Cooking with Crime

I was going to title this “Cooking with Cindy,” but I thought two hard Cs sounded better. I was going to add that crime is more interesting than Cindy, but quite frankly, that is not always the case.

Saturday I did not get out of the house to do fun Mohawk Valley things. In my defense, I was not free till the afternoon and by then was tired and low on ambition (this after a bad-ass if unblogworthy morning). Well, I think I am allowed to watch crime shows and crochet on a Saturday afternoon (or almost any other time; it is one of my favorite things to do). I decided to also write in the TV Journal, because writing is always a good thing to do.

I found a feature called Weekend Mysteries on HLN. The first show was Body of Evidence: From the Case Files of Dayna Hinman. I had seen shows featuring Dayna Hinman, she is a famous profiler. Today’s episode featured a wealthy Texan. Did he die of natural causes, suicide or murder at the hands of his gold-digger wife?

Of course I also needed to start cooking. Steven was hard at work, and I had promised him a good supper. I started by pouring myself a glass of Chardonnay, so I could cook with wine, then peeling and garlic-pressing several cloves of garlic. I set the timer so they could breathe for 15 minutes (a friend sent me a link explaining that; it has to do with cancer fighting compounds). This also gave me an excuse to watch 15 minutes more of the show.

It was a disappointing case, but I don’t like to give away the ending in case you like to catch it sometime.

The next show was called The Investigators, and the case had also been covered on Snapped. I love those! A husband is gunned down on the beach during a romantic stroll with his newly-reconciled wife. Surely the grieving widow could have nothing to do with it.

During commercials I made it back out to the kitchen. I put the garlic in the blender with olive and canola oil and some basil out of a tube I had found in the produce section (I can’t wait till summer and fresh basil out of my container garden). I tossed some onion in this mixture and put it in a 350 degree oven. Later I added eggplant and much later fresh mushrooms. I normally do this in a 400 degree oven but thought I would try the effects of baking over roasting. It was quite successful.

We had the mixture over angel hair pasta, which I had also tossed in the basil/garlic oil. I put grated Parmesan on mine. Steven had dilly bread from the Ilion Farmer’s Market with his (ooh, so I do have a local connection after all. Yay!) (actually, if you want another local connection, I drank my wine out of a glass obtained at a fundraiser for the Herkimer Crusaders).

During cooking and eating, I also viewed a couple episodes of Sins and Secrets, one of which was also seen on Snapped. Mixed in with all this, I also got some crochet done. Crime, cooking, crochet, three of my favorite things. Not a bad Saturday in the Mohawk Valley.