food rules.

One of the huge blogging cliches: Posting about food. I know. But I love food and enjoy cooking. Not everything is a success, but usually I can put a meal on the table that is decent, ideally not too expensive, healthy, and probably won't make you sick. Neither the hubs nor I is picky. It's one of my favorite, favorite things about my husband: He will try almost anything once, and he is adventurous with food. I'm the same way, so it stays pretty easy around here, save for the occasional battle of man-wants-meat vs. girl-wants-veggies. Generally, and luckily, the only challenges are...

HIM:
No white stuff - includes mayo, yogurt, sour cream, overly stinky cheeses, etc.
No veggie products that pretend to be meat - there was an incident with some vegan pepperoni, and he has never recovered

ME:
No bananas
No maple syrup - no seriously, I can barely sit at a table when someone is eating pancakes

So, I broke one of the rules last night and used mayo in a recipe. If it's cooked, it gets past him undetected. And it was a hit!  Grilled eggplant sandwiches have been in the rotation for a while, but I decided to mix it up and go with "oven-fried" eggplant cutlets served it on toasted ciabatta rolls with fresh mozzarella, basil, tomato, and balsamic onions. Calorie-wise, it might be a little more than using just olive oil, but we didn't have anything besides a simple arugula salad on the side. Dessert was an epic fail, though... apparently the white food category includes creme caramel... "I like the caramel, but it's too eggy!" Sigh. A waste of a water bath and worry over burned sugar!

So, I am going to try and make a habit of (remembering to photograph and) posting dinner menus for doable weeknight meals, and maybe fancy weekend meals. I have a hard time remembering successes, so it would be great to record them for my own use! I'll try and post recipes if/when I use them. If I make something up, maybe I'll type out the recipe. Last night's dinner...

Recipes:
Oven-fried eggplant cutlets
Balsamic onions