Oh boy! Heirloom Tomatoes!!

The long-awaited heirloom tomatoes are here…that means one thing: Caprese salad.  Slice tomatoes over a bed of lettuce with slices of fresh mozzarella.  Top with some sliced fresh basil (from our window boxes), sprinkle on some salt and pepper, and drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  The ultimate summer supper!

I am also planning on making a menu from Vegetarian Express.  This is another go-to cook book for me.  The thyme in our window boxes is getting out of control, so I have been asked to make something with it so it can get trimmed.  I found a recipe for black-eyed peas with garlic and thyme.  The recommended sides are a tomato and pepper salad (I’ll use the slicing tomatoes and gypsy peppers from the box), corn on the cob, and whole grain bread.  This should be plenty of food to round out the rest of the week.

We are officially in stone fruit season.  A bout with what was either stomach flu or food poisoning pushed most of my menus into this week, so there really isn’t much to talk about.

Except…

The nectarines in the box are TINY…about two bites worth each.  When I opened the brown paper bag they were packed in as I was doing box inventory (like Christmas every week!), I was immediately reminded of the nectarines my paternal grandfather used to pull off his tree in Santee.  My grandmother would cut them up and turn them into sort of a loose preserve.  We would eat it on toast, stirred into oatmeal or cornmeal mush, or over ice cream.  I don’t have a recipe, but here’s what I expect was in it: stone fruit, sugar, and a little lemon juice.  Both grandparents are gone now (grandma three years and grandpa coming on the one year anniversary).  When I saw those tiny little fruits, I was instantly bombarded by hundreds of  childhood memories: baking cookies with my grandmother, puttering in the garden with my grandfather (well, he puttered while I usually picked flowers or snuck a snack off a nearby tomato plant), my grandmother’s determination to get her pond and waterfall to work…she never really got a satisfactory fountain until they moved to Arizona.

At the moment that Steve proposed last July, as my grandfather was dying, I was heartsick for a split second.  This amazing memory would forever be tainted with my feelings of helplessness and loss, I thought.  Somehow, though, my heart has managed to separate the two…perhaps because it understands that his intentions were amazingly sweet.  I am deeply sad that neither grandparent survived long enough to meet him properly or to see us married.  So this weekend, I will attempt to reproduce my grandmother’s preserve with the nectarines so like my grandfather’s to feed to my love, and know that they will forever be in my heart.  My past will be feeding my future.

Okay, I know I skipped last week, but we didn’t eat at home that much, and when we did it was SALAD…yes, we’ve officially entered summer full of yummy salad foods! Another note: we have dandelion greens on our permanent exclude list, so I will NOT be doing anything with these greens.  After trying through the season last year, we decided that we could not find anyway to make them edible; we got 2 golden delicious apples instead, which I consider more than a fair trade.

Sunday I totally blew it.  Thinking we still had plenty of salad fixings in the fridge, I didn’t bother to get to the store.  When I reached into the fridge to start prepping, I discovered that we were woefully low on lettuce.  Not wanting to run to the store, we opted for quesadillas served with steamed broccoli and carrots that I tossed with lime juice, salt, and pepper. Most of this week, we will be munching salads for dinner – we chop up peppers, carrots, celery, broccoli, toss it with lettuce, and add various accessories, if you will.  Some nights, marinated mushrooms, some nights chopped turkey.  Just depends on what we feel like, and it helps to make the salads different.  We also always have something crunchy, usually in the form of chow mein noodles, but toasted nuts, sunflower seeds, or croutons work too.

Steve requested veggie tacos this week, so I’ll be making that filling.  I saute an onion and a couple cloves of garlic in a little oil.  Then I add veggies.  This week it will be the gypsy peppers (which look like the sweet Italian peppers but have just a bit of a kick to them), carrots, celery, and cauliflower.  I spice it with cumin, chili powder, and coriander.  Then I toss in a couple cans of pinto beans.  When everything’s heated through, I add some lime juice and salt if needed.  We eat this as a soft taco filling on corn tortillas topped with lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, and salsa.  I use tacos to help clean out the fridge, because you can pretty much put any kind of vegetation in it and it works great.

I’ve not addressed what we do with the fruit.  For the most part, we eat it for breakfast.  The berries are usually the most fragile and sun-tired, so I chop those up first.  The next day, I usually attack the melon and stone fruits and make a quick fruit salad with whatever looks like it’s going to go first.  Steve eats this plain, or if I’ve made granola, with granola.  I always add yogurt and a banana (if it’s not too overripe).  Oranges and apples either get eaten out of hand or added to our dinner salads.

On our own growing front, I’m pleased to announce that we have lots of baby tomatoes and one baby bell pepper.  The herb baskets have taken off – particularly my “Italian” one with oregano, basil, and thyme.  I’ll be making some great sauce once the tomatoes come in! I may even make some sooner with canned tomatoes and summer squash.  Who knows what next week will bring?

This is going to be a short list of menus for a couple of reasons.  We had our annual Scottish Country Dance ball and workshop on Saturday, which means that Sunday was a “don’t want to move much day.”  We had a mostly pre-prepared dinner on Sunday: grilled chicken sausage, baked beans, and steamed broccoli and carrots (the only items that weren’t pre-processed).  Sunday afternoon my throat started hurting, and by Monday it was on fire.  I came home from work sick and Steve picked up dinner (Sukiyaki – a great sore throat/cold soup).  My throat’s still a bit sore today, so we will probably have either leftover sausage and beans or do take out again tonight.

Tomorrow, I plan to return to the kitchen.  The chard and asparagus are this week’s use first items, so I’m going to make Whole Wheat Spaghetti with Swiss Chard and Pecorino Cheese, and roast the asparagus to go on the side.

Saturday, we are hosting a wedding invitation stuffing and Pangalactic Gargleblaster recipe building party.  We should have about a dozen folks throughout the afternoon.  I figured chili, cornbread,  salad, and brown rice would be a nice filling meal.  Since one of the attendants is a vegetarian, the entire meal will be meatless.  I found a scone recipe using jalapeno and fresh corn; I think I’m going to triple the recipe and plan to freeze any scones that don’t get eaten at the party.  The vegetarian chili recipe is a slow-cooker method, so I’ll get it started and make the scones in the morning.  Later in the afternoon, I’ll put the brown rice in the oven and put the salad together.

For next week, I’ll  have broccoli and rosemary carrying over.

After last week’s pasta dish, Steve requested that the next time I make pasta to make a “red sauce with perhaps a meatball.” At first I was a bit hurt by what I took as a criticism. But it occurs to me that, given Steve’s heritage, one of the major comfort foods for him is a traditional spaghetti and meatballs. The various forms of pasta that I’ve been tinkering with over the past few weeks full of veggies and anti-sauces have been tasty, but were not hitting the mark as Italian comfort food.
This week, I still had a head of cabbage, celery, carrots, and potatoes to use up. Today’s box will arrive with broccoli, lettuce, more carrots, and more celery (along with lots of fruit including the first peaches and melon of the season -yay!).
To fulfill my dear heart’s wish, I opted to make spaghetti and bolognese.  I doubled the recipe, both because Steve likes a lot of sauce and so that I could have some in the freezer.  I rounded out the meal with some frozen green beans since we’d eaten through all the lettuce.  This was a pretty tasty dish, though a bit expensive.

Less successful was the dish I selected to use up the cabbage: Smothered Pork Chops with Apples, Onions, and Cabbage.  The idea seemed promising, but the end result was sloppy, greasy, with a sharp alcohol flavor.  To be fair, I substituted the Calvados that the recipe called for with Apple Jack because of cost (a small bottle of Calvados was going for $24 while a bottle twice the size of Apple Jack was $20).  So, I’ll take the blame for the alcohol flavor.  I served the dish with mashed potatoes to try to soak up some of the liquid, but the whole thing was meh.

This week’s box arrives today, so tonight, I’ll be tackling the broccoli and making Chicken and Broccoli Stir-Fry with brown rice.  I use this method to cook brown rice, and it comes out great every time.

To try to finish up this week’s box, I have a chilled supper planned for later this week: a mushroom and Parmesan salad (using celery and served on lettuce) with a chilled tomato soup.  Both recipes are from Moosewood Cooks at Home.

Steve has spent the last couple weeks planting and hanging a pair of Topsy-Turvy tomato planters and some window boxes (which we have attached to our balcony railing).  He planted tomatoes  in one of the Topsy-Turvys and pepper, chilies, and tomatillos in the other, with the hope that they will produce these items that only come for a few weeks in the boxes.  I would love to be able to make the chili verde sauce Steve’s mom and I made at Christmas using our own grown ingredients.  The window boxes have been filled with herbs: basil, oregano, thyme, mint, and rosemary (and catnip, but only the four-legged members of our family will be enjoying that particular herb).