Creamed Spinach

I'd taken some veal out of the freezer, but it hadn't fully defrosted for dinner tonight, so I had to scramble to come up with something to make.

I decided to reheat some leftovers and make some new veggie sides. My crisper was pretty empty - I missed the Farmer's Market in favor of Emily's bachelorette party. Martin and I had gone to the grocery store but only bought bare bones supplies, barely enough to last until Sunday, when I could replenish at the next Farmer's Market day.

Based on that, I came up with creamed spinach and tomato gratin. Take a guess at which you think the disaster was. :)

I picked this recipe because it was the only decent looking one I found that did not call for heavy cream, which I didn't have on hand. Everything was going fine until I threw it all into the food processor.

The line that says pulse until creamy? Yeah, it'll never become that. Instead, you'll get a weird, lumpy, grainy, watery green mixture. It's not appetizing at all. :)

Thinking about it now, I think where I went wrong was adding chicken broth to the mixture. I spent a long time squeezing all the water out of the spinach, to make sure that it wouldn't make anything watery. But then I went and added the chicken broth, thereby undoing all my good.

Coconut Ice Cream?

Tommy and I had a bad culinary week last week. I wanted to make some more ice cream, so I chose coconut ice cream. I like coconut, both the flavor and the texture of the flakes. Tommy insisted on buying REAL coconuts and harvesting the coconut flakes and coconut cream from the REAL coconuts. Awesome. We proudly walked out of the grocery store with 3 REAL coconuts. When we got home, we drilled into one of the eyes to drain the liquid (is it called coconut milk at this point?). Then I baked them for about 10 minutes. Tommy took a hammer to them and we took off the bark and then the second layer of bark. The flesh went into the food processor. Finally, coconut flakes! I sweetened them up and proceeded to make the coconut ice cream using the coconut, heavy cream, half and half, and some sugar. The result? Flavorless white ice cream with tons of coconut flake (those were flavorless too). Oh, and the ice cream has this strange crystall-like texture that doesn't resemble ice cream at all.

Pasta, green and clumpy

Is it considered cooking if the only step involved is boiling salted water? Pasta's pretty easy but plain old pasta gets boring. I wanted something different. Maybe something wide, or squiggly. Whole Foods was not up to the challenge. They had gnocchi but I was not in a gnocchi mood. So I went with fresh pasta; I had seen it many times before and it always intrigued me. Store-bought fresh pasta? Then is it really fresh? It's more expensive, maybe it's better.

Wrong.



I was skeptical from the start. After all, it looked like one big green blob of spinach fettuccine, formed into a nice rectangular brick. It turns out that the impressive powers of boiling water had no hope of pulling those strands apart. I poked and prodded it for ten minutes and all I ended up with was clumps.