Recipes, Please!

Okay, I admit it. I’m a mediocre cook. Maybe even worse.

I wasn’t always this way. I used to experiment with all kinds of recipes, and actually came up with some pretty good meals. But I tried to keep them relatively healthy, which didn’t always please my sons. There were certain things they liked, and others they snubbed. Now they’re grown and living on their own anyway, so it’s just my husband and me around. My husband is one wonderful and tolerant guy, so when I take shortcuts in what I serve, he’s fine with it.

But now I’m faced with a dilemma. Some very dear friends have planted a garden in our spacious backyard since they live in a condo with relatively little room for planting. The garden is bearing a lot of great veggies now, but because of some unexpected family issues our friends are traveling at the moment.

Which means that I need to figure out how to serve some of these veggies that are now ripe and won’t survive till their return--although we will give some to other friends, relatives and neighbors. But we want to eat some ourselves, of course.

Help!

If you can point me to recipes you particularly like, whether online or otherwise, I’d really appreciate it. Or post them here in comments. Please!

For what? Well, although there are tomatoes in the garden, I’m definitely not a tomato aficionado so I won’t cook with them or otherwise eat them. I know how to cook the green beans and have done so--and love them. The corn ripened before, and, yes, I knew how to cook it, too.

But what I need is good recipes for peppers (yellow ones that are supposed to turn pink when ripe... although they seem pretty ripe to me). Also, we’ve an abundance of eggplants and are beginning to get some zucchini. The Brussels sprouts aren’t ready yet, and I’m not sure the artichokes will ever be.

One other thing. As you probably figured, I’m really into doing things the easy way these days. The fewer ingredients and steps there are in recipes, the more likely I am to try them.

And, yes, I know there are numerous culinary cozy mystery series that are devoted to cooks, chefs, shops that specialize in certain kinds of edibles (like cheese shops and coffeehouses), and others involved with food who solve murders, too. If I ever got an idea for one of them I’d relive my olden days of enjoying cooking so I could include recipes with my story, as many of these series do.

But as you know, I write my mysteries about pets, not plants or food. The best recipe for dealing with pets is love, not cooking (unless you want to cook your pets’ food, of course).

As a result, any suggestions would be welcome!

So... what’s your favorite recipe for eggplant, zucchinis or peppers?