Multitasking Monday

All last week I went about my business with an insane sense of urgency--gotta get this done so I can then get that done so that afterwards I can get this done because I really want to have time to do this before I find time at the end of the day to read the Wall Street Journal and catch up on comics while watching the Fox Comedy Hour and enjoy dessert on the couch with the husband. Despite my frantic, crazed pace, I rarely got the chance to do what I wanted.

But not this Monday. I still felt a bit frantic, but I did manage to get in my full time at the gym (including 7.25 miles on the treadmill, thank you very much), to get scanned and uploaded for the coders the monographs I'd edited over the weekend, to get 15 more monographs edited, scanned and uploaded, to make it to the FedEx store down the street to ship off the last of the original galleys I'd worked on, to pick up the steroid cream for my Olympic rash that finally came in at the pharmacy at HEB and, best of all, to spend some quality time in the kitchen. Not only was I damned determined to get supper on the table at 6 Monday evening (after far too many 7 PM meals, which then put the boy's bedtime routine in a rush and severely cut into the unwinding time the husband and I like to have before we hit the hay), but I was hoping to replenish the dwindling supply of dessert yummies in the deep freeze. Plus I have a some lovely red bell peppers and zucchini just waiting to be mangled by moi!

Back to Basics
When I first started preparing more of the evening meals at Chez Boeckman-Walker, I started with pretty simple yet flavorful fish and chicken recipes I found on MyRecipes.com, TasteofHome.com and DLife.com, a great site for folks with diabetes, folks who live with folks with diabetes and folks who may be at risk for diabetes or just are health conscious and know that living and eating as if you have diabetes isn't too bad a way to live and eat. From one of those sites, I'd nabbed a ginger-lime mahi mahi recipe and substituted tuna for the mahi mahi the first time I made it. It would once again get its time in the spotlight dans ma cuisine, though I'd be true to the recipe this time and use mahi mahi because (1) we had some frozen mahi mahi fillets in the freezer just waiting to be eaten and (2) fish doesn't take that long to make so that if I did wind up frantically scanning monographs because it'd been one of those days, I could still get supper on the table by 6.

This recipe couldn't be any easier to prepare, and the results are quite delish.

Ginger-Lime Mahi Mahi1/2 C lime juice
2 T honey
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 slices peeled fresh ginger 1/8-inch thick
8 mahi mahi fillets (6 ounces each, about 3/4-inch thick)

1. Combine juice, honey, garlic and ginger in zipper bag.
2. Add fish fillets to bag. Seal and let marinate in refrigerator at least one hour.
3. Remove fish from marinade but reserve marinade for optional basting. Do discard the ginger.
4. Bake or grill the fish according to safe fish preparation standards. Baste with marinade as the fish is cooking (optional).

Nutritional Info
Calories: 163
Fat: 1.3 g
Protein: 30.5 g
Carbs: 6.1 g
Cholesterol: 73 mg
Na: 104 mg

Pretty darn straight-forward and healthful, non?

At this point, Gentle Reader, you're probably wondering how I futzed with it or screwed it up. Fear not! for futz I did. Screw up I did not.

• I did not use the husband's nifty lemon-lime squeezer to make fresh lime juice for the marinade. We only have one lime in the house, and the husband's reserved for cilantro-lime rice for Wednesday's Burrito Night.
• My ginger was freshly peeled, but the piece I took the slices from (I used five or six because two just isn't enough for my tastes) has been up in my cabinet for at least two months. I'm not sure how well ginger when left unpeeled ages, but upon peeling it, it released its wonderful aroma, and it didn't seem to affect the fish negatively.
• I had to remove one of the two fillets after ten minutes of baking because it was thinner and baked faster than the second, thicker piece. I stored it in one of my old Visionware cranberry storage bowls atop the stove, where it stayed nice and warm until its fellow fillet finished.

For the veggies, I gave half a thought to doing up a stir-fry with a pinepple-soy sauce marinade. I opted not to do it because I know the husband prefers his carrots crisp, and a simple saute would keep them crisp and would allow me to stick to my theme of simplicity.

The veggies I sauted were a mix of Green Giant Frozen Select sugar snap peas and half a bag of "stew vegetables" I bought at Wally World about two months ago that contains sliced carrots, cubed potatoes, pearl onions and a few sliced celery pieces so that I could add more of the veggies (carrots and potatoes) that I knew the boys would eat. These I sauted in a little bit (maybe half a tablespoon) of lemon-infused olive oil, and voila! Crisp, flavorful veggies.

I'll have you know, Gentle Reader, that supper was served a few minutes before 6 PM.


Looks pretty tasty, non? Well, Gentle Reader, it was. The boys ate their veggies without too much nagging from moi, and we had no leftover fish to stow in the already-stuff 'fridge. (Although the boy did ask upon taking his first bite of fish, "Is this seaside fish or is this chicken fish?" Gads, when did my kid become the reincarnation of Jessica Simpson?) I declare victory!

Zounds! Zucchini!
While working on my monographs, I expended a little brain power to determine what type of yummy I wanted to make. I'd initially thought I'd just whip up the batter or dough Monday evening and then bake the yummy Tuesday morning while kickboxing. With that plan in mind, I reviewed the multitude of dessert recipes I've bookmarked for future use and then had a revelation: I have zucchini!

I've been waiting for the zucchini to ripen for weeks and weeks now. The fabulous zucchini bread my dear friend The World's Greatest Spin Instructor shared with me coupled with the memory of an incredible zucchini cake I had while attending a weekend of hatha teacher training at Barsana Dham in November 2004 and my rediscovered zeal for the culinary arts have had me jonesin' for zucchini desserts for some time. Last Friday, we bought some large, ripe zuccs so that I could make the zucchini bread and other things, and Monday was just the day for making some "other things."

Finding just the right recipe was a challenge. I'd bookmarked recipes for zucchini cookies and a chocolate-zucchini cake but ultimately deleted them because I feared futzing with them to make them light wouldn't yield great results. That's the problem with food memories and light cooking: Sometimes your attempts to recreate the food of your memories in a more healthful version are just disastrous. Yet a Google search for zucchini cookie recipes gave me a chocolate chip-zucchini cookie recipe and a spicy zucchini cookie recipe that were already healthful I thought would work well for us.

While I waited to hear back from the husband about which of the two he might prefer, I scrutinized the two recipes and realized that, duh, the only essential difference between them is that one uses a cup of chocolate chips while the other uses a cup of raisins and half a teaspoon of ground cloves. Since I can't decide between them--and the husband is taking too long to reply, I thought to myself with more than a modicum of impatience (patience is not my forte, Gentle Reader, especially when I'm anxious to be in the kitchen), why not just combine the two to make spicy chocolate chip-zucchini cookies?

Spicy Chocolate Chip-Zucchini Cookies1/2 C margarine or butter
1 C sugar
1 egg
2 C all-purpose flour
1 t baking soda
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t ground cloves
1/2 t NaCl
1 C grated zucchini
1 C semi-sweet chocolate chips or morsels
1 C raisins

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy.
3. Add the egg, flour, baking soda, cinnamon, clove and NaCl. Mix well.
4. Stir in grated zucchini, raisins and chocolate chips.
5. Drop cookie dough two inches apart on cookie sheets.
6. Bake cookies until set, eight to ten minutes. Remove from oven and let them rest on the cookie sheets for a few minutes, then transfer to wire rack to finish cooling.
7. Resist urge to scarf cookies down while still warm with oozing chocolate.

Again, Gentle Reader, you're probably wondering how I screwed this one up. Well, here ya go:

• The zucchini I attempted to grate with my wonderful Queasy Art food processor using its shredding disk that looks just one side of my box grater. I don't know if the end result qualifies as grated zucchini, but it looked damn nice to me:
  
  
  The problem was that when I added this shredded/grated zucchini to the dough, it was in longish strands, not little bits and pieces that eaters would never notice.
  
  
  Doesn't look terribly appetizing, eh?
  
• While I did make sure I had all the ingredients for the recipe and even set all of them out (aside from what needed to stay refrigerated--people, we had another triple-digit high yesterday, and it's hot inside Chez Boeckman-Walker too), I failed to ascertain that I had the full amount of fat-free butter I needed. Yes, Gentle Reader, I didn't, largely because the boy's been enjoying it on his bagels and on the Krusteaz fat-free blueberry muffins he and his daddy made Sunday morning.
  
  Luckily I had a tub of Smart Balance low-fat butter on hand to round out the half-cup I needed. This blend of butters might have been a good thing since I've noted before that the fat-free butter has a lot of water, which may be throwing off the dessert recipes in which I use it. For this batch of cookies, I didn't notice anything too terribly off.
• I don't know if the little jar of ground cloves I've had since...1995 or so has gone bad or what, but I found the 1/2 teaspoon too strong. Next time, I'm going to omit it and see how the cookies taste.
• Also next time, I may only use half a cup of the mini morsels I used for this batch. A cup of Nestle mini morsels goes a long way, and some of the cookies I had seemed to have almost too much chocolate. While many, many people out there will swear there's no such thing as too much chocolate, I'll argue that yes, there is when it doesn't balance right with other ingredients.
• For the first time ever, I used the cookie scoop Mum bought me years back to drop the cookies onto the cookie sheets. While I feel it did trap a bit too much dough between the plastic scoop and the scoop getter-outter arm, I liked it. Unfortunately, it didn't do what I'd hoped it would do: allow me to better space apart the cookies.
  
  Gentle Reader, I'm spatially challenged. I suck at measuring anything visually. I can't "eyeball" two inches, two feet, two yards or anything. Give me a damn measuring device, thank you very much. Thus my cookies ran together a wee bit. I myself don't mind when I wind up with conjoined cookies, but it looks amateurish--like I'm the only grade schooler taking part in the local 4-H baking contest whose mom didn't do the baking.
• I don't know what happened to the smaller of the two sheets of cookies I made, but it had to go back into the oven after I'd already turned it off and let both sheets cool. Following some sound CI advice, I rotated the sheets in the oven after four minutes of baking so that each would have equal time closer to the heating element. But I guess the four minutes the smaller sheet spent closer to the heating element didn't work the magic that it did for the larger sheet. Or the smaller sheet is shoddily constructed and doesn't conduct heat well. Either way, that sheet had to go back in the oven, but after five minutes in an oven that was slowing heating back up to 350 degrees, they came out just fine.

Look pretty tasty, non?

I hesitantly told the husband to give a small one to the boy for fear that he'd get an eyeful of the shredded zucc and balk. But after taking his first bite, the boy declared, "These are the best cookies I've ever had." Ahh, thanks, son! Good cookies and a compliment from the boy--what more can a faudie want out of a fun afternoon in the kitchen?