mollotchka: Tuesday, 6/21/11: Herbed pasta Salad, grilled pork chops & zucchini and peach blueberry cobbler!

Today I had to do a summer dinner for it being midsummer and all. Longest day of the year. And it was a gorgeous one.

To start with, I made pasta salad. I hadn't really planned on it, but Audry wanted noodles, so we made noodles and then I turned the remainder of the noodles into pasta salad.

First of course, there was the cooking of the noodles.

Then there was Audry eating the noodles.

She loves noodles. You can tell because she ate like 5. Five noodles. (Did I mention she eats like a bird?)

Meanwhile, I headed over to my herb garden and made a selection of herbs to chop. There is basil, chives, and oregano.
You can see garlic in the middle and a couple roma tomatoes, neither of which came from my garden. So sad. Gardening in Colorado is the pits. Soon I am hoping that Will is going to have his hydroponic basement garden grow us some tomatoes. In the meantime, thank God for grocery stores.

(The garlic is deceiving. I didn't use it after all. I decided that I had enough chives.)

Oh! And this is my kitchen herb garden.

It is one of those Aerogarden things? We picked it up on Craigslist for cheap! I did order my nutrients and seeds through them which weren't the cheapest, however, it IS most certainly foolproof, and I am looking forward to fresh herbs in the winter.

Then I took the bowl of pasta, drizzled it with olive oil, and put all the yumminess on top with salt & pepper too. Yay! I just happened to have some feta cheese in the fridge too, saying "Eat me! Eat me!" Ok, feta, you got it.

Meanwhile Audry played in the sink.

Then I made a marinade for the pork chops by throwing some chives, thyme, olive oil, the juice of half a lemon, salt & pepper in the umm, blender thingy.

When that was nice & mixy, I put it in a large plastic bag with my thawed pork chops.

I really like marinating meat in the gallon size bags- the marinade gets all over the meat without using too much of it, and it is easy to throw in the fridge for a couple hours then toss later.
"Hey Audry! Did I just hear you make a big fart?"

Yes. Probably.
Here is what Omar thinks of that:

The chicks decided to come up on the porch to see what was going on.

Silly chicks!
Enough of the kids and animals, back to cooking!
Next I took the zucchini, cut it into long quarters and threw it in a bag to marinate with olive oil, salt, pepper and (I cheated) garlic powder.

I put that in the fridge. And that is when I noticed I had these blueberries and peaches that needed eating. I brought them out and washed them.

What to do with these? My they do look good. But I didn't feel like making a pie crust. Even though I do love peach and or blueberry pie. It became cobbler.
I mixed the fruit with sugar, put it in a shallow dish and squeezed lemon all over the whole thing.

Look at that candied gloriousness! (Looking back, I should have also mixed in a tablespoon of corn starch when I did the sugar just to thicken it in cooking.)
I made a cobbler topping (no recipe here... haven't you had enough?)

One smart last minute decision on this was to add in the zest of half a lemon.
Do you know how hard it is to zest half a lemon that you have already squeezed?
But it was worth it.
Here it is baked it until it was crispy & brown.... yummmy (with extra m's).

Then Willy came home, so he gave Audry her bath while I grilled everything; we put her to bed and had our dinner.

Everything was DELICIOUS! I am starting to agree with Will, that pork tastes better than chicken, especially when cooked properly. Pork is so easy to dry out. However, these weren't. Not at all. And the zucchini was el perfecto- juicy and flavorful.
While we were eating the chicks thought they'd come in the house!