What's for supper? Pizza chicken

Tonight's menu:

Pizza chicken (cut-up chicken breasts cooked with canned pizza sauce, green peppers, and mozzarella cheese)
Whole-wheat spaghettini

Banana-Bread Sundaes (a fancy-dessert-glass concoction of a bit of banana bread, a bit of mostly-thawed banana, a bit of mostly-thawed yogurt, a spoonful of peach jam, and some frozen strawberries warmed in the microwave)

Ricotta desserts, and ricotta whipped topping

"Bettina" might not approve of putting ricotta cheese to use in desserts, and usually it is too expensive for us to recommend it as a frugal ingredient; but our local supermarket occasionally runs specials on an Italian-style brand of dairy products--their Parmesan, their ricotta and so on--and that's when we pick some up.

We haven't made frozen Tortoni for awhile, but we do sometimes make Cocoa Ricotta Cream when we have a container of cheese on hand. It's very good, but you don't want it after a heavy meal--ricotta desserts aren't usually sweet, but they are rich.

Tonight we had one of those sale-priced 2-cup containers in the fridge, and Father's Day company coming (just Grandpa Squirrel, but he's important), and strawberries and raspberries to make shortcake with, but no whipped cream. We could have used plain yogurt, or just had the fruit on top of the plain biscuit cake, but there was the ricotta, and Mama Squirrel remembered a recipe for Ricotta Topping in the Goldbecks' American Wholefoods Cuisine. So that's what we did. Short version: run the ricotta cheese plus some yogurt plus some honey plus a little vanilla through the food processor, or beat with electric beaters until fluffy. The recipe also called for a bit additional cream cheese, but that seems optional if your ricotta is already pretty creamy.

An option to make all this more frugal would be to use a homemade version of ricotta cheese, like the Hillbilly Housewife's version. I've made it and used it in main dishes, but haven't yet tried it in desserts. If I do, I'll let you know.

As southern Ontario as...strawberry pie

It's the middle of strawberry season here, and we bought two baskets of them last Saturday. One basket went to make jam. Ponytails used some of them to decorate the angelfood cake for The Apprentice. And we still had a big bowlful that had been washed and so wouldn't keep long...so Mama Squirrel planned to make a strawberry pie, kind of a rare thing in this Treehouse. We are more likely to make strawberry shortcake with biscuits. But it just seemed like the right thing...

Except that when Mama Squirrel went to examine the strawberries the next day, she found that their number had greatly decreased. Oops.

But we did have a box of blueberries that Mr. Fixit had added to the shopping cart.

So: some of the (remaining) strawberries went to make the glaze for the pie. We don't use pudding mix and Jell-O, it's a scratch recipe, southern-Ontario style...but I don't bother to push strawberries through a sieve like my grandma did, I just mash them and cook them with sugar and cornstarch and a little water and lemon juice. Like making a really quick jam. And the rest I mixed with the box of blueberries, put in a baked pie crust, and poured the glaze over. That's the nice thing about this kind of pie--you don't bake the whole thing, so you don't lose the texture of the fruit.

I think I like that as much as I do a whole pie made of strawberries.

Strawberry Mice

Crayons and I made these last night for a surprise dessert. The idea was from Family Fun, and the impetus was a late-summer pint of strawberries from the farm stand (and the fact that we've had about as much shortcake as even we can eat for awhile). Check out these adorable micies, and use your imagination and whatever's on the shelf to improvise their faces and tails. We used chocolate chips for both the noses and eyes; bits of dried fruit (from a bag of trail mix) for ears; and pieces of chow mein noodle for tails. For fun, we arranged them on a plate around a wedge of cheese (with a "bite" taken out of the side).

We made about a dozen, and served a bowl of the extra berries and sliced-off bits on the side.

(Thanks, Ponytails, for the photos.)