It feels silly to dedicate an entire post to what I threw together this morning. BUT, mostly this is just to say, it's nice sometimes to get creative with your leftovers. Every once in a while, when I get bored with eating heated-up tupperware meals, I like to declare it Jo Ann Surprise Night. What, might you wonder, is Jo Ann Surprise? Glad you asked.
Those close to me in my wild oats years may remember Jo Ann surprise from drunken nights of revelry, in which I'd throw whatever I had in the fridge into a hot skillet, add some Louisiana hot sauce and feed whatever mass of collegiate bohemians happened to be wandering into my living room at the time. Most often, these dishes came out resembling some sort of mac n' cheese. Most of the time, the "secret ingredient" was mustard powder.
Jo Ann, if you're wondering, is my grandmother's name. Aside from being one of the most courageous and classy ladies alive, she's also a phenomenal, quintessentially Southern cook. And thus she is inescapably notorious for cooking five times as much food as we need. When we gather for holiday meals at her home in Tennessee, she always sends us home with a cooler of ziplock bags filled with green beans, casseroles, even iceberg salads.
As I've grown older, I've tried to step-up my Jo Ann Surprise game. Of course, I've found it easier, in general, to prepare meals when I'm not inebriated, barefoot, trying to keep hoards of college students from running nekkid into the streets of Bowling Green -- so JAS dishes these days take only a few more steps, and a little more concentration. Nonetheless, the philosophy behind the Surprise remains the same - follow your heart, take risks, and be satisfied with less than perfection. Always.
So today is, at the very least, an interesting mix of things. Here's a list of tupperware'd items I had sitting in my fridge:
strawberry cupcake batter
purple cabbage
spinach
marinated mushrooms
potato hash
sweet potato pancake batter
So obviously, the natural course of action here is to mix the two batters, form sweet-and-savory hotcakes of sorts, and pile on the potato hash, mushrooms and chopped leafy veggies. Voila! Sweet, savory, bitter, spicy. A veritable circus. But I suppose that's what the tequila sunrise is for. I have only mostly grown up since the old days of Jo Ann Surprise.