Winning Produce

My most recent haul from the CSA brought in lots of  the usual goodies - tomatoes, Thai and Italian basils, zucchini, squash, eggplant, potatoes, garlic and peppers.  

This garlic really is phenomenal - I'm planning to roast a head of it to make some garlic butter - perhaps I'll freeze that to bring me the flavors in the winter.

This week also brought, of course, more peaches!  Every week I keep looking at them, thinking "I'll try a new recipe with the peaches this week."  And every week, I simply cut them up and eat them just as they are.  They've been wonderful with no additions at all.

This week I also got a few more tomatoes, and combined them with a couple more for a slow roast.  I simply cut them in half, sprinkled them with olive oil, salt, a little thyme and a smidgen of sugar and put them in a hot roasting oven.  Nigella Lawson's Nigella Express includes a recipe for what she calls "Moonblush Tomatoes" that she puts in a very hot oven right before bed, and then turns off the oven and leaves the tomatoes in the oven overnight as it cools.  I'm a fan of her methods, and while I toy with the ratios in her recipe, it offers a nice flavor profile.

These tomatoes are slightly roasted, and get just a bit wrinkly as the flavors are concentrated.  I love eating them on their own, but they also make great additions to salads, and are wonderful sauteed a bit and put over pasta.  This is just a generally fantastic way to enjoy some tomatoes!

The Italian Job

Some nights there is too much to do to spend much time on dinner. On such nights, the preparation work I've done earlier in the week comes in very handy! I quickly cooked some angel hair pasta, which only takes a few minutes. While the pasta cooked, I sliced a clove of garlic and cut up two tomatoes.

When the pasta was done, I drained it, leaving a little of the pasta water in the saucepan, and added a bit of olive oil. I added the tomatoes and garlic and sauteed them until they softened. Then I stirred in some of the pesto I had in the fridge.

I then added the pasta to the mixture, and stirred in two spoonfuls of ricotta cheese. As I stirred it together, the cheese melted into it and the pesto coated the pasta. It smelled great. I added a little salt and fresh ground pepper to season it, and then served it up!

While it was a quick dinner, it still tasted fresh, flavorful and filling. I'll have to use this combination again!

Mise en Place

It’s been so hot around here, I’m not even hungry every night. On days where I have a very late lunch, cooking doesn't always appeal. However, looking ahead to a busy few nights, I know I should at least make a few things…easier on myself for later in the week.

It’s a perfect time to chop, slice and process a few things…no cooking required!

My first stop – slicing up some veggies for use later in the week. I do not do this will ALL veggies, but some are just fine. In this instance, I took a few hot peppers and some garlic and sliced them, then chopped a few slices as well. This can be the basis of a dressing, or a spicy Thai-style dish, or generally anything I want to be spicy and pungent. If tomatoes magically appear in my world any time soon, this could go in my gazpacho too!

Next up, I had some lovely Italian basil, and some sprigs of Thai basil as well. While I can use Thai basil in those spicy dishes I mention, above, the Italian basil is begging to be made into pesto – especially since I finally found some pine nuts! I put the basil in the cuisinart mini-prep with some parmesan, some salt and freshly ground pepper, and some toasted pine nuts. This time, I toasted them in a skillet on the stovetop, but you can also toast them in the microwave too – they key, using either method, is to monitor them carefully to ensure they don’t burn.

After a few pulses of the cuisinart, I added a few glugs (yes, that’s a technical term) of olive oil, and whirred it again. I scraped it a few times, tasted, adjusted with salt and pepper, and added an additional dollop of oil. Voila…pesto!

I put it in a pyrex container with an airtight lid, topped with a little extra oil to maintain the freshness, and it’s in the fridge, waiting for use.

The last little adventure in not cooking was cucumber…in preparation for the next night’s dinner.

Vegetable Parade

Last Wednesday evening, I was supposed to be three different places at 5:30, one of which was picking up my vegetables. I wasn’t going to skip that. On my way to pick up my CSA vegetables, I must have been distracted by the other places I should be…I’ll also blame the intense heat for my absent-mindedness. I didn’t go the usual way to the pick-up point, and instead headed directly home from work. Knowing enough about the area that I could get there, even if in a round-about way, I headed up the highway. When I got there, I realized that way, while less scenic, was much quicker…apparently my brain was working at a higher level than I realized!

The haul for the sixth week of my CSA engagement presented the first real bag chock full of vegetables. I came home with small potatoes, more eggplant, some delicious garlic, additional Italian basil, a cucumber, a yellow squash and a zucchini! I can’t wait to get to eating these. They smell marvelous and, being so fresh and yummy, require little effort to be delicious.