pan to crisp the batter
but you don’t want it so hot that it burns. Each zucchini stick has to be in
there about 4 minutes on each side to cook through. Most of mine were half-cooked and a little
burnt. The sun porch filled with smoke and all the dinner guests stood between
me and the doorway, commenting on the situation instead of helping or getting
out of the way. The Farmer came in and tried to take over but I managed to
divert his efforts. In the end, everyone
who dared try my cooking had to admit, they were pretty good. There’s nothing
like fresh zucchini from the garden. The taste was lacking in something, so I
added a little garlic salt. Yum.
Paulina found the old deep fryer in the basement, so there’s
that. But I am going to try to perfect the less greasy method of cooking gluten-free
breaded zucchini sticks. I’m not ready to throw in the dish towel yet.
The chocolate muffins turned out perfect. I’m better at this
cooking gig than I thought. Still don’t like it though. I would rather leave the cooking to the
Farmer. At least on Sundays.
Email: dianafisher1@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment