On Beyond Bovine Trials #5, #6, #7, #8, & #9

What a weekend for the experiment that I bet you thought I forgot about.

I'm marking some regulars off the list this week and one newbie.


#5 - Iceberg lettuce - I made a salad where I combined iceberg lettuce and romaine lettuce. I actually prefer my iceberg lettuce on tacos, but Clinton prefers salad of iceberg lettuce. Landon prefers to lick salad dressing off his fingers, bypassing the lettuce altogether.


#6 - Romaine lettuce - see above. Except I don't like romaine lettuce on my tacos, I do prefer it in my salads.


#7 - Yellow onions - I made The Pioneer Woman's Pot Roast again, so I am able to cross off the yellow onions. I'm not sure if this counts; we didn't really eat the onions, but they do flavor the meat...you make the call in the comments.




#8 - Carrots - and of course the carrots went into the pot roast as well. I love a pot roast carrot. Mushy, beefy, yum!! Clinton eats them, but I don't know that he loves them or anything. And Landon, Landon is in the raw carrots only camp. He will not even entertain the idea that carrots might just be yummy cooked as well.
And finally, the newbie - #9 - Acorn squash.

I used another Pioneer Woman's recipe for this one.

This is an acorn squash.
This is an acorn squash cut in half - looks pumpkiny.



This is an acorn squash with it's guts removed and 1 1/2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp brown sugar put in it's place, and then drizzled with pure maple syrup - or as I like to call it, liquid money. (In an attempt to not buy something with HFCS, I bought 100% pure maple syrup. Which cost me nearly double for about 1/4 of the syrup.) Also, Pioneer Woman didn't mention this, but my squashes would not stay up right. I made little holders out of crumpled aluminum foil to make them stand up.

Here's a picture of the maple syrup. I thought it needed its own picture. It was the major cost of this recipe.


Bake for 30 minutes at 400° covered with foil and water in the pan, remove foil from top, bake another 25 minutes. Turn oven to broiler and cook another 5 minutes.


I suggest waiting about 10 minutes for them to cool; it took a while for the molten lava in the middle to not burn the ever loving crap out of my tongue.

Reactions:

Clinton: [Head tilt, really thinking, probably about how to say he doesn't like it without insulting me] It does the cotton candy thing.

Me: [Confused] Whaaa? What's the cotton candy thing?

Clinton: You know, it like dissolves in seconds in my mouth.

Me: [Confused as to why this is a bad thing.]

Clinton: I can see where someone would like it, it's okay, but not really my thing.

Me: It has a similar flavor to sweet potatoes, I don't like the maple flavor much, it's overpowering. Considering I really only like butter and brown sugar on my sweet potatoes - in fact I don't even really like maple syrup on my pancakes, I wonder if I'd like it better without the maple syrup.

So there you have it, it was good, but overpoweringly sweet and maybe if I could tone it down I'd like it better. It was not fault of the squash, but the recipe I think.


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Next trial - fresh coconut. Oh and I decided that in the spring I'm going to grow upside down tomato plants (like the infomercial except I'm making my own.) So if you have a good tomato recipe, bring it on. (Uh, I don't know which kind of tomato I'm going to get, so if your recipe calls for a certain kind of tomato, let me know that way I can look for that kind when I go to buy the plants.)

Because this experiment seems to be at risk of becoming an experiment in which I cook everything with the pioneer woman's recipes, I'm going to ask for some help. She just posted a recipe for turnip gratin. This seems really right up my alley - I mean, it's full of cheese, how could it not be. But I want to see if there's something better out there. Do you have a turnip recipe?

And any other recipe for a fruit or veggie that you like, I'll take those recipes too