More cooking

I've been doing a lot of knitting and crocheting lately, but haven't had the chance to take pictures of the finished objects.  Ryan has completed another reflector for the garden, but I'm going to let him post about that. A lot of our current projects are hibernating right now, as we've been dealing with car repairs (Ryan usually does them himself, but lacks the time, space, and equipment to repair a leaking head gasket), plus we're getting ready for a vacation.  So why am I posting at all?  Just to give an update on some cooking successes and failures.

First, the failure.  It turns out that if you want to make black sugar to give sugar cookies a kind of goth look, you need a lot more food coloring (and a higher tolerance for the smell of food coloring) than I have.  So when I volunteered to bring dessert over to a friend's house for dinner, then didn't have time to make the Watermelon Mojito Sorbet, then decided to go for my fallback option of sugar cookies (dusted with homemade vanilla sugar), I probably shouldn't have attempted to dye that sugar black.  I made it to dark brown before giving up. The cookies now deceptively appear to have been coated in regular brown sugar rather than my fancy vanilla sugar.

Successes (there are two):

1.  Avocado cream sauce.  I had never heard of it, never thought of it, but I saw a recipe, decided it looked delicious, and was right.  We made homemade spaghetti noodles (I love my kitchenaid mixer), poached and shredded some chicken (again, love my kitchenaid mixer) and tossed it with avocado cream sauce.  Fantastic meal! Not a quick meal, since we made the pasta from scratch, but definitely worth the effort.

Here's how I made the sauce (I won't write this up as a recipe, because I can't be bothered to actually measure): Place the flesh of two ripe avocados, a couple of tablespoons of cream, a couple of tablespoons of lime juice, and a little bit of salt in a food processor.  Process till smooth.  That's it.

2. Zucchini Quinoa Rice Enchilada Casserole. This one was a little more complicated, but also involved using canned food, and was pretty fast to assemble. It involved corn torillas, refried beans (two cans, since in my four previous attempts at making them myself I discovered that it is damn near impossible to make them taste good and have a decent texture), rice, quinoa, zucchini, sour cream, cheddar cheese, enchilada sauce.

Without measurements, here are the steps:

1. Cook up a big pot of rice and quinoa.  They cook together really well, and cook exactly the same way.  If you've never tried it, next time you make white rice, replace about a quarter cup or so with the equivalent amount of quinoa.  We usually use about a 2:1 ratio.
2. Go out to the garden and harvest zucchini. I used two from a bush baby plant. Or you could just buy zucchini.  I just wanted to say that so I could link back to the post about the garden. Note to self: do another garden update before it becomes so hot all the plants die.
3. Shred zucchini and sautee with olive oil.  
4. Shred up a bunch of cheddar cheese (or whatever cheese you like).
5. When rice/quinoa is done, add the sauteed zucchini, cheddar cheese, and some sour cream.
6. Open a can of enchilada sauce, put some in the bottom of a baking dish.  
7. Layering time. Here's how I did it: Corn torillas, refried beans, rice mixture, enchilada sauce, corn tortillas, beans, rice mixture, corn totillas, enchilada sauce, more shredded cheese.
8. Bake at 375 for a half hour, or until it all looks really bubbly and you can't stand to wait anymore.