Dinner Last Night

It's not exactly restaurant food but I made myself a pretty good dinner last night. Whole wheat spaghetti with zucchini, corn, roasted red peppers, sliced hot dogs and feta cheese.

When I cook zucchini I like to cook the crap out of it. I mean I slice it and caramelize it in olive oil in a pan. Add some garlic and some salt and pepper and even Pete will happily eat it. Onions are nice too if you have them. Cook the crap out of them too - but not the garlic. Garlic gets bitter if you're not nice to it. Add it last.

So caramelize the zucchini, add corn off the cob from the night before and sliced hot dogs - I brown them - then toss in the chopped store bought red peppers and some minced garlic. Put it all over some whole wheat spaghetti with some extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and crumble in a little feta cheese. It's quick and it covers all the bases: plenty of vegetables, HDL cholesterol, some protein, a bit of calcium and complex carbohydrates. If you have some other herbs you want to use of course throw them in. And/or the aforementioned onions. Onions would have been nice but I didn't think of it. Maybe next time. It still tasted good but it might have benefitted from the sweet taste of well-cooked onions. As I said, I used hot dogs but if you have other sausages that you prefer use them instead. If the mustard greens hadn't bolted I'd have added some of them too.

My beverage of choice was the Cuban Mint Julep - mainly because we had the ingredients. Plus it was over 90 degrees out and humid and it's a darned refreshing drink. I got the recipe from the License to Grill cookbook by Chris Schlesinger and then I made it my own due to faulty math. People really like mine so here's my interpretation of the recipe to make one drink:

• a pint glass or other large, sturdy vessel
• a great big fistful of fresh mint leaves (about half a glass-full, un-tamped)
• half a lime, quartered
• three teaspoons sugar (not measuring teaspoons but table teaspoons. I use vanilla sugar - sugar that has a vanilla bean stored in it. I just keep my vanilla beans in the sugar - double duty)
• ice cubes cracked into dice, not crushed ice (too slushy)
• light brown rum ( I find white rum to be too sharp tasting and dark too heavy)

Put the mint leaves and sugar in the glass (If you like less sugar use less) Squeeze in the juice from the lime quarters and drop the squeezed fruit in the glass as well. Take the teaspoon and muddle the mint, sugar and lime quarters together in the glass. Fill the glass with cracked ice (I put ice cubes in a dishtowel and smack them into chunks with a meat tenderizing mallet) then top off with straight rum. Stir thoroughly with the teaspoon. It looks a mess but it tastes wonderful.

When you're done with the first you'll think you should have another. I suggest leaving the dregs of the first one in the glass except take out two of the old lime chunks and some of the more beat-up mint leaves. Make your round two right on top of the first round. It's my way of watching it with the rum. The extra vegetation takes up some rum space but adds flavor and how much more rum do you really need? Unless you have a rum deficiency - ARRGH! LIKE A PIRATE ARRGH!!!