Last night I walked out of the Quincy Center T station to this ^. Ok, so I adjusted the brightness and contrast a little bit on the photo but it really looked pretty threatening out there! I took some photos just before my camera batteries died, you can see that the lens cover is starting to close on this photo, and then I walked quickly home. Halfway there giant rain drops started falling so I walked faster and reached my front porch just in time to miss the skies open up and dump waterfalls of rain down on the Earth.
I walked into the front hallway and found a box sitting near the mailboxes - my cookbooks from the Good Cook book club!! Went inside, opened up the box and sat by the window flipping through my new treasures while I tried not to be scared of the thunder and lightening that was directly over my house... or so it seemed anyway. I thought for sure we'd get struck, but the storm only lasted about 1/2 an hour and then I went off to do laundry and run errands.
Then I came home to finally make the box of Annie's GF Mac & Cheese that I bought the other day. I came across a recipe for fried green tomatoes in Real Simple magazine and I thought they'd be a great accompaniment to the mac & cheese.
Let me just say first that I actually don't even like mac & cheese out of a box. I rarely ate the "real" stuff before I went gluten-free so I don't know why I was so excited to find the GF version. But I cooked it up anyway.
While the pasta was cooking I set to work on the fried tomatoes. Stop & Shop didn't actually have green tomatoes so I bought the least ripe red ones I could find. The recipe calls for all purpose flour, eggs and yellow cornmeal for the coating and then you fry them up in canola oil. I substituted sweet rice flour for the all purpose flour. Perhaps this was my mistake? I am not very good at knowing what to use for flours. I also had white and brown rice flours in the fridge but I figured since it was just for dredging I could use the just the sweet rice. The tomatoes went first into the flour, then the egg, then the cornmeal then into the oil. The first batch cooked up nicely but the second round burnt as I'd let the oil get too hot.
I finished making the mac & cheese, plated up some of it plus 2 tomatoes and set off to the living room to enjoy my dinner.
I should've taken a picture but I was so disappointed in it all that I didn't even bother. The mac & cheese was gritty and the fried tomatoes had no flavor. You know when you can already taste what it before you eat it? I had in mind exactly what this would taste like and when it didn't, well I was pretty bummed.
The upside? I finally found Lactaid ice cream! So I finished off with some of that. Yummmmm!
Tonight is the first night of the next session of kickboxing. I was a pretty big slacker last session and I promised Steve I'd be consistent this time. I've been going to kickboxing twice a week for over 1 year! I do love it, I've just had a lot of other stuff going on lately but I'm really looking forward to getting back in the habit. This is only an 8 week session and then we usually have a pretty long break after this. Hopefully not too long. I'll really have to make sure I get my butt to the gym to workout during the off-season!
Ok, long post, doesn't say much of anything, and now I have to get to work!
Comments
anyway - rice flour generally doesn't work as a substitute for flour. I keep on hand a GF all-purpose mix. I use either Tom Sawyer or Kinnickinnick or Bob's Red Mill. You'll see that they have a combination of flours (including rice flour usually) to give it a similar build to all-purpose regular flour! you'll start to know what you like better in the mixes... :)
That photo is awesome, Jenny! I was at work during the storm and it was redonkulous! It sounded like lightning was hitting right outside of our building.