The problem with being Dumbass Gourmet is that it’s become slowly impossible for me to just cook something. It used to be that coming up with a new recipe every week (or whenever) was a ginormous chore, so I was both amused and annoyed last week when the idea of putting naked chicken breasts in the oven bothered me into looking up recipes. Used to be I could put a sprinkle of Mrs. Dash on my piece and a few twists of sea salt and pepper on The Husband’s and everyone was happy, but those days are apparently gone.

The spanner in the works was that I wanted to use stuff we already had; specifically, the Cameo apples sitting in the fridge. After at least an hour of Googling and rejecting all the recipes that included apple juice (we didn’t have any and I’m too lazy to puree the apples), I landed on an organic, gluten-free blog that had a recipe for roasted rosemary chicken with apples and balsamic vinegar. As a true Pennsylvanian, I love my vinegar — especially on french fries, which everyone in Kentucky thinks is insane — so I was definitely sold. Problem was, the recipe was for a whole chicken and fresh rosemary, but I substituted our chicken breasts and dried rosemary, which I rolled between my fingers until it crumbled into smaller pieces rather than the spikes that come out of the container.

I drizzled the chicken with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then sprinkled the rosemary on top. The recipe suggested putting the apples around the chicken, but I decided to slice mine thinly and put them on top of the rosemary as well as around the edge of the pan:

I flipped the apples over halfway through cooking so both sides got the rosemary flavor.

The Husband made some mashed potatoes — my favorite food ever — and I dumped out some frozen peas to round out the dinner. The aroma of the vinegar, rosemary, and apples cooking together was amazing, and I could hardly wait to taste the finished product:

For some reason, I can’t embiggen this picture. Trust me, it looks awesome.

I’m happy to say I finished my plate before The Husband even started his. It was absolutely delicious, and I was thrilled to find that we had not one, but two leftover servings of mashed potatoes. Honestly, I would eat mashed potatoes every day if it wouldn’t blow me up like a balloon. Although, as usual, no one can come close to my mother’s cooking, The Husband’s offerings are a close second.

I love eggplants in theory. They’re a gorgeous purple color, they’re delightfully smooth and oval, and my knife makes a very satisfying sound when slicing through them. I’d never had an eggplant before, so when my chiropractor offered me one that an Amish patient brought him I seized it and ran out the door before he changed his mind. I stashed it safely in my laptop bag, but when I took a particularly hard turn it rolled out and spent the rest of the drive rocking gently on the passenger side floorboard. That’s definitely not the worst thing that’s happened to a piece of food I was planning to eat (see: floor spinach), so I wasn’t fazed.

Amish eggplant is obviously superior to regular eggplant.

When I got home, I was presented with the dilemma of what, exactly, to do with my eggplant. I poked around on the internet for a while before deciding to slice it, bread it, and bake it — almost like a parmesan, but without the tomato sauce. (When you eat spaghetti as much as we do, you get sick of tomato sauce pretty quickly.) I sliced the eggplant as evenly as I could (not very) and then debated what to do with the lovely purple rind on the outside of each slice. One recipe I saw suggested you slice off the rind, while another one said you should leave them on … and, since the Dumbass Gourmet always defaults to the culinary path of least resistance, I left them on.

On a side note, how freaky is a sliced eggplant?

Was I supposed to seed this thing?

So I dipped ‘em in egg, rolled ‘em in breadcrumbs, and sprinkled ‘em with parmesan cheese, followed by a tanning session in the oven for about 10 minutes on each side. There was half a box of rigatoni in the cupboard, so I tossed it with some garlic and butter (after cooking it, of course — I’m not that dumbass-ish) as a side. Except it turns out all our dinner dishes were in the dishwasher, so I had to get creative with bread plates instead:

This is The Husband’s, obviously. The tomatoes make it look less grody.

So … eggplant. The Husband has never liked it but was willing to give it another shot, albeit tentatively. I was a little braver with my first bite — not that it mattered, because I didn’t really enjoy it all that much. The next day at lunch, my friend Jim said maybe I cooked it for too long, but it wasn’t mushy, just blah. It didn’t really taste like anything. I’m very sorry to say we didn’t finish it, because I hate to throw away perfectly good food. I know some of you out there love eggplant, so tell me — how do you prepare it? I’m not averse to giving it another try, but only if it actually tastes like something.

I’m totally psyched for dinner tonight. I’m going to make ask The Husband politely if he’ll make mashed potatoes, my favorite food of all time, to go with the chicken breasts and whatever random vegetable I dig out of the freezer. Corn, maybe? Happy eating!

Editor’s Note: Just because the Dumbass Gourmet was on a month-long hiatus a while back doesn’t mean I quit cooking. (The Husband only wishes he were so lucky.) Here are a couple dishes I made while waiting for the new site to get up and running.

Apple-stuffed pork chops

Let me set the scene: I had a lonely apple and a slowly-getting-stale loaf of bread sitting in the fridge, and we had recently scored some butterflied pork chops on manager’s special for something like $2. I hit AllRecipes for ideas, and found a recipe for apple-stuffed pork chops that sounded absolutely heavenly. Add in some edamame and a baked potato, and we had a huge dinner that left both of us feeling like beached whales — but beached whales who’d just eaten a delicious meal.

The pork chops smelled unbelievable — all apple-y and onion-y. I’m drooling a bit just remembering them.

High-falutin’ edamame with sea salt.

Rigatoni

When I was little, I loved to watch my mother cook. She let me help, too, although most times I managed to eat more than I prepared. I still do that — snack as I cook — which means by the time the food is done I’m no longer hungry. (Of course, I eat it anyway.) One of my favorite jobs was to stuff the rigatoni, which sounds like an unfortunate euphemism but is literally what I did. I got to slice cheese into little rectangles, then stuff them into unsuspecting pasta:

Om nom nom.

Rigatoni noodles also double as fashionable fingerthings:

Coming soon to a Tiffany’s jewelry store near you!

The rigatoni turned out absolutely delicious, just like mom’s:

Cheesy!

As usual, we had some random fruit laying around in the crisper, so I chopped it up and put it on some spinach:

I wish I had something witty to say here.

I’ll leave you with a picture that makes me smile every time I see it. I spotted these containers when I was at my dad’s house in July, and they immediately made me nostalgic. Why? Because we have owned these spices for as long as I can remember. Seriously — they’ve been sitting in the spice cabinet for at least 20 years, if not more. Not only that, but they’ve survived three, maybe four, moves to different houses, and they now reside on the lazy susan in Daddy’s kitchen:

Sunriiiiiise, sunset, swiftly fly the years …

The Husband and I tried eggplant for the first time last night. Was it awesome? Did it suck? Stay tuned for another edge-of-your-seat Dumbass Gourmet!

Debbie, she of the gorgeous kitchen in the last post, joined a co-op this summer and is knee-deep in fresh produce, which she willingly shares with anyone who will have it. Since The Husband loves tomatoes (and since I didn’t buy him a present for his birthday yesterday), I scored a few and stashed them in the fridge. He came home early from work today not feeling well, so I decided to make him some bruschetta to cheer him up and make tonight’s dinner of spaghetti (which we have at least once a week) a little less common.

My faithful Betty Crocker cookbook didn’t have a recipe, so I took to the internet to figure out what all goes into bruschetta. Tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, basil, and balsamic vinegar seem to be the accepted ingredients, so I tweaked it a bit to help get rid of the lonely onion sprouting on the top shelf of the fridge: onion, tomatoes, olive oil, italian seasoning, olive oil, and black pepper. The recipe was fairly straightforward, but I stopped short after reading the first step — parboil the tomatoes so the skin comes off easier.

Let’s get one thing straight: The Dumbass Gourmet doesn’t parboil. I also don’t braise, poach, or chop up celery, onions and carrots into mirepoix, which I only know about because they do it all the time on the Food Network. (For one, onions are gross and carrots turn you orange.) What I do do (haha) is throw things into a pan and keep my fingers crossed.

Tomato skins never hurt anyone, I reasoned as I grabbed the knife, tomatoes, and cutting board:

Sleep easy, my pretties.

… but I was nice enough to painstakingly scoop out all the seeds and guts:

Red’s looking a little nervous.

It was at this point that I slipped on a slick spot on the kitchen floor and almost went down. Was it water? Tomato guts accidentally slopped off the cutting board? No … it was grease from the meatloaf I made earlier this week. Please don’t ask me how it got on my kitchen floor (and how it went unnoticed for three days), because I don’t know. What I do know is that I should purchase stock in lemon-scented Clorox wipes, and possibly hire a housekeeper.

After chopping the garlic and onion and giving the mix a good shake of olive oil and italian seasoning, I toasted some leftover multigrain bread from a local steakhouse (the Dumbass Gourmet strives to clean out the fridge above all else, except for that “don’t kill people with your cooking” thing) and spooned the bruschetta on top. A twist of fresh peppercorns, and here we go:

I really wish I liked tomatoes.

It got a big thumbs-up from The Husband, and I’m officially the Best Wife Ever. I try to remember these moments so I have a cache of goodwill upon which to draw when I do something like dump a plate of spaghetti on my laptop. The Clorox wipes came in awfully handy then, too.