Eating With Our Eyes Closed

"I had nothing to do with it!"

An infamous line from the Bush administration was Donald Rumsfeld's statement about the Iraq War, "You go to war with the army you have." This is the saying in our house about food, "You make dinner with the food you have". That means no special trips to the store to get that thing that would make dinner just fabulous, or even an item that is completely necessary to create the dish. It makes for some interesting discoveries.

The squash garden

squash growing in the compost pile

I have no idea what this is

 With our garden spewing out squash right and left, I am trying to fit it in Sara P. style to many of our dishes. But I think the poor things would rather die at the Pitts home than be subjected to the humility they experience here. Last night I made two dishes, Zucchini Tortilla Bake and Zucchini Bread Pudding.

I didn't have any enchilada sauce to make a zucchini/tortilla layered Mexican style casserolish thing, which is what I had in mind. So I took tortillas, pasta sauce, fresh basil, lots of zucchini strips and vegan Parmesan and made Zucchini Tortilla Bake. I figured the tortillas didn't know they weren't pasta and the marinara sauce didn't know it wasn't enchilada sauce, so what could it hurt? It was really good. Really easy, really good and I used up two huge over-sized zucchini. A win win.

On to dessert. Ernst loves when I make him vegan bread pudding, I decided to jazz it up a bit. To the chopped walnut bread from Trader Joe's, I added blobs of a cooked sweet potato and shredded zucchini. Over this I poured Rice Dream mixed with vanilla, maple syrup and cinnamon. This is what it looked like before I baked it.

Before baking, the purple color is the walnut bread

After I baked it, well, as Ernst put it so nicely, it looked like dog poop. Yet, it tasted really good. I shouldn't have wheat but I had a "plop" or two and it was quite yummy, if you could get past the looks. After refrigeration, things just got worse. Now it looks like dog vomit, after the dog got into the veggie garden. But we eat what we have around here, so bread pudding it is.

I picked 3 more zucchini from the garden today. I think I heard them planning a Pitts Trip. (Not the Pitts Trips, but a Pitts Trip. There is a huge difference.)

still green tomatoes, are they afraid to ripen, is that it?