Almost-Rotten-Vegetable Primavera

Food goes bad at my house. There are just two of us and I love to cook, but my schedule doesn't always allow me to make dinner. It's rare that I go shopping and use up all of the vegetables and herbs that I buy before they go bad (but conversely I nearly always use some of the vegetables!).

Tonight I cooked up some tortellinis, ten days past their expiration date. And I made a sauce with an onion and garlic clove that were both starting to sprout green from their stems, mushrooms that were several shades darker than when I bought them, a spare stem of broccoli from a casserole I made a couple of weeks ago, a small zucchini of which I could only use half because the bottom was already turning to mush, some spinach that was starting to show signs of slime, and some basil for which I paid $5 three weeks ago, and from which I salvaged about seven leaves. Then I poured in some vegetable broth that I opened 2 1/2 weeks ago (though the box said to discard seven days after opening) and some cream that expired last week. I added some flour to thicken.

It was surprisingly good. Zach claims he could tell that the veggies weren't as fresh as usual, but I really don't think I would have noticed had I not fixed the dinner myself.

Sometimes I do make real live dinner, particularly on Sundays after church. We never used to make anything, but the last year since Jeffery started coming with us, I've felt a pleasant obligation to feed him something other than Indian food leftovers from Saturday's night out. Last week Jeffery slept in and didn't go to church, but I went and retrieved him from his house so I'd have an excuse to try a tomato-olive compote I found online (I think on Martha Stewart).

We cooked the frozen salmon using the broiler on our oven. I made Zach do the heavy lifting on that part, but it involved olive oil, about 15 minutes of cooking and a switch from broil to bake halfway through. He also made the sticky rice, which he bought from the Asian market and cooked in the rice cooker he bought from Costco a couple years ago.

I made a side dish of asparagus and the tomato-olive compote to go on the fish. First I sauteed half an onion and 4 slivered cloves of garlic in 2 tablespoons of olive oil (extra virgin from Costco), and some salt & pepper for about five minutes. Then I added a can of diced tomatoes (even though Alice Waters swears you should buy whole canned tomatoes for better flavor), 1/2 cup chopped Kalamata olives, and 2 tablespoons of capers. It was delicious if I do say so myself. And beautiful.