Making Zucchini on the Grill

We have a vegetable basket for the grill, so I tried grilling zucchini as a side dish.

Two things to keep in mind: first, zucchini shrinks when cooking. Just because there's a layer covering the entire bottom of the basket, it won't look like enough 20 minutes from now. Cut some more.

Second: keep an eye on things and don't trust what the knob on your burners say. The basket straddled the center and right burner, and both were between Medium and Low, closer to low. Everything looked good, so I ran inside a few minutes to work on salad. I was gone about 5 minutes when I came back and found the those slices over the center burner turning brown and smoking a little. Another reason to cook extra.

The stuff that didn't burn came out okay. I just wish I'd made more.
I also baked some plain Idaho potatoes. Next time, those will have to be spiced up a little.

What's a Good Recipe for Iced Coffee?

There's a heat wave in New York City, which means three or more days of 90+-degree heat, with the accompanying humidity. And yet, I still like having cups of tea or coffee. Now, for tea, I need a cool breeze or something. I can't drink tea in the middle of a hot afternoon. Coffee, on the other hand, I can pick up at any store at any time of the day (especially McDonald's where the large coffee is still a dollar).

The one problem I have at home is that tea can be made one cup at a time, but coffee requires a pot. Even half a pot, if I wanted, but still wasting a filter that could make a pot. So I made 8-10 cups, most of which sat there for a while, until I decided to try making Iced Coffee.

Note: I would not call this a success, but it wasn't terrible either. I could work on it (or I could just get someone else's recipe).

Basically, here's what I did: In a large cup (one of those plastic, extra-large drink cups from one of those stores) I put in
4 - 5 ice cubes
2 scoops of vanilla ice cream
10 - 12 ounces of room-temperature coffee, previously brewed
3 - 4 ounces of milk

Then I realized that I needed to sweeten it because the ice cream wasn't going to do that much. So I added ...

a little Light Corn syrup, because we didn't have any Dark syrup,
a little Dark Corn syrup, which I found as I was putting away the light syrup
about a teaspoon of sugar
a little smidgen of honey

I was worried about it being too sugary and having to scrape the syrup off my teeth. Also, I was afraid that it was all going to settle too the bottom of the cup (the main reason I don't make unsweetened iced tea). In fact, there was some syrup stuck on the iced tea spoon I was using to stir the concoction, so I kept stirring vigorously.

In the end, it was refreshing and I could take the sweetness, but it still had a bitterness to it that I didn't like. Yes, coffee is bitter, but not if you sweeten it properly. I'll work on it some more.

Maybe even later today, if I put on another pot of coffee.

EDIT: I should read my own blog. I might've remembered this entry:
Drink With Maple Syrup, from 2010!

Back for Another Summer

Another summer break is here, and I'll venture to try to do two things: first, to experiment in cooking because I don't have a very large recipe file in my brain; second, record my successes and failures and post them here!

I failed on the second part last year. Most of this was because I wanted to post pictures to go with everything, but I didn't set time aside to upload the pictures. Part of it was because I didn't want to make multiple posts in one day, so when I did find time, I had a self-imposed limit. And then I didn't get back to it.

Let's hope Summer 2013 is better than Summer 2012, even if I'm the only one reading this.

And if I'm not here, I hope that means I'm doing something productive, like writing my hypothetical novel.