How is your garden doing?

Today I was looking thru my email at the food blogs I had recently received with new ideas and recipes. This caught my eye as I had just purchased an eggplant yesterday with two different ideas for what to make.
The first was to make a batter-fried eggplant patti to serve as a side dish along with whatever broiled meat I plan to serve. This is a rather simple recipe that I will explain as follows:
My next idea came, as I mentioned above, as I was reading my newsletter from Moms Menu which I read faithfully from beginning to end. Cindy Sanchez is Editor in Chief of this site which has many great ideas in each newsletter and it is well worth your while to sign up for it. Anyway this is where I found the recipe for Eggplant Parmesan which is shown in the picture above. One suggestion I have is you can buy a jar of your favorite spaghetti sauce and use this as the tomato sauce in the recipe and it will serve the same purpose. The parmesan cheese makes the dish, of course. The more the better.

Just happened to look over at my neighbor's garden and noticed it was looking rather puney with rather high weeds amongst the rows of vegetables. I feel as tho something happened this year and what came up did not produce. He usually has the best looking tomatoes as well as beans, okra, squash and green onions. Anyway I was looking at Chef John's site and he put on his video for "fried green tomatoes". This uses the tomatoes that are really green before ripening to ruby red and can be rather tart. Once you batter and fry them and eat along with fried chicken and biscuits, you have a lucious meal. You don't have to be a southerner to like this dish but I feel not too many of you Yankees have had the chance to eat it.

Nothing Cooking today

The big reason for no cooking today is because it is my birthday. I never cook on MY BIG DAY every year because I need a day off now and then. My family is good about it and manage to come up with a surprise each year which makes me feel great. Even the family decided to go to a restaurant instead. They asked me where I would like to go and I decided on the Beau Rivage Buffet. It is so terrific with not only the great variety but the desserts are something else. So besides a beautiful steak(medium), baked potato and nice green salad, I chose a chocolate, chocolate dessert with a chocolate base, chocolate filling and shaved chocolate top. The picture is not what I had but it does look very appetizing. Yep, I do love chocolate.

Make It Fast, Cook It Slow!

I just happened upon this slow cooking cookbook via looking at President Obama's food likes and dislikes while perusing MSN.com. Now that is a long way around to find a cookbook.
Let's start with MSN.com web site where they have one-liners for topics to click on to read more. One that caught my eye was about President Obama's food likes and dislikes. The click thru took me to a discussion of his family recipe for making chili. It seems Good Morning America ran the recipe according to Huffingtonpost on 03-04-2008. I clicked thru to a few different sites to see what the recipe entailed and there I was at crockpot365--the site of President Obama's chili recipe. Each site had its own take on his recipe but this was made using a slow cooker. I proceeded to look thru the site being it had lots of recipe ideas to do with slow cooking.
Let's end with the slow cooking cookbook authored by Stephanie O'Dea namely "Make It Fast, Cook It Slow: The Big Book of Everyday Slow Cooking." This cookbook, available October, 2009, has a wide variety of recipes which has piqued my curosity. There are many, many slow cooking cookbooks available but I believe I will try to get this one.
So if you like to have slow cooking meals, give this a looksee. Right now my slow cooker is in the process of humming away for tonight's dinner.