CABIN FEVER CASSEROLE

What could be more savory than our warm turkey eggplant casserole on a wintry evening? This family pleaser is only 7 points per serving. Abigail Parsons, of Bewelle, Illinois says:” I make a double portion every Sunday, and freeze servings for meals during the week.”

Ingredients: (makes eight ¾ cup servings)

1 16-oz can of diced tomatoes   

½ onion, finely diced

1 garlic clove, crushed

¾ cup bread crumbs

1 tsp basil

1 cup grated lo-fat mozzarella

¾ cup bread crumbs

1 medium sized eggplant

1 green pepper

1 red pepper

1 cup mushrooms

Directions:

1 Sauté the crushed garlic and diced onions in a heavy skillet (in 2 TBSP of olive oil). Be sure to use a low heat and coax rather than bully the onions to turn translucent. That is the secret of using onions to flavor rather than dominate a dish.

2 While the onions are slowly cooking, go ahead and dice eggplant, peppers, and mushrooms. Cut in small pieces or they will not soften enough so you will taste that acidy pepper taste and have trouble digesting the skins and you will have to use some of your husband’s Prilosec after dinner though you’re supposed to take it before you eat but you never know whether a dish is going to cause indigestion or not, depending.

3 Add the ground turkey (I forgot it in the list of ingredients but so what? I can’t do everything around here. I do enough as it is. Anybody should guess from the title you need turkey anyway. I’m so sick of people asking me to think for them.)

4 Add basil, canned tomatoes, diced vegetables, bread crumbs and simmer, stirring often. Be careful not to spill any pieces over the edge of the skillet. For this recipe I use a large sized cast iron frying pan but who knows what size peppers they grow in Illinois, b/c they’re getting larger every year, probably genetically altered. Like every fucking other thing in the store and we wonder why so many people get cancer.

5 If the ingredients are too dry, add a little chicken broth. Whoever recommended that amount of bread crumbs I don’t know if they were kidding. The vegg are going to get onto the stove top, spilling over top of the skillet. If you have just cleaned the mouse turds off the stove top, make sure that you are the one cleaning the kitchen after dinner b/c if your husband does it he will not see the bitty pieces and you’re going to have little black droppings in the morning for sure and that’s a nasty sight, esp when a stove is white like ours.

6 Put aluminum foil over the whole thing and place in center of oven, bake for 45-50 minutes at 350 degrees. I forgot to write down 350 too but anybody who cooks knows  this is standard temperature for a casserole. Abigail Parsons would know, Abigail and her neat preplanning and portions, one of those kinds of people who’s organized every minute thing in her life. Sounds like she’s a career person. If it’s so hard to cook at night after being on her feet all day, why the heck doesn’t her husband pitch and do it once in a while? Too busy vegging out in front of the TV while Abigail heats up one of her frozen casseroles. Or maybe she’s all alone, and lonely, watching the news, eating her casserole portion on a little TV tray. Both scenarios pathetic.

7 After allotted cooking time, take the foil off the pan, and sprinkle the mozzarella over top of the casserole. Dump on the whole package, who cares about points, if it doesn’t get thick and stringy, it’s just not good. Put the skillet back in the oven and bake another fifteen minutes. If the timer on the oven cannot be heard in the den above the sound of the TV, use the clock timer with the broken face from when you dropped it two Christmases ago, you can carry it into the den. It is good and loud. Forget saving the foil to use again, unless you want to spend the time scraping off veggie matter so as not to tear the foil, a task requiring a lot of concentration and patience. And who can recycle everything anyway. The kids used disposable Pampers back in the 70s. I’m already going to consumer hell, and I know it.

8 Once the melted cheese is browned, remove casserole from oven. Let cool for five or ten minutes before eating.

Serve with crispy buttery garlic bread. Try to make this dish last for more than one meal, but nobody’s perfect.  Depending on how cold it is outside or how many days you have been snow bound, this dish is greatly accented by a dessert of hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream, covered with a touch of chocolate sauce and a handful of peanuts.

Note: Don’t forget to turn off the oven. Who can afford to waste Propane?

(copyright Cathy Larson Sky 2/24/2015)

 

FIREFLY

In the wee hours of a June wedding celebration, I watched dancing lights in the thick darkness by a river: fiber-optic strands cradled in the palms of little girls who jumped and twirled to the music. Deep in the rains of early July, after fighting sleeplessness one moonless night with a meditation CD that urges me to visualize the benevolent presence of loved ones, I opened my eyes to see a green gold light on the ceiling directly above my head, flashing. It was a firefly, speaking – reassuringly, it seemed -- in its native Morse code. These two events were prequels to a coming change. 

I was in an outdoor restaurant when a gnat flew into my right eye with that familiar bap I get when it happens. Summer gnats love my eyes. “Pat,” I told my husband, “You’re going to have to operate with a Q tip when we get home.” But there was no bug this time, though I kept seeing brown things that looked like insect carcasses sailing through my vision. Then I began experiencing flashes of light in the corner of the eye, followed by the descent of a dark thing, like a wing. Later I started calling the wing thing a record needle, coming down.

The eye doctor labeled these new sensations Flashers and Floaters. If someone told me when I was 20 that at 64 my life would fill with Flashers and Floaters, what would I have expected?  Raincoat clad people exposing themselves at sports events, maybe, or inner tubes for floating in pools on lazy afternoons.

The doctor showed me how the vitreous humor, in its tidy sac, turns from gel to liquid and then begins to separate from the lining of the inner eye. The brown insect legs I saw were blood from this tearing away; the flashes were distress signals from the optic nerve. Looking at the diagram of the perky round vitreous that resembled a younger me’s breast, I wondered irrationally if I was going to need a sports bra for my morphing eyeball. Was it going to start sagging out of the eye socket, like a Spielberg special effect from Raiders of the Lost Ark?

No, said the doc. Imagine a beach ball filled with gel. The gel liquefies, but it is still the same volume. The internet told me to imagine a piece of Jell-O that is left out of the fridge and starts to pull away from the dish. Both images disturb. I was assured that separation of the humor is normal for older people. (More women than men, statistically.) A fellow writer said, “Oh yeah, I call them (the floaters) my family. Some mornings I wake up and tell my husband we have many new family members.”

Within ten days the tearing away was complete. The eye doctor was satisfied that the retina had not detached during the process, in which case I would have had to have immediate laser surgery to save my eyesight. That was good news.

One night last week a firefly, resting on the screen door, flashed me. My eye flashed back, and the wing/record player needle descended. The firefly and I repeated the communication a couple of times. I’ve always secretly believed I could learn to talk to the animals. I didn’t know it would be like this, quite. I return to a prayer that rises during meditation: Let me see things through the eyes of spirit. Will I see more clearly through a liquid than a gel? Firefly, the world is full of mystery.