I haven’t cooked an interesting meal for most of February. 39 IEP meetings in a short month will do that to a person. But it is a new month, with a vacation coming up and the possibility of an actual yoga class, so I thought it would be a good time to experiment. Experiments can go really, really well or they can be total disasters. This one fell somewhere in between.

I had some beautiful purple basil in the garden that I was dying to try, and some cute little leeks and a tomato or two from the last veggie basket. The store had some pretty green beans and I still had leftover squash. So what to do?

I started by roasting the squash and green beans with some olive oil. Then I cooked down a little leek and shallot and added the tomato. Get that all nice and soft, add a little veggie stock and cook down. I seasoned a chicken breast with salt, pepper and herb de Provence, got a nice crust on it, then combined it with the tomato and leek sauce to finish cooking.

It looked good, it smelled wonderful, but it was only ok. We even broke out a bottle of wine tonight, just because. The first one was a Chilean Pino Noir that was just bad. Not a “not so good” bad, but an undrinkable bad. We decided to not try more than one sip (soapy acidic taste will do that) and we went for one of the Haywood’s Bob picked up. It was ok. Kind of like the dinner. We have had better, but it was drinkable, like dinner was eatable. Not the best meal, but far from the worst. I’m hoping my next experiment is more successful.