The haul:

-Beets!
-Corn!
-Kale!
-Basil!
-Beans!
-Zucchini/summer squash.

I wasn’t going to get to the basil before it turned black and sad, so I decided to make a compound butter that I could freeze.

I put the ingredients in my new boyfriend, the Vitamix, in roughly the order implied by a compound butter recipe int he binder that came with it. Unfortunately my butter wasn’t actually very softened and I was using totally different ingredients. Um, oops.

It did work eventually, but it took doing. And it was so hard to get the butter out of the bottom of the blender! I think the cuisinart wins on this sort of task.

The butter could have used a little more zip, but I have loads of it in the freezer so I’m going to be positive.

That night I applied it lavishly to the ears of corn we’d received. I’d soaked the ears in water for about 20 minutes, then peeled back the husk and desilked before buttering and closing them back up.

10 minutes on the grill and the corn was just barely cooked, incredibly tender and sweet.

Another night, I plowed through that summer squash, riffing on a suggestion from my mom to roast it and mix it with feta and mint. I added cherry tomatoes and used basil instead, since I still had some.

(I didn’t use the giant one in the end.)

The downside was using a 450 degree oven on a hot day. And I was too eager and put the tray in before the oven was hot enough, so the squash softened before getting really brown. Luckily I have plenty more where that came from to try again!

We ate it with sausage:

I made leftovers into a killer sandwich the next day, btw. And it would also be great tossed with pasta.

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I had my baby shower this weekend! I am just 2.5 weeks out from my due date, if you can believe it. I don’t think I’ve posted a single photo of myself since I have been showing, so here you go, complete with a giant flower showing where the baby is. Between the hand gestures and the weird talking facial expression this is a very accurate photo of me!

My friends Lauren and Megan hosted in Lauren’s backyard. It was lovely, and I ate QUITE a bit of Megan’s totally ridiculous key lime pie. (She’s promised me the recipe. I will fully make this even with a newborn at home.)

Drool.

And just to be silly, I brought craft-store wood veneer masks as favors, with Crayola markers to color them. Everyone was very sporting about it.

-Lettuce
-Kale (2 bunches; I traded my cilantro for kale in the swap box: BEST SWAP EVER)
-1 turnip
-1 kohlrabi
-Zucchini
-Peas
-Eggs

It was crazy hot earlier this week, and I wasn’t feeling particularly prone to extended cooking sessions. I still had a handful of cabbage from a previous share, so I just quickly sauteed the peas, added in the cabbage to wilt, dosed them both with a bit of rice vinegar before pulling off the heat, and dressed with sesame oil and soy sauce. I think it took 5 minutes from start to finish, including heating the pan.

We ate the vegetables with Trader Joe’s “Bool gogi” (sic), which wasn’t half bad.

I know this is lackluster, but guys, I’m 8.5 months pregnant. Ben is lucky we’re not eating chinese takeout every night. (We did have that last weekend. It was luscious.) One fast/easy/delicious thing we ate this week was another Trader Joe’s product, their chile/lime chicken burgers. I hate chicken and turkey burgers as a general rule, but we tasted samples of these and they are really good. They come frozen; we grilled them and I mashed avocado with lime, salt and pepper, spread that on top, added pickles, and we were good to go. (Oh, on rolls. Obviously.) I would eat one of those right now, I think, and it’s 8 a.m.

The main news around here is the purchase of….wait for it….A VITAMIX!!! I have a LOT to say on this subject, and will try to get around to saying it early next week. Enjoy the long weekend, happy birthday America, etc.!

I’m seriously working on how we could arrange to move here and run a small inn or something. We’re staying here, and I never want to leave. Don’t you think it would be wholesome to raise the baby by the sea?

To win I need to get the most votes between noon on April 28 and noon on May 4. And I need your help, big time: I’m going to be out of the country for more than half of the voting, so it will be harder for me to spread the word towards the end.

Here’s my essay, which had to be fewer than 140 words and answer the the question, “What is one of your best moments or memories in nature?”:

I grew up in Oregon during the bitter battle to save the spotted owls from logging, and when I was 10 I was lucky enough to see the owls in the wild. We hiked deep into the forest, an emerald-green cathedral with a carpet of moss and ferns. When we stopped, the leader handed me a live mouse and I clambered to the end of an enormous fallen tree. I stood, holding the mouse out by its tail, and the owl swooped out of nowhere, so silent I barely registered it until the mouse had vanished. I never forgot that golden-green moment, the speckled owl whooshing past, the trees looming up overhead. I’m grateful that the logging trucks of my childhood–each holding one huge tree–have vanished, but that forest and those owls have held on.

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Voting is now!! Please share with as many people as you can. Email it around! I am not ashamed to ask for help, here!

Vote here:

PLEASE vote for me, and please ask your friends to vote? We didn’t think we’d make it to the lake this summer because of preparations for the baby, and it would mean so much to either make one last trip before he’s born, or to go up and relax with him at the tail end of the season. Thank you, thank you, and please excuse the re-posts I will be putting up until the contest ends…

And so you understand why I’m so excited, here are some postcards from our weekend at Deephaven Camp last summer:

And for those of you who came over from Design*Sponge today, welcome! Sorry about the site crash earlier; the volume was a bit much for the server, apparently. If you have any questions for me, please feel free to ask over at formspring!

One of my biggest regrets (an indication that I’m pretty lucky, I guess) is that I didn’t get to attend an event at BU while I was a student there, in which Jacques and Julia did a demonstration together. I found out about it too late to get a ticket, saaaaadness. I wasn’t about to miss this one! The event, I’m sorry to say, was not particularly well-run (as a BU alum I have to be clear and point out that it seemed to be organized through the continuing ed program, not the college itself, which tends to run everything with military precision), but the panel! I mean, how many chances do you get to see Judith Jones and Jacques Pépin in the flesh? And Alex Prud’homme was delightful, full of insights into Julia-as-a-person. The talk was full of fun nuggets about working with Julia and the delicate balance Meryl Streep achieved in terms of capturing her drive and toughness in addition to the showy hamminess that everyone saw on her tv shows. I got a chance to speak with all three afterward, at length with Mr. Prud’homme, and all were lovely.

Fellow Boston-area food blogger Adrienne Bruno was able to join me and Ben at the last minute, canceling dinner plans to do so, and it was great to meet in person. She was also way better positioned for photo-taking during the panel; all of my shots are mostly made up of the large head of the woman in front of me. So thank you to Adrienne for the photos!

Adrienne also took a picture of me looking a little crazed (agh!) with Jacques Pépin. I was thrilled to buy a hardcover copy of The Apprentice (have you read it? READ IT!) and get him to sign it. One of my favorite food-memoirs ever, which is saying a lot.

I did find it hilarious that at an event like this, talking about Julia for an hour+ and then watching her eat her way through France, the “reception” consisted of pretzels, popcorn and Julia’s favorite cocktail snack, goldfish crackers. I made my dinner out of about three bowls of goldfish crackers and a Jamba Juice smoothie from the food court downstairs. Further hilarity was provided by the mostly extremely, um, mature crowd, which arrived early and was enraged not to be allowed in to claim seats right away. I really though there was going to be a slow-motion cane fight by the time we finally went into the giant auditorium. The old folks didn’t stick around for the movie, by the way.

Before heading to LI for a family party, I spent much of drizzly Friday with the lovely Amy, who (among her many, many projects) works at Saipua, a gorgeous floral shop in Red Hook. Owner Sarah was kind enough to let me tag along for the morning, and since it was a busy day I got to help out with a bunch of small arrangements. All in all I did four tiny nosegays and four medium arrangements, all while reveling in the luxury of actually having my choice of flowers and filler to work with. Pretty different from my usual “stick a bunch of TJ’s tulips in a vase” approach! If only there were a wholesale flower market in Boston where the public was allowed to shop…

Anyway, in honor of the gorgeous spring sunshine that is finally shining down (my office smells like wet wood from the leaking window catastrophe of this flooded weekend), photos of pretty, pretty flowers:

Literal buckets of flowers to work with:

Two of my nosegays:

One of the medium arrangements:

The day’s work:

Amy made this totally amazing centerpiece (my nosegays were going to accompany it, in awe at their bigger sibling!). You can actually see where it started in the first photo of all the flowers in the shop–it’s built in that silver footed bowl with the floral foam in it! Excuse the iPhone pics.

Front:

Back:

So cool! For contrast, here’s my current home masterpiece, pretty in its own way but awfully simple!

I have to say, I’ve finally gotten fully on board with living in Boston (well, Cambridge!), and when I’m back in NY it feels really dirty and annoyingly difficult to get in and out of. But I sure miss the social side of my life there. I need to make a concerted effort to limit my hermit-like tendencies; I felt like a new person after a few days of seeing old and new friends and wandering around shops. I also have to say how thankful I am for the blog community, which has connected me with awesome people like Amy and Grace. It’s just really amazing to meet like-minded folk, especially those whose paths would never otherwise have crossed mine. It makes me schmoopy.

Ahem. Back to food someday soon. I have thrilling photos of nachos for you.

As a matter of fact, we found out on the DAY OF our holiday party (which explains our dazed/delirious looks in the photos, despite my consumption of sparkling cider only), and that was my last real cooking effort for quite a while. Over Christmas in Oregon I indulged in such lavish delicacies as half a cup of yogurt with a bit of granola while everyone else ate beef bourguignon. And then laid still for a while. Party on! (Note to pregnant ladies: Eat, even if you aren’t hungry. Saltines did nothing for me; I needed protein. Once I added raw almonds, greek yogurt, etc. to my mid-afternoon routine life became muuuuch easier.)

Now that my appetite has come back (with a vengeance, sigh) and we’re back from a few trips, hopefully I’ll be cooking regularly again. Poor Ben had a meager diet for a while there. Meanwhile, I thought these photos were fun, juxtaposed against their summer counterparts. We were out at Crane Beach and around a pond further inland a couple weekends ago, and later I realized I had similar photos from a trip to those exact spots when everything was significantly warmer.

Crane Beach, January 31:

Crane Beach, July 5:

Salt marches near Crane Beach, January 31:

Looking down at the marshes, July 5:

Pond with the best swimming hole, January 31 (Someone kept biking around, but we couldn’t get a clear shot):

Swimming hole, July 5:

Bittersweet branches for fall: