My Mediocre Meals

There are kitchen days when all the recipes just turn out right and it feels like everything my whisk touches turns to gold. Then there are days like Sunday. Sunday was a kitchen day where everything my whisk touched turned to "meh."

I started the day turning some of my beautiful CSA blueberries into a batch of vegan blueberry muffins for a picnic brunch with friends.  And since I was all out of egg replacer after last week's glorious chocolate beet cake, I looked to the internet for a new vegan muffin recipe. I found this one, which uses the reaction between baking soda and vinegar to get the muffins to rise and turn nice and fluffy. Sadly, even after almost half an hour of extra cooking time my muffins were still a little soggy in the middle and did not rise properly. The taste was good, but the texture just wasn't cutting it. Luckily, everything is better when it's served (and chopped to pieces!) by an adorable baby.

After a lovely brunch with some mediocre muffins, I came home to make something tasty and full of veggies that could come to work for lunches all week. Ah, I said, a cheesy baked thing with layers of polenta and chard! That sounds perfect! I decided to double the chard and add in some zucchini, and things seemed to be off to a nice start.

But sadly, even with extra veggies and the addition of some herbs and extra garlic and red pepper flakes, it turned out kind of bland and very mushy, with a layer of mozzarella on the top that was so tough I could barely chew through it. Also unattractive!

Seriously, this was the best picture I could get of this pile of mush. Pretty it's not!

But I had a plan to salvage something out of this unfulfilling day in the kitchen. Monday night I cooked up a good, quick standby - chicken sausage and green beans sauteed together with plenty of garlic and a little salt. It would be hard to mess this up!

I made sure there were plenty of leftovers, and I mixed them into that mushy polenta mess. Sausage fat and garlic added a punch of flavor, and between the chewy sausage and the crunchy green beans my meal now had some texture! I think I can stomach eating it for a few more days so I don't have to feel guilty about wasting food, hooray! I hope your kitchen time has been tastier than mine, and I hope I'll have something more pleasant to share soon.