Monday, July 27, 2009

My Own Cooking Show...coming to a blog near you

You know those cooking shows? The ones where they whip up a fabulous meal in a half hour while saying things like "Well, I thought it would be great if I added..." Have you ever noticed that when you add stuff recipes at home, the result is not always as stellar? I thought it would be fun if everyone got to relive tonights culinary efforts with me...the good, bad, and the ugly.

It all started with a trip to the chiropractor this afternoon. A very large zuchini was sitting on the counter with a note saying "Take Me". So I did. And I thought "maybe I could make some fried zuchini to go along with tonight's stroganoff." And so I did.

I could have started at allrecipes.com and got some instructions first, but what fun would that be? Instead I started by slicing my very large zuchini into disks. I needed a bread-crumb-ish mixture, some kind of "sticking" liquid to adhere the bread-crumb-ish mixture, and oil for deep frying. Oil I had, but I didn't have bread-crumbs. So I looked into my pantry and found a box of Grape Nuts that nobody wants to eat. I used my ever-so-handy Pampered Chef food chopper to grind up the Grape Nuts and then I added Montreal Steak Seasoning to the crumbs to give it a better flavor. I melted some butter for my sticking liquid.

I put my first three zuchini disks through the steps: Dip them into the butter, press them into the crumb mixture, and drop them into the hot oil. The result? The crumb mixture completely fell off in the hot oil. Butter as a sticking mixture was no bueno.

For my second attempt, I used a couple of blended eggs as my sticking mixture. I threw those mixed eggs into the butter mixture (can't be wasteful of the butter!) and tried the next few zuchini disks. This time the crumb mixture stayed on the disks...Yeah! However, I found myself running out of crumb mixture. Back to the pantry I went, this time coming out with Rice Krispies cereal. Turns out Rice Krispies cereal is much easier to grind into crumbs than the Grape Nuts were.

I continued with my zuchini disks until I had cooked them all (half of the huge zuchini that I started with). Towards the end of my process, my oil was really dark and some of the zuchini disks were coming out with little burns chunks of Grape Nuts sitting on top.

Caption: Here's the first three zuchini disks where all the coating fell off. The fourth zuchini shows how the oil started to get dark and the Grape Nuts started to burn.

Here's what my family thought. Hubby said they were good, but don't bother to save the leftovers. Sweetness thought she'd try them with ranch dressing, but then decided to just eat the ranch dressing alone. Spunky Girl didn't bother to try them and the Big Guy whimpered when I put them on his plate. Me? I liked them, although I thought they were a bit salty.

Yeah...I'm not quite ready for prime time.

1 comment:

  1. I had a negative cooking experience with zuchini many years ago. Someone gave me a huge one and I decided to hollow it out and stuff it with stuffing to which I would add sausage. When I cooked up the sausage I decided not to drain off the grease my reasoning was "you cook things in bacon grease, why not sausage grease". So I went to a lot of effort to cook this thing, had one helping and then found out the sausage grease made me RUN for the bathroom! o.k. this is probaly more than you wanted to know, but that's my story.

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