Mixed-up Meal

We had one of those meals over the weekend that friends and family alike will likely tease us about for years to come.

In an attempt to focus on cleaning and organization (tasks I loathe), I put off grocery shopping until after Himself got home from work on Saturday. I thawed out a pound of hamburger to make something for dinner. Except, well, neither Woodstock nor I nor Himself actually particularly like ground beef. I like it in moussaka or Spanish rice, but that is about it. And since I had neither a good hard aged cheese for moussaka or tomato juice for Spanish rice, neither was an option.

I spent nearly half an hour searching for a recipe in my volumes of recipe books for something using ground beef that would satisfy us all. Nothing lept out at me other than meatballs, but one cannot make meatballs with only a pound of meat.

In desperation, I went hunting for random things that sounded good. Tempura batter mix, green tomatoes, sweet potatoes, a package of jalepeno brats (the only kind of sausage I can stand - mostly becuase they're so lean you have to spray the pan before you cook them - no grease!- and the jalepenos kill the sausage flavor). Some apples from the last farmer's market of the year...

When Himself came home, the kitchen smelled of fall - peppers, sweet potatoes, green tomatoes, brown-sugared apples ... he asked what I was making. I coyly replied that I wasn't going to tell him, because if I listed it on a menu he would laugh at me.

We dined on tempura-battered fried green tomatoes, roasted sweet potatoes and jalepeno brats, cut into medallions, and apple cardamom upside down cake for dessert. There is something about tempura batter that makes fried foods infinitely more palatable to me. There is something about roasting that makes the flavors of already rich sweet potatoes burst in a celebration of crisp leaves and cold nights. There is something about the first fruits of fall that make a meal seem more "cozy" and warm. Never mind that they were all sort of jumbled up on a menu.

Himself didn't laugh at me. In fact, we both remarked on how it was the perfect light fall meal.

Of course, he was the only one who didn't laugh. I could hear my mom rolling her eyes as she said, "only in your house."

No one roasts veggies, fries green tomatoes or eats jalepeno sausage in our families. Sometimes I wonder where we came from.