Stuffed acorn squash

Look, a recipe! This was a good way to eat an acorn squash, and I would absolutely do it again. The premise is that you cook the squash, fill it with tasty things, crack an egg on top, and then dig in.

Next time, I am going to skip the egg, and add a bunch of cheese into the filling. And some sausage.

Filling
1/2C quinoa, cooked in stock (because I had it)
1 onion
1/2 can black beans, rinsed
~1/2C cottage cheese
1 tomato
1 green pepper
2 leaves of collards
2 cloves garlic
1 hot pepper
1 piece baon

First, get your squash cooking. Chop it in half, de-seed it, rub the inside with olive oil and salt and put it cut-side down on a baking sheet. Slide that thing into your oven as it preheats to 400F or so. Cooking it while the oven preheats will maximize the browning, and that means flavor. It'll probably take 20-30 minutes to cook, check after 20 minutes - the back side should yield a bit when you poke it.




For the filling, start with the bacon. Chop it up, render out the fat. As it nears the done point, add your diced onion, let that go as long as you feel like it, then add diced garlic and hot pepper. Cooking the hot pepper ought to take away some of its bite. I used a hungarian wax pepper. Then throw in the green pepper, collards, and tomato, cook those till they've wilted down, remove the pan from heat, and stir in the beans and cheese. Taste, season, adjust.




Once the squash feel mostly done, flip them over and fill with the filling. I topped these with eggs, which was fine, but didn't add much. Cheddar would be much better. Bake until the eggs are set or the cheese is melted, whichever you're doing (eggs will take 25 minutes, cheese will take like 10), and enjoy!




Oh, don't eat the skin. Too thick.

CSA Week #13

I think we're on week 13. But really, who knows. We've been spending a lot of time canning tomatoes and making sauce and drying tomatoes lately, so it feels like we've just been totally overwhelmed with food, but I think now that we're beyond that, we can do some regular cooking again. I'm looking forward to it. This week was a big haul:




Slicing tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes
Carrots
Eggplants
White onions
Potatoes
Jalapenos
Radishes
Cilantro
Bok Choy

Eggplant parm, with potato wedges, chicken, and some sauteed greens and onions. Ed made a big batch of pico de gaillo style salsa this week, so I've basically been putting it on everything.



Eggs with bok choy, radish, radish greens, green pepper, and salsa.


It's a little tough to tell, but there are some eggplant/onion/corn meatballs under a pile of pico de gaillo on that plate, next to some roasted delicata squash, potato wedges, and an heirloom tomato salad. The potato wedges we've been making out of these little potatoes have just been heavenly.


We found a huge stash of chanterelle mushrooms while we were out orienteering at Pawtuckaway over the weekend. The real reason orienteers use plastic bags for our maps - so we can fill them with mushrooms when the season is right.

This may just look like a pan full of chicken, but actually it is a DELICIOUS pan full of chicken. I started with the chicken skin-side down for 5-10 minutes, to both start the skin rendering and also to put some grease on the pan for the potatoes/onions. I took it out, added a bunch of potato wedges and some onion wedges, tossed those around, and put the chicken back on top, skin side up this time. At the last minute, I hit it with the broiler, because that made it extra delicious. I recommend. Also, those potatoes, cooking in chicken juices... you really can't go wrong with that.


Served the chicken with a big pile of veggies - onion, carrots, bok choy, green pepper, hot pepper, and leftover cabbage. Not my most inspired veggie dish, as it was essentially just using up whatever was left in the fridge, but tasty enough. And some butter-fried chanterelles on top.

CSA Week #11

We missed a week of delicious produce, because we forgot it was Thursday. I'll spread the blame over two of us. But anyway, the following week was delicious, especially after fumbling our way through a week of leftovers and sad grocery store food. I don't even know what we ate.

This last week has been all about tomatoes. And peppers. I'm not a huge fan of green peppers, because I just don't like them that much when cooked, but it turns out they're pretty tasty just eaten raw. I've taken to chopping a pepper into slices to snack on while cooking dinner... can't be that bad a habit, right?




2.5lb slicing tomatoes
2lb heirloom tomatoes
2lb green peppers
8 ears corn
1 bunch kale
2 silver something onions
2 heads of garlic
2 zucchinis

The pre-pickup email had been talking about lower yields this week because of torrential rain, and I suppose maybe this was a lower yield, but I still have a lot of tomatoes to deal with. Especially with Ed in VT, this week has been very much about putting away some food for freezing. With a couple experiments.






Like this cauliflower/corn/tomato tart. I've never made a cauliflower crust before, and I have to say that I oversalted this one almost to the point of being inedible. Luckily, the pancake-like filling wasn't very salty, and the corn kernels were so sweet that they offset the saltiness. For the filling I basically used my fritter recipe - two eggs, a quarter cup or so of corn meal, a small spoonful of baking powder and a small spoonful of salt, and corn. That part was good, creamy and crunchy. The tomatoes on top didn't add much. As an experiment, I would give this one a low grade, but passing, because I did manage to eat the whole thing. I could see myself trying the cauliflower crust thing again, but it would need to be cooked more, and not in the form of a tart. This one just sort of turned to mush.



Tomato salads for days. The best, and simplest, way that I like to eat a good tomato is to slice it up, salt it, and maybe add a drizzle of olive oil or some basil leaves. But just salt and tomatoes is enough to keep me going forever.




I tried a panzanella, but I have to admit that I didn't have cucumbers or onions at that point, so it was just tomatoes, stale bread, basil, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt. It was fine, but I'm still not a fan of stale bread.

Forgot to take any photos of the tomato focaccia and bruschetta topping, but it was delicious. The bruschetta was just two tomatoes, an onion, and a ton of basil. With olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt. Noticing a theme?

I stopped by the farm on my way back from the Catskills with my parents, and picked more green beans, husk cherries, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, hot peppers, and mini sweet peppers. Really enjoyed a scromelette of green beans, dill, cherry tomatoes, and eggs the other morning. And a tomatillo/husk cherry salsa.

Zucchini kale gratin

I saw this recipe, and knew that was the next thing I was going to make. Can't say no to vegetables smothered in cheese. It was the perfect thing to use up a bunch of the zucchinis, kale, and tomatoes that I still had on hand, and was relatively easy to put together.

3 zucchinis, grated
1 tomato, chunked
1 small head of kale, blanched
1 handful parsley (or any other fresh herb)
all the parmesan cheese in your fridge
2 cloves garlic
1 onion
3 pieces bacon
salt and pepper to taste
2 eggs

Put the grated zucchinis and the tomato in a colander, and toss with maybe three heavy pinches of kosher salt. Set this aside to drain as you prep the rest of the stuff.

Chop your bacon, and render that out.

As it renders, dice your onion and garlic, chop your kale and parsley, and grate the cheese. Preheat the oven to 400F.

Pour out most of the bacon grease, then saute the onion and garlic until sweated through.

Squeeze out as much liquid from the zucchini and tomatoes as you can. Put the veggies, bacon, onion/garlic, parsley, and half the cheese into a big bowl. Mix around, and taste. Adjust seasoning. Taste. Once happy with it, add the two eggs.

Spread into a greased oven-safe dish. I used a cast iron skillet, but some sort of casserole dish would also work. Super versatile in its cooking vessels, this dish isn't picky. Sprinkle the rest of the cheese on top. Bake for 20-30 minutes, until the top is golden.

This would also be good with various carbs added in. Breadcrumbs, potato slices, whole grain, you name it. I'll try that next. Because this recipe was a total keeper. It would also be good with more cheesy goodness. I'm thinking cottage cheese or ricotta. I mean, you're basically talking about my basic scromelette, just baked rather than cooked on a stove, and with more cheese and bacon. How can you possibly go wrong?

I froze about half of it into individual portions for lunch, but I can't imagine that'll take away any of the deliciousness.

Cobb salad

There are two types of people in this world. Those who dress the salad in the bowl, and then serve it onto your plate, and those who serve the salad onto the plate, and then spoon the dressing on top. I am the former, Ed is the latter, and this makes for interesting salad arguments. 

Also, Ed believes that salads are the fastest thing ever to put together, and I maintain that they take a while. Case in point, this one was like an hour of chopping things and puttering around looking at what else should go into it before we actually ate. But, regardless as to how long it took to make or how you like to dress it, this salad was really good. Deserving of its own blog post!

Dressing

All quantities are to taste.

Whole milk plain yogurt

Basil. Lots.

sun dried tomatoes

olive oil

salt

lemon juice

pepper

Start adding things to a food processor, and taste frequently, adjusting as you go. Use water to thin it out at the end if it's too thick. 

CSA Cobb Salad

1 head green leaf lettuce

1 small fresh red onion, diced

~1C cherry tomatoes, halved

~1C green beans, steamed and chopped

1 beet, shredded or grated

2 links andouille sausage, cooked

2 eggs, hard boiled

a bunch of chives, chopped

I don't think you can really have instructions for a salad. Put everything in a bowl, toss with dressing, and serve. Or, put everything in a bowl, then put on your plate, then spoon on the dressing, and proceed to throw salad all over the table as you try to dress the salad. Either way.

And Ed made some delicious drinks - ginger beer, gin, and lemon. Those went down nicely! 

We only kept it in those pretty lines so I could take a photo. Then we tossed it all together and served. It was a very good salad! 

Oh right! And a cake! It was my coworker Lee's birthday the next day, and she's made me lots of cakes, so I figured it was time to return the favor. Followed this recipe for golden nectarine cake, and it came out beautifully. We served it at the office with lots of whipped cream. 

CSA Week #9: Grilled cabbage, bloody Marys, and the most amazing celery you've ever eaten

I'm falling behind again. Eh, it happens. And I think the best meal we made I forgot to take a photo. Not the most dedicated of bloggers, me. 

I forgot to take a photo of the haul, so now I have to try and remember what we got with no photographic assistance. 

2 large beets

several tomatoes

1 head celery

1 head purple cabbage

1 head green leaf lettuce

1 bunch scallions

3 green peppers

1 big eggplant

Anyway, this week started to get more colorful. Beets, tomatoes, cabbage, eggplant, all the purple-y red things are ripening now! The most exciting thing we got was a head of celery, which is green, not purple, but was just about as far from the typical pale thing you get at the grocery store as you can imagine. This stuff has FLAVOR! It's spicy, tart, fresh, and just so green tasting. Good stuff. 

Ed tasted the celery and the first thing he thought of was a bloody mary. Brunch in a glass! Lots of tomatoes, spicy vodka from Grand Ten Distillery (the extra fire puncher), celery, worcestershire sauce, lemon, and a garnish of pickles and celery leaves. I don't think I've had a bloody mary before - gotta say, with those sorts of flavorful veggies and good vodka, it was pretty good! 

With that we had a salad of celery stalks and greens, paneer (ish), and bacon. There might have been other things in that salad, but I have sense forgotten, and the photo isn't that helpful. Maybe some toasted walnuts? It was a very tasty salad, very green and fresh tasting, crunchy, with a nice softness from the paneer stuff we'd made to use up some milk. Languishing on the side of that plate is some crispy kale with last week's kale. 

Friday night we were en route to VT, so I used up the last of our zucchinis in more zucchini fritters for on the road. Saturday we finally had access to a grill! Of course I forgot to take a photo, but for lunch we grilled some eggplant slices and topped with a little salad of tomatoes and chives and basil and salt and olive oil, and it was delicious. Grilled eggplant is one of my favorite things. 

That night we grilled more things, this time some wedges of purple cabbage, a green pepper, and some scallions. All these veggies have been so flavorful that we haven't needed to do much to make our meals taste amazing - they taste like vegetables, in the best possible way. Grilled scallions, fresh from the farm, are amazing.

With that, we had a grain salad based on morrocan couscous, with onion, carrot, green beans, and topped with some fresh chanterelles in brown butter and sage, that we'd foraged that morning from the woods... crap we really are turning into foodies.

Don't worry, we stopped for a burger and a beer on our way home. Can't lose that carnivore taste!

One of the beets was a golden beet, and I had thoughts that I'd make a beet puree and it would be bright yellow, but it turns out if you also add garlic and yogurt and olive oil and sumac and zaatar and vinegar, it becomes kind of beige. Now that it's all gone, I should have added some turmeric, for color and flavor! Regardless, this was a very delicious way to eat a beet. We ate it with those wedges of pita that had been fried in a little oil on the stove, and that was a durn good combo.

Also tried a cabbage slaw. The dressing was good, a savory mix of yogurt, mustard, anchovy paste, olive oil, salt, pepper, and maybe other things that Ed added when I wasn't looking. The slaw had the other half of the purple cabbage, the rest of our celery, a red onion, and some bacon. And a bunch of thyme and savory, and a small grated candy beet. This was a fine slaw, but not my favorite thing. Too crunchy, actually, but maybe I was just tired and I'd already filled up on beet hummus and didn't feel like chewing so much.

Alongside the slaw was a salad of red onion, cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, basil, poppy seeds and olive oil. Delicious.

We've just about run out of vegetables again, so I'm looking forward to what this week will bring!

CSA Week #8

The chapter in which we break Ed with zucchini.

Over the years we've lived and cooked together, Ed and I have greatly expanded each other's palettes. I would say my greatest success was in getting Ed to try zucchini, cooked in various ways other than just "unidentifiable overcooked tasteless green mush." Turns out it can be good. In the last few weeks, we've had it shredded and fried in patties, breaded and baked into coins, sliced into zoodles, chunked and fried as a side dish, and cooked into veggies stews. I would even argue that zucchini has been delicious in all the various forms that we've eaten it, and Ed has gone from tolerating the vegetable (technically a fruit) to actually enjoying it.

But by Tuesday night, we had chomped our way through the week's CSA and were down to a zucchini and a jar of pesto. I was all excited about a pasta dish with zucchini rounds and a pesto sauce, and Ed simply couldn't do it. He couldn't eat a single bite more of zucchini. I'll give it to him, he tried. And failed.

It's ok, he didn't go hungry, since there are other things to eat in this world. And I do think the zucchini problem was compounded by our landlords dropping off a couple huge monsters at our door that they'd grown in the garden. The bonus zucchinis were pretty hard to use up.

Anyway, we're on to a new week, with a new batch of zucchs, and I choose the little ones, because those are tasty, and will happily eat them all, chunked and fried, for lunches, if Ed doesn't want any for dinner.

Week #8

8 ears of corn
1 bunch collards
1 bunch kale
1 purple cabbage
1 bunch cilantro
2.5lb tomatoes
2.5lb cucumbers
1.5lb zucchinis
1.5lb carrots
1.5lb beets

We're moving up the glycemic index now! Look at those gorgeous little candy beets and sweet carrots! I'm pretty excited about this one, all sorts of my favorite things. There were two types of cucumbers, the ones with the thin skin (my preference), and the ones with the thicker skin and more warts, good for pickling. I mostly got the thin-skinned variety, because I think those taste better raw.

First up was a super quick dinner salad for Thursday night. Ed was off to VT, to meet up with John to go on an adventure, but first needed to do some last-minute truck maintenance so that it would work better, so as he did that I made a quick batch of corny corn muffins, and a salad of chopped cucumbers, tomatoes, parsley, sliced raw beets, sliced red onion, chickpeas, lemon, salt, and olive oil. Tasty stuff, and it was all done just as Ed came back in, so he could wolf down a quick dinner before leaving.




The corny corn muffins were very corny, because I may have double the amount of corn called for in the recipe, and used two ears and half the recipe. I used the recipe from Bon Appetit, with the only changes being that I left out the sugar, replaced milk with water (because we had no milk), and left out the bonus egg yolk. While the recipe tasted fine, it was a pain in the butt to make, with weird random quantities and things like "one egg yolk," which would leave you with one egg white. I'll stick with the KAF basic muffin recipe, or the cornbread recipe on the back of the package, and just add fresh corn kernels, next time.

Other dishes - Toast with a salsa of cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, fresh young raw purple onions, chives and lime juice. Served over some shredded mackerel mixed with lemon and parsley, on top of a sourdough toast. And, because I'd thought we'd need more food, but we didn't, a side of lentils, cooked with lots of chicken stock, an onion, garlic, some tomato paste, and some mexican chili paste, which adds amazing flavor. That chili paste has vanilla, coffee, and like fifteen kinds of peppers. Gift from our friend Neil when he was in Mexico - he came home with the stuff and told us "I don't know what to do with this, but I bet you do, here you go!"



The salsa was really good. Again, those young red onions are amazing. Now they're all gone. The husk cherries also worked really well in the salsa, a hit of sweet and sour amongst the tomatoes.


And because there's no use making pickles if you aren't going to eat them, a couple refrigerator dill pickles to go along. And a watermelon gin & tonic, because it was that sort of Wednesday.

The pesto zucchini pasta dish. Quite delicious, actually. The trick here is to reserve some of the starchy pasta water, to thin out the pesto.

Our flowers from last weekend and even the week before are still going strong. So pretty!

Ottolenghi-inspired burnt aubergine

We had one eggplant left, and I figured, why not try one of those recipes from the Ottolenghi cookbook that we haven't tried before? There is one in there that essentially broils the crap out of an eggplant and mixed with fresher flavors, and that's what I wanted. Here's the original recipe, ish:

https://thehappyfoodie.co.uk/recipes/burnt-aubergine-with-yellow-pepper-and-red-onion

I have to say, true to typical-Alex-form, I didn't manage to follow the recipe for very long. But, our version was totally inspired by Ottolenghi's!

One of the things this salad relied on was one of those amazingly sweet little red onions. I don't know if you could do it with those big supermarket red onions, but I hear that soaking the cut onions in cold water can take away some of the bite of a fresh onion. The little fresh guys we got don't need that. It's amazing. I can't stop raving about these onions.

The interesting thing is that the eggplant sort of disappears into the dish, just adding some smoky flavor and a little bit of thickening texture to the dressing. So good. Definitely my newest favorite way to eat eggplant.

Broiled eggplant with herb oil
1 eggplant
1 small red onion
~1C cherry tomatoes, halved
~1/2C fresh parsley, chopped roughly
~1/2C fresh basil, chopped roughly
~1/4C fresh oregano
~1tsp cumin seeds
~1/2tsp red pepper flakes
~2-4tbs olive oil
Juice of half a lemon
Several pinches of salt

Line a baking pan with tin foil (this step is unnecessary if your baking pans are clean enough. Mine are so well "seasoned" that you'll get a lot of smoke if you don't cover up the seasoned bits...), and broil your eggplant until it's soft and the skin is burned and cracked, turning a few times. I think it took us about 15 minutes, turning it every 5.

Cut the tomatoes in half, deposit in a big bowl. Cut the onion in half, then each half in half lengthwise, and slice into little quarter-rings. Add to the boil. Salt, lemon juice in the bowl.

Pour a hefty couple glugs of olive oil into a small pan. Add the cumin seeds and red pepper flakes, and heat that until it smells awesome. Then add in the fresh herbs, and stir those around for maybe a minute, taking the pan off the heat. The idea is that you're flavoring the oil, not cooking the herbs.

As you're doing that, scrape the eggplant innards out of it's burned and cracked skin. Chop roughly and add to the bowl; season with some salt, mix with the tomatoes and onions.

Pour the warm oil and herbs over the eggplant mixture. Stir to combine. Taste, and adjust salt and lemon juice as necessary.

We ate this as a salad, but it would also be SO GOOD over toast.

Tabouleh, pickles, and other random meals

This weekend we processed a bunch of veggies into things to eat later. I guess humans have been doing this for our entire evolutionary history, but with the advent of grocery stores, well, it's less fundamental to survival. But it still seems a worthwhile thing to do when presented with all this fresh produce, that won't stay fresh forever.

We also swung by the farm, on our way home from other wanderings, and picked more green beans, husk cherries, blueberries, cherry tomatoes, and herbs. Because we totally needed more food. But god are those husk cherries amazing. Planning to make a big batch of pesto, hence all the basil. Oh, and the chanterelles - we happened across them as we were hiking. Can't not stop for that! And they fry up so well with butter. mmm. And we bought two melons from the farm store, a mini watermelon and a mini musk melon.

Anyway, as for the pickles, we've had good luck with lacto-fermented peppers, and preserved lemons, but have struggled with cucumbers in the past. I think this is largely due to getting them from Russos' sale shelf, so they're already old, and also because Ed doesn't always use a recipe. I looked one up. The golden ratio appears to be:

4C water:3tbs kosher salt

The rest is all flavoring. So, one batch of Moroccan-themed carrots, and two batches of cukes, because we do have a lot of those. The brine for both veggies was just the 4C:3Tbs ratio.

Carrots:
peel of 1 lemon (washed, then peeled with a vegetable peeler)
2 small dried red chilis
1 tsp cracked coriander
1 tsp cracked cumin
About a third of a small white onion, cut into thin rings

I think that was it?

Pack the spices and onion in the bottom of a jar, and cut the carrots into sticks. pack the carrot sticks into the jar, and top with brine. Make sure the carrots are fully covered, or else they'll mold, and then you have to throw out the whole batch. Use a weight (like a small jar filled with water) to push down on the veggies, and leave 'em be for 3-4 days.

Cucumbers:
1 tsp peppercorns
1 tsp fennel seeds
a few sprigs of fresh tarragon
1 clove
about a third of a small white onion, cut into thin rings

Same deal as the carrots. Pack the onion and spices into a jar, cut the cucumbers into nice 1/4" rounds, and pack them into the jar. Cover with brine, put a weight on top, and leave them alone for a few days before tasting.




Tabouleh
We make this stuff a lot, but this week's CSA was the perfect CSA for tabouleh. Not only that, but the little fresh red onions they gave us are just amazing - so crunchy and sweet, it's almost like eating something entirely different than an onion. Onion can be hit or miss in a tabouleh, but with onions this good, you're only hurting yourself by not eating them raw. Because we still had a huge pile of cucumbers left over after making two jars of pickles (I think 5?), it was a cucumber-heavy dish, but we made like two gallons of it, so it all works out in the end.

5 cucumbers, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
2 small red onions, diced
~2C parsley, chopped
~1C basil, chopped
2 lemons
2C bulgur
2C water or vegetable stock
1/2C? olive oil
Salt. lots. to taste.

Boil the veggie stock, and once it boils dump in the bulgur and stir it around, then leave it covered for at least 5min.

Dice all veggies and put into a bowl. Squeeze in the lemons and give a couple good glugs of olive oil and pinches of salt. Stir, taste, adjust. Ed and I have different opinions on how wet a tabouleh should be; I like mine relatively dry, he likes his sopping wet. Preferably with oil. We usually compromise by me making it my way, and he'll just add oil.

Season the bulgur with some oil and salt and lemon, taste, and add to the big bowl.



This gets better on day 2 or 3, if it lasts that long.

Other meal photos -


Zoodles and a bolognese. That was a damn good bolognese; normally I think I try to cram in too many veggies, but this one I knew we were serving it over zoodles (zucchini noodles), so I left it alone, and those flavors just sang together.



Bacon (pour off some of the fat but reserve it in case you need to add it back), onion, garlic, ground beef (cook off the fat in a different pan first), tons of fresh savory and oregano and thyme, bay leaf, dried red pepper, oven-dried tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, a solid 2C or so of red wine, chicken stock as needed. Large quantities of fresh basil are to be served on top of this.

Don't skimp on the wine. Also, when they say don't cook with wine you won't drink, that means you should be drinking a glass as you cook, right?

As for zoodles, I think we both agreed that it was an acceptable experiment, with no need to repeat again.

Ham, cheese, and squash-stuffed french toast. Took about half a grated yellow zucchini to fill between the cheese slices, with the bread dunked in eggs first. Still working on those VT leftovers; sliced bread and lunchmeats? Not really my style, but you can't let food go to waste. Anyway, this was good, despite its resemblance to a sandwich.




Green beans and kielbasa. The green beans were really tasty. A hunk of butter in the pan, tons of garlic, a splash of oil (less than a glug), saute the garlic until golden and add the beans, saute until soft. Add chicken stock as needed if things get dry, and squeeze half a lemon over the whole thing. Top with some toasted almonds.

Then after taking the beans out, we added a spoonful of dijon mustard and reduced the sauce a bit. This paired wonderfully with the kielbasa.

We tried making some zucchini and eggplant chips in the oven. Slice the veggies into rounds, salt and let them sit until they've released some water. Squeeze, then dredge first in egg, then in cornmeal, and bake at 500F. We found that the zucchinis were good, but the eggplant got too soft. I guess actually deep frying would be better, unless you like soft eggplant. Eh, worth a try.




Kale salad, meatballs, and an Ottolenghi-inspired "burnt aubergine" dish. Ed declared the eggplant dish the best thing I've ever made. It was good. Recipe in a different post, because indexing. Oh, and a watermelon-basil-rita. That drink was DANGEROUS. I don't really know what was in it. White overproof rum, tonic, muddled basil and watermelon, and who knows what else.

The kale salad had a dressing of mustard, lemon, oil, and salt. It also used up the last of our redleaf lettuce (not pictured: the big-ass salad I had for lunch Saturday that used up most of the red leaf lettuce). Then some steamed yellow beans, slivered almonds cooked in butter, dried cherries.

I have no idea what Ed did to make the meatballs, but they involved some amount of bulgur, salt and pepper, and a bunch of fresh savory.

Dressed up tomato toast

We were watching some sort of Bon Appetit video online the other day, and Carla made some delicious-looking middle eastern-inspired tomato flatbreads. She described them as "dressed up" tomatoes on toast, and it looked really delicious. So with those big gorgeous tomatoes that we got in the CSA, plus all the herbs we had on hand, we figured that would be pretty tasty. We weren't wrong, this was amazing. The key is that every component was amazing on its own, so combining them just amplified things. We'll be making this again. 

There are four components to this piece of deliciousness: Flatbread, tzatziki, smashed chickpeas, and seasoned tomatoes. Each element is delicious alone, but together you've got a real symphony in your mouth. 

The one on the left has both the tzatziki and the chickpea smash, the right still only has the tzatziki

Flat bread

The flatbread we sort of winged it. Could have made a traditional yeasty bread with yogurt for tanginess, but instead went with our trusty sourdough for the tanginess (is that a word? spellcheck doesn't seem to agree with me that it's a word). 

About a cup of starter, a cup of warm water, and two cups of flour. 1.5ish teaspoons of salt. Plus a sprinkle of instant yeast to help it poof. Not sure if that was necessary. Knead it well, and then let it rise while preparing the fillings. For extra tanginess, you can mix up the starter and a cup of flour the night before, and let the starter eat all that yummy flour so that when you knead in the next cup, it's got even more tang. We went with that approach, because we'd started making bread the night before and then got lazy and went to bed instead.

Anyway, after you've assembled the fillings, divide your dough into six balls, and roll them out or stretch them out. Heat some oil in a pan, and start frying up your dough. Somehow, this makes things so much stretchier than just baking it. Once the bottom is nicely browned, brush the top with oil, and flip. I think it was about 5 minutes for the first side, and maybe 2 minutes for the second side. They'll stay flexy after cooking, don't worry. 

Tzatziki

This has got to be one of my favorite ways to eat cucumbers. Herby and creamy and cool, it complements all sorts of things. It's also a delicious way to eat yogurt. You can't go wrong. 

1 cucumber, peeled (could use two, if you're got an over-abundance)

1 small red onion (or shallot)

1C (maybe? it was whatever was left in the yogurt container) greek yogurt. Regular would work too

juice of half a lemon

pinch of salt

1 tsp chopped mint

1/2C chopped parsley

1/4C chopped cilantro*

1/4C chopped basil*

*You could totally get away with just using mint and parsley, or in a pinch, just mint. But more herbs make it taste even better!

chop the red onion and cucumber finely. Chop the herbs. Mix everything together. You could make this the night before. The longer it sits, the more the flavors meld. 

The red onions that we got from this week's CSA are amazing - not at all that overwhelming raw-onion flavor you get from the big ones, rather just sweet and crunchy and juicy and just the right amount of spice. I'm so in love with those onions! I've never loved raw onions before, this is totally a game changer. Anyway, the crunch of an onion is different than the crunch of a cucumber, so it's nice to have both in the sauce. 

Chickpea smash

Again, you could make this the night before, because the longer all the things sit together, the more the flavors meld. This is another easy one - 

1 can chickpeas, drained

juice of half a lemon

2 good pinches of salt

~1/2C roughly-chopped parsley

~1/4C chopped cilantro

Put the chickpeas in a bowl, and mash them a bit with a fork. You're not making hummus, leave some big chunks. Add everything else, stir it around, and you're good to go.

Seasoned tomatoes

This is the sort of dish to make when tomatoes are perfectly ripe. The sort of dish to make when you've got those big heirloom tomatoes from the farmers market, the sorts of tomatoes that when you sniff them you swoon. Because the tomatoes are the star of this show.

Slice them into rounds, maybe 1/4" thick. When you place them on the flatbreads, sprinkle with salt and za'atar and sumac. You could skip the sumac, since there is already sumac in za'atar. But don't skip the seasoning, as it brings out so many more flavors. 

Assemble

On a piece of flatbread, spread some tzatziki, then some chickpea smash, then lay down some tomatoes and season. Cut into wedges, and eat with your fingers. 

We also served this with some roasted carrots, since we have a LOT of carrots right now. 

This is my newest favorite summer dish. Enjoy!