Friday, July 15, 2011

the dinner dilemna

It's Friday evening, 5pm. Husband is out mowing the lawn after work, toddler is clingy, wanting to be held and read stories. Which is nice, but after a less-than-productive day, I was feeling the need to actually make something for dinner. So I tried to think of something to make.

A few stories later, and it's 5:30. I still have no idea what to make. I look up some beet recipes cuz I know we have beets we should eat. Most of them require roasting the beets. Which takes an hour. Which is too long, since Andrew needs to leave again by 6:30 for an evening event. Or they require grating, which is messy and also takes a long time. And I'm wearing a white shirt today.

So what to do? I open my fridge, and pull out ALL my veggies. I start a pot of water for pasta, and a pan to saute some veggies. I start washing and chopping. What cooks fast? Broccoli. Zucchini. GARLIC! Mushrooms. Beet Greens. By that point, I had a pretty big pile of chopped veggies, and figured that was probably enough.

I started with the garlic with some olive oil, and added in the broccoli. Then the zucchini and mushrooms. A bit of fresh ground pepper. Then the beet stems, and finally the beet greens, along with the juice of a zest-less lemon I had sitting around. (The beet roots went back in the fridge for another day!)

When the veggies were cooked, I added some fresh basil from my garden, and a jar of alfredo sauce. Mixed it all together, and added the whole grain penne. It was surprisingly even better than I expected. A successful experiment.

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