Indian-Spiced Vegetables

My fabulous sister-in-law knows I am a sucker for cookbooks, so last time I saw her she showed up with THREE for my reading pleasure.  One of them was an Indian cookbook.  In flipping through it, I saw some lovely recipes for fresh vegetables, simply sauteed or pan-seared with a strong flavor profile.  

While I eat Indian food sometimes, I do not cook with those flavors often.  It was a simple approach to vegetables with some flavors I knew I would enjoy.  I chopped my eggplant and squash, and then got to cooking.  First, some cumin is toasted lightly in some oil in a very hot pan.  Then the vegetables are added to the spicy oil and cooked for a few minutes - with an occasional turn of the veggies.  You can stir some, but you get a nicer sear on the veggies, and some darker marks, if you let it sit some.  Once those veggies were cooked through, I added some freshly diced pepper, some turmeric and some salt.  A few more minutes of stirring, and the lovely, fragrant and richly flavored vegetables were ready for my dinner!

Summertime Squash!

The squash and zucchini, faithful summer vegetables, were sitting in my fridge, and just begging to be eaten. However, the awful heat makes me want to prepare things without heat. I've explored a couple recipes for a squash salad, and decided to test out the idea. I started with my beautiful yellow zucchini, and shaved it into thin slices with my mandoline (fingers intact!). I love the colors of the flesh in this beauty!

With all the shaved pieces in a bowl, I added salt, pepper, olive oil and some lemon juice and stirred, then added some crumbles of ricotta salata.

Once it had marinated just a bit, I dumped it on a plate and dug in - a delicious summer dinner, cool in the kitchen and cool on my plate. It was both aesthetically and flavorfully pleasing - just look at this!

CSA Summer

This week, my camera battery died, and it was such a busy week I've just gotten a new one. So while I do not have pics of all the wonderful produce from this week, I have wonderful produce all the same.

This week we got more garlic, a beautiful and vibrant yellow zucchini, some lovely broccoli (if all broccoli were like this, I think I'd love broccoli!), more tomatoes and cucumbers, potatoes, arugula, a new green called Tokyo Bekana, and more Thai and Italian basil.

I also got my weekly egg share, and this week for fruit I got about a dozen beautiful and fragrant peaches. Again, they were so soft and tender they filled the car with the smell of nectar on the drive. Mmm....

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.

A Slice of Yum

Last night, I got home a little late from my class, but had a quick dinner plan in mind. I’d bought a Maryland-style crab cake at the grocery store, and had a zucchini and a yellow squash in the fridge. Perfect for a quick and tasty meal!

I turned on the oven for the crab (I bake them) and got out my benriner slicer. I quickly peeled the veggies, though not perfectly. After all, a little skin adds color! I sliced the squash onto a little plate. At this point, I put the crab cake in the oven to bake, which only takes about 15 minutes. Then I continued by slicing the zucchini.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: If your slicer comes with one of those handy-dandy slicing guards, when your zucchini cylinder is less than an inch tall, USE IT. I sliced my thumb open on the slicer last night. Ouch. Nothing dire, but I spent so much time going back and forth to the bathroom to clean it and the stove to cook, that I took no pictures of this meal.

I melted a tablespoon of salted butter in a skillet, then tossed in the veggie slices and let them cook. As they start to smell yummy, flip them in the pan (like on TV…do a quick scoop with the pan to flip the slices into the air!). You can also use a spatula.

After a few minutes, I added some salt and freshly ground pepper, and continued to toss and stir the veggies. When the crab cake had been in the oven for 10 minutes, I added a very thin slice of butter on top of it, just for moisture.

In about 15 minutes, my dinner was done – and I ate the entire squash and the entire zucchini. Hooray for veggies!