So I’m spending the week with Ruthzilla in Chapel Hill and it has been several days now of “let’s feed Elizabeth good food and booze”. I’ve only suffered one mild hangover, and quite honestly deserved much worse for the amount of fun that was had.

Ruthie is my cooking muse, and not in the old male sit there and be naked and inspire me muse kind of way. We play well together in the kitchen. I made her turkey breast with paprika and lemon. She made me lemon rice (hers is always better than mine). We’ve resumed our MST3000 style of watching cooking shows and today I nearly peed my pants squealing over the horrors of a Paula Dean ham and banana casserole. There are some people in the world where things are just easy when you’re around them, even if everything else around you is shit shit shit. Ruthie is one of those people to me, and because our friendship is so smooth it makes the rough patches in our separate lives a bit nicer.

But on to the recipe.

So we had a ton of leftover lemon rice. We are both used to cooking for larger groups than just 2 food geeks. We mashed it up with some bread crumbs, eggs and pecorino. Then we made patties and dusted them with seasoned corn flower. Then we fried them. Simple, easy. Took less than half and hour. We made a seasoned mayo (fresh dill, chopped pickle, green onion, garlic salt, dijon mustard) and stuffed ourselves. It was awesome.

Tomorrow it’s omlettes and farmers markets and maybe see a band or two. It is nice to be social, but it’s even nicer to be social with one of my favorite people ever.