Waiting for Thoreau

Food.

Yesterday was John’s birthday. He spent most of the day hunting. I spent most of the day cooking.

Here was the menu: Veal parmiagiana, brandy glazed carrots, buttered noodles, with cherry pie and ice cream for dessert.

It gets better.

The veal parmigiana was from our veal, and I topped it with a fresh mozzarella that I’d made hours before. I used an Emeril LaGasse recipe from FoodNetwork.com that was sorely lacking in solid instruction. However, the sauce was extraordinary and well worth the four hours of simmering time it took to make it extraordinary.

Simmering Tomato Sauce

I dumped the idea of making the Mornay sauce as I never figured out why we needed a white sauce on the noodles. I also slathered the bottom of a 9 x 13 baking pan with the tomato sauce, cooked the scallops the way the recipe called to cook veal chops, then nestled those browned bits of meat into the sauce. I finely shredded a parmigiana-reggiano cheese over the scallops then smothered them with the rest of the sauce. The whole thing was topped off with thin slices of the fresh mozzarella.

The cherry pie and ice cream were also homemade. The pie was pretty and the ice cream from the cream of my cows.

Cherry Pie

What more can I say?

Happy Birthday, John!