Pop quiz!
You are looking for something to make for lunch. You are at home with time, but you are going away for the weekend, so you don’t want to make anything big, and you don’t want to leave any leftovers in the fridge to start decomposing over the next two days. What do you do?
If you’re Italian, or just a person with good taste (ah ha ha!), then you probably have some sort of pasta in your fridge from earlier in the week. And if you like fresh produce, then you might have some seasonal veggie, say, zucchini?
By now, you have probably guessed that this is clearly rhetorical, and I’m going to tell you what I did with these very ingredients. You are correct. I made Indian food tonight, but I forgot to take pictures, so I’m reheating the yummy lunch I made last week for my second post today.
Also, I apologize, and I will not use any more puns in this post. I think. So!
On Sunday, I think, I made chicken parmigiana with rotini. The chicken and fried tomatoes had been consumed earlier in the week, but I made a whole pound of pasta in my mania, so I still had a good serving and a half left, along with the remaining sauce. Since we were leaving for the weekend, I didn’t want to have to come home only to throw away pasta.
I had a zucchini, too, and for some reason, I’ve had terrible luck keeping those suckers around lately. I definitely did not want to have to throw out a delicious vegetable, so I saw a great solution: pasta + zucchini = delicious!
Rather than just slice up some zucchini and throw it on the pasta, though, I thought it would be fun to play with a few extra flavors, so I warmed up some oil and vinegar, threw in a little garlic and various and sundry Italian spices to cook the slices in.
This is one of my favorite way to cook zucchini or squash. Depending on what kind of vinegar you use (red wine vs balsamic), you can have a tangy topping or something sweet. I went with balsamic to balance the sweet tomato sauce. It is simple, and it takes about 5 minutes.
Once the zucchini was all cooked up, I nuked the pasta and topped it.
I had a little bit of zucchini left over that I just munched on through the afternoon while I packed and cleaned a little bit. It was a great break in the day, and it tasted good. I guess it has some of that nutritional value, too.
Tomorrow, by the by, I will showcase the wedding favors that I made for a “Wedding Wednesday”. I thought about something 4th of July related, but that would have required some more forethought on my part, so wedding stuff it is.
I also might post a poll – I am having some trouble with a project I’m working on, and I always welcome advice. Look forward to that!
You say Polymath like it's a bad thing... 