Today was a rare Friday with nothing going on. rob and I were both off of work, with no evening gig. We slept in and the only plans were to go to the grocery store and maybe see a movie. But we each managed a spectacular fail early in the day. Mine had only short-term consequences:
I was rooting around through the shelves while making my grocery list, and picked up a plastic bag full of quinoa. Hadn't touched that for some time, and...as it started to softly cascade all over the floor, I realized there was a hole in the bag. A good 1/3 of the kitchen floor and the cats' water dishes were covered in the world's tiniest grain. Adding to the mix is our ongoing ant problem. They'd reappeared en masse last night but I didn't have the energy to deal with them.
Out came the vacuum sucking up quinoa 'n ants, ants 'n quinoa, for a good long while. I'd discovered they found an open box of cereal, which is where the latest horde was focused...so got rid of that, and eventually got everything fairly clean. Sigh.
rob's fail, unfortunately, was much more costly...though in hindsight, an even better story. A couple weeks ago he'd managed to get his hands on an ancient, dirty tenor banjo that had been sitting around in a barn for a few decades, and today he began the process of taking it apart. He was having trouble separating the skin head from the rim, and as he was struggling with it the banjo managed to slip out of his hands and the headstock whacked his laptop screen. Rendered probably 1/8 of the screen useless. So, rob spent the rest of the afternoon shopping online for a new laptop. His has had a good 3 years, which lessens the blow a wee bit...
...and really, if you're laptop's going to be felled, what better story than it being felled by a 1928 Vega tenor banjo?
But back to the food thing...it was time to set things right with something tasty. In addition to the baby eggplant, I still had a couple of small yellow squash from last week. So I thought I'd stuff 'em.
The stuffing was sort of a dirty rice-esque creation. Browned a link of Italian sausage, then sauteed chopped green pepper, a yellowish/whitish pepper from last week, some of our red onion, and garlic. Seasoned with Cajun seasoning and some smoked paprika. Added in 1 1/2 cups of an obscenely expensive rice mixture I'd bought at Safeway. I was looking for something with wild rice, but everything was Uncle Ben's pre-seasoned except for this jar of $6.99 gourmet rices. Then added 3 cups water and it was done in about 20 minutes.
I hollowed out the squash & eggplant and added the innards to the stuffing mixture. Put the shells on an oiled baking sheet, about 2 TBL of filling in each, and baked at 400 for about 15 minutes. Then topped with feta cheese and browned under the broiler.
A bit of work, but they were yummy. And plenty of the rice mixture to eat later. Too bad the eggplants didn't retain their pretty purple color...they turned brown as soon as they were cut and exposed to heat.
These conquered my earlier food fail though. And now I've got some chocolate-chip zucchini bread in the oven to try and further lessen the blow of rob's laptop destruction...
Great stories… Almost as good as the food… Almost!
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