First harvest and a cookie cooperative

I harvested my first crop from my Christmas herb garden today—romaine that had grown long and lanky and kept folding over on itself. So I had a big salad for lunch—mixed a little leftover iceberg in with it, but the dark green leaves in the picture are my home-grown romaine. Added blue cheese, croutons, and my favorite Paul Newman’s vinaigrette dressing. A salad fit for a queen. In place of the romaine in the garden trough, I put a seedling of garden cress. We’ll see. I was tempted to use the mustard in my salad today, but I think it needs a bit more growth—it isn’t what I’d call plentiful yet. If you’ve never used raw mustard greens in a salad, I urge you to try them—peppery and spicy, a wonderful perk in a green salad.

Another cooking day. I seem to have a lot of them lately, not that I’m complaining. Yesterday I made the overnight salad and stashed it in the fridge. Tonight, I made a chicken/green chili casserole, but I fudged with the recipe a bit. Jordan found a recipe she really liked, but it gave no quantities. If you wanted to download the actual recipe you had to allow some program to put something on your computer—not going there. I found an approximate recipe and decided to make it, but the more I studied on it, the more skeptical I got.

The recipe said you could pour the sauce over raw boneless chicken breasts, but I elected to use diced chicken that I had poached yesterday. The sauce called for cream cheese, green chilies, spices, and grated Monterey Jack. I couldn’t see anything that would make it fluid enough to be a sauce. Cream cheese, evens often, is pretty solid. I added sour cream. Then I thought the recipe needed “finishing”—so I put a Ritz-cracker-crumb-and-butter topping on it. Pretty good if I do say so.

I sautéed the rest of the sugar snap peas and asparagus in the refrigerator. At Christian’s request, I splashed soy on them, though I questioned adding soy to a chili-based dish. Oriental and Mexican? My palate was not sure about that, but I went light on the soy, and it was all good.

For dessert, we had molasses cookies. Jacob and I baked them this afternoon. Well, sort of. He was a willing helper when I mentioned it this morning, but his enthusiasm waned when confronted with the task—assembling cookie sheets, greasing them, getting a small dish of sugar for rolling the cookies, etc. We had to do this in the house—I have a miniature jelly roll pan that fits my toaster oven, but I can only do five cookies or five biscuits at a time. We’d have been at it all week. So we went inside, but most of my cookie sheets, like lots of my kitchen stuff, have disappeared.

Like the cookie sheets, Jacob kept disappearing. His phone rang. He’d pet a dog or put on socks, and I’d send him to wash his hands again—he must have washed them five times. Once we got started and he saw what was involved, he decided I should roll the dough into little balls and he’d roll them in sugar. One pan, and he said, “We’re done, aren’t we?” Nope. It’s one of those recipes that makes five dozen. With Jordan’s help, we finally got it done. And I have to say, those are some darn fine cookies. But I’ll think twice before I commit to cookies again. Still….some chocolate chips, made the true old-fashioned way—oh, my so good!