Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

For those of you interested, here's the list:

( 100 Recipes )

( #100 Chicken Broccoli Alfredo )

And that's it for the 100 recipes. I'm thinking I may just keep going until the end of the year and see how far I get. With the holidays coming up, there's a lot of opportunity for experimentation on unwitting subjects guests. I've really enjoyed having this challenge to keep me trying new things, especially with veggies and baking.

Last night, daily_alice and I carved a jack-o-lantern. I've always just tossed the seeds, since I don't like them, but Jason loves them toasted, so I went ahead and picked all the seeds out of the slime. Following this recipe, I let them dry over night and this morning tossed them with a tablespoon of butter (which was a little much) and divided them into three batches on a baking sheet: plain buttered, garlic/cumin, and cayenne. I tried one and yup, still don't like 'em, but Jason is devouring them and making yummy noises, so I think I can call this a success.

heliopsis asked us to bring a salad and we had squash from the farmshare burning a hole in our rotter, so I decided to try ( #89 Summer Squash Salad )

Since I had two more zucchini to use up and the zucchini parmigiana was so good, I decided to try doing it with chicken.

( #88 Chicken Parmiagiana )

While I was making this, I was thinking about how you don't need to boil lasagne noodles before putting them in the casserole--the liquid from the sauce cooks them in the oven. Has anyone tried this with other forms of pasta? I'm wondering if it would work to just throw hard egg noodles into tuna casserole, or ziti into red sauce & cheese. Anyone done the experiment?

I follow crockpot365 and recently she posted this procedure for making yogurt in the slow-cooker. It seemed pretty easy, so I gave it a try.

( #82 Yogurt )

Thanks to radicallylocal I have two big round zucchini^*. So I decided to make ( #81 Zucchini Parmesan )

It was delicious and all three of us had seconds. And now I have one large round zucchini in my fridge.

I recently read about baked cucumbers in Julie & Julia, and since I've been getting cucumbers in my farmshare, that seemed like a good thing to try. And I have this lamb sausage that I wanted to use. So I came up with this idea for a deconstructed baked gyro kind of thing.

I started with ( #79 Roasted Tomatoes )

Then I made ( #80 Baked Cucumbers )

While the cucumbers were baking, I put the lamb sausage on a baking sheet and let those bake--possibly too long. They turned out a little dry--those are some very solid, meaty sausages. But I had all this yogurt-cucumber sauce and that moistened them nicely. I served the tomatoes and sausage over the cucumbers, with pita chips that I toasted while I was cutting up the lamb. I'm not sure it was worth all the work, but it made a tasty meal and it's certainly something to do when you have too many cucumbers.

Thanks to muffyjo for being tonight's test subject!

We decided tonight would be a good night to eat in the backyard, so we plugged in the grill out there for ( #77 Grilled Lamb Salad )

And for dessert there was ( #77 Lemon-Buttermilk Pudding Cake )

It was a lovely send-off meal for Jason's brother, who's off to law school soon.