Food Fails & Fridge Finds

Got home from a 10-day tour yesterday - we did make a stop at the grocery store at the end of our 6-hour drive, but only for eggs, bread and potatoes, as we were too brain-dead to intelligently shop for other things. This afternoon I assessed the contents of the fridge - which included the remains of last week's CSA veggies - and found Chioggia beets, summer squash, some mostly wilted/brown basil, and some old but still firm celery. The freezer revealed some frozen cod fillets I'd forgotten about. Though another trip to the store was definitely in order, I didn't feel like it, and figured I could wrangle some dinner from what was there.

However I definitely had some food fails for this meal. Don't know if it's because I haven't cooked for myself in almost two weeks, but...ugh. I decided to make potato salad first and started with some hard-boiled eggs. For some reason I thought I needed to look up how long to boil them for (yeah, that brain-dead thing). I turned to the usually-trusty app for Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything," which said to put them in water, then bring to a boil, then turn off and leave them in there for 9 minutes. Sounded about right. Nope - underdone, impossible to peel, not salvageable for other egg eating. However the potato salad turned out fine without eggs (standard mayo-mustard dressing with celery and some chives still hanging around in the garden).

I decided to roast the summer squash and beets in the oven, and though a little voice was saying to me "the beets are gonna take longer than the squash," I cut the beets small and the squash large, and tossed them all in together with oil/salt/pepper. Nope. Had to extricate the squash and put the beets in for another 10 minutes.

Our host in IL sent us home with a baggie of shelled pistachios, so I decided to make pistachio-crusted cod: pulverized the nuts with a rolling pin, combined with panko breadcrums, spices & olive oil (note...use more oil), spread a thin layer of dijon mustard on the fish and pressed the mixture onto it. Baked at 400 for about 20 minutes.

It all came out alright, but the brain was not firing on all cylinders. And I gotta go to the store again.