We had another day of gorgeous weather at Seven Oaks today. I ran around to job sites today while Dave made the necessary improvements here on the farm. He started out with gentle weeding and then did some mowing before changing the tractor implement in order to switch to plowing. He also harvested vegetables which we were lucky enough to eat for dinner! I make it sound more romantic than it is, perhaps, but that is because some of my last posts have been rather graphic!

So, let me back up a bit before I get into the dinner hour which was quite exciting. Back to me….I arrived at my first job site around 7am and had a nice conference with the carpenters there. It was a relatively quiet morning since many people are tagging on a vacation day to the 4th of July and so the roads were free of rush hour.

There was a bit of a scramble with changes to the construction plan on one job but that was all resolved by about 10am. That was when I arrived home and saw that Williams-Sonoma was advertizing an extra 20% off their sale prices on items in their store only. I had been lusting over a Le Creuset brand Dutch oven in the perfect color for my kitchen, ‘Ocean’, but had been stopped by the price tag. Well, they had a slightly scratched one reduced by 50% and then with today’s added 20% reduction and my 10% trade discount, this was too good to be true!  Come to Papa!

So, the day continued, yada, yada, yada, until dinner time when I decided to pull out all the stops. Sometimes you just have to evaluate the players and figure out what role they will play. Here were my list of players tonight: green and yellow summer squash, two types of lettuce, cherry tomatoes, green scallions, and green peppers. Dave had picked up .33 lbs of boneless pork loin from the butcher, Bob, this afternoon.

I relied on a simple summer squash recipe from my brother. It involves sauteing sliced squash and onion with some olive oil and some added spices. I added a pat of butter since we were splurging on all fronts!

We have enjoyed this simple squash sautee for the last couple of years but I was able to enhance it this year by the addition of  our dried thyme from last year’s harvest. I keep meaning to put all those leaves in a spice jar!

The pork recipe is something from Hoosier-ville, Indiana. They have a wonderful treat called “Chicken Fried Steak” which is actually a pork loin wedge that is flattened, breaded and then fried and ultimately served on a bun like a hamburger.  The history of it comes from Wienner Schnitzel which is a German way of preparing pork. For more info, this is a fine link on The History of Schnitzel. http://www.kitchenproject.com/history/Schnitzel/

It is well received with mustard and if you order it in a restaurant it would look like this:

It is to die for when done correctly.  We don’t eat much meat any more but but when my dear husband, brought home two thin slices of a boneless pork loin chop today as I reported above I decided to make my own version of these. I smacked them with a ‘trudge’ which looks like this. One side is flat and the other is pocked. I used the flat side to make 2 really thin pieces of pork. They were almost see thru so they cook almost instantly.

Then I dipped each piece in egg, and breaded them with panko (a Japanese version of bread crumbs) which looked like this. A heavy hand with the pepper grinder is all they needed.

Here are the pieces frying in the pan!

When finished, we had a lovely dinner that looked like this! No need for a bun!