Tuesday Night Cooking Quickie

Damn...now that Mt. Sac started, I don't have as much free time as I would like, but on the upside, the quarter at Cal Poly is almost over. On a side note, I think it's sad and a bit shocking that Mt. Sac has better labs for students than what I've seen at both Cal Poly Pomona and UCSD. Anyhow, here's a post for anyone just trying to get through the week, esp. the worker bees. Thank God it's hump day...

The food blogging world is endless (and that is only a small part of the bigger blogging universe), and I've found another food blog that I like called For the Love of Cooking. On it, I saw an interesting recipe that I wanted to try called Vegetable Tian. She adapted it from a Barefoot recipe. What a "tian" is, I really don't know. I tried looking it up, but none of the hits really said what it was or where it was from. Is it French?

I'll leave the specifics for you to read on Love's blog, but here's the gist of how to make it.


Dice an onion into small pieces and saute in a pan, along with two cloves of minced garlic. When the onion becomes translucent, layer this in your baking dish.


On top of the onions/garlic medley, tightly arrange sliced potatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, and Roma tomatoes in a ring. Season with salt, freshly ground pepper, and dried thyme. I didn't have just dried thyme, but I did have some Italian seasoning and sprinkled that on it. I liked the colors of it all. Go look at Love's site, to see how it should look haha...hers looks a lot better.


Bake the dish covered in the oven for about 35 minutes. Then add 1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese. For some reason, I thought she wrote Mozzarella, so that's what I added, only to quickly realize that I was wrong. So I added some Parmesan cheese to this as well. Then, uncovered, bake it for another 30 minutes.

I should have cooked this longer to let it develop more of a "crust" from the looks of Love's pictures. The vegetables turned out nicely though...nothing got overcooked. A simple and easy dish to make, but it tasted good, if you like vegetables. I think next time I will try some fresh herbs, and maybe add some eggplant to the mix.

I've also had a hankering for some cookies. I remember in high school in the mornings before class, there would be freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, 3 for a buck. They were so good...
But today, I decided to make oatmeal raisin walnut cookies, using Simply Recipes Recipe. I don't know if this was coincidence, but I was looking at the Quaker's Oats (the oats I used) Vanishing Oatmeal Cookies recipe, and it was pretty much the same except that the Quaker's called for 1/2 cup less of the granulated sugar. On another side note, I made a fairly recent discovery to link Quaker's Oats with the Quaker religion and the guy on the label...haha yea I'm slow...

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The recipe made 24 humongous ugly cookies. I baked em a bit too longer than I should have because the out edges came out almost crisp. But the middle was still chewy, so they weren't ruined. Next time, I will try the Quaker's recipe, by cutting down the sugar and also adding more walnuts.

That's it for today folks...Until we meet again. Same time, same channel.