Today's toy garden harvest

I love cooking when I’m in the mood!

When it’s time to cook dinner, I’ll have the meat defrosted.  But I’m never sure how I’m going to prepare it. I take a look in the refrigerator to see what I have to work with, then I just start playing, and dinner evolves from there.

Tonight I had 3 boneless beef ribs thawed.  I put them in a pan and browned them well.  Then I added garlic, onion, ginger root from the freezer, celery and a handful of baby

Garden gifts chunky soup

carrots.  While that simmered, I sniffed my way through my spice drawers.  Ah, that would add a nice high note.  That one would add depth and complexity. 

Then I added diced potatoes, and the pole beans and two tomatoes from the garden.  The ho-hum one pot meal morphed into a down home delight.

Next it was time to cook the eggplant.  I LOVE fried eggplant.  Even though I enjoy eggplant parmesan and baba ganosh, I always default to dipping the

My favorite! Fried eggplant!

eggplant slices in egg, seasoning them, then dredging them in a mixture of flour and cornstarch, and FRYING them!

I love it so much that I deliberately only planted one plant this year to keep me from over-indulging.  That one plant provides 3 or 4 eggplant a week, which is more than we need.

We got a very light, gentle rain most of the day.  Much less than was expected or predicted from Tropical Storm Lee.  Tomorrow we should get more.  But it doesn’t look like we are going to get anything near the 5 – 9 inches that was predicted for this area yesterday.

That’s okay.  If we get a couple of inches, I’ll be thrilled!