starch
What do I tell you about last night, then? Hmm. Well, I made a dinner dish I had never made before. It was basically a scallop potato casserole. And I loved it!
Shobhit wanted me to burn through some of our aging potatoes for the dinner he asked me to make, since he worked until 8:15. "Potato cheese casserole with veggies and maybe bread crumbs," was his suggestion over text. "Potato casserole" actually sounded pretty appealing to me, especially with cheese thrown in the mix. The issue for several minutes was, when I googled "potato casserole" recipes, I kept finding recipes that called for things we did not have, and I did not want to be forced to go to the store -- most notably mushroom soup, and/or chicken broth. Obviously we're not going to eat any chicken broth, but we have no broth of any kind at home.
But I kept looking! I found this page of "18 Potato Casseroles That Are Peak Comfort Food," and opened several of them into new tabs as possibilities -- almost all of them disqualified by ingredients I did not have. But! Then I found this very simple one that I could do quite easily: "Parmesan Potato Casserole". Only seven ingredients, only one of which was missing from my kitchen -- rosemary, and who gives a shit about rosemary? All I had to do was smother thinly sliced peeled potatoes in garlic and butter, salt and pepper, bake for an hour, cover in parmesan, then bake for another half an hour.
It was certainly time consuming, just for all the baking; another half an hour to start, because of the chopping and peeling. So this dinner took me like two hours to make, although I did watch an episode of Stranger Things 3 while it was baking. In any case, I added garlic powder to the salt and pepper mix, on top of five minced fresh garlic cloves. This dish was far more seasoned than anything I usually make. But! I did not want just potatoes covered in butter and seasoning. I also chopped up half an onion, half a bell pepper, four mushrooms, and two Field Roast Veggie Sausages and mixed all that up. So once the potatoes had baked for an hour, I then covered them all with a semi-thin layer of parmesan (this took a full cup out of our tall bottle of grated parmesan); covered that with the vegetables and veggie sausage; covered that with the last third or so of the parmesan, and then sprinkled another cup of grated cheddar to top it -- and then baked it all for another half hour.
Delicious. I will definitely do this again. This might even be my favorite new way to make potatoes. Totally recommend! Five stars!
Shobhit was even pretty impressed with it. I used six of the eight potatoes we had left on the counter and so it made a pretty full casserole dish; it yielded two lunches for me to pack, so that covers both of us for tomorrow, as we still have leftover pasta for today. We're all about efficiency with our cooking. I shudder to think how much money I would be spending if I actually bought my lunch every day. What an insane thing to do.
And you know what? Almost every time I have my packed lunches lately, I actually find myself thinking about how delicious it is. The food I pack for lunch is actually better than the food at most restaurants. Especially if I made it!
Anyway. What else? It's in the eighties several days in a row this week. I can't even remember the last time I wore pants instead of shorts, it must have been sometime in the middle of last week. There was a crispness to my bike ride to work this morning as the city was enveloped in fog, and still I was fine riding in shorts and no jacket. We may be going through a summer that seems mild due to the lack of the more typically sporadic peaks into the nineties, but I bet anything the average temperature for the summer is still above the normal average. And averages are what mean anything, and it's too bad this country is full of morons who don't get that.
I just ate my lunch out on the patio, and it was quite pleasant. I would still gladly exchange it for a day of rain. Granted, August has always been historically Seattle's driest month anyway -- and I feel almost like knocking on wood that we have not yet been choked with smoke from regional wildfires -- but, guess what? Even though we are slightly above average rainfall for the month thus far (all of six days in), we are still more than three inches short of normal since the beginning of the year. It's always going to be this way more often than not from now on, so I will always welcome rain no matter what day or time of year it is.
Well, okay. Okay! I did appreciate my Birth Week being pretty rainless. I never said I wasn't selfish!
[posted 12:20 pm]