[Argh, until I work out a solution please imagine another third of each photo off to the right. Annoying.]

The goods:
-3 ears corn (I cut off the kernels and froze them)
-1 delicata squash (!!)
-3 bell peppers, red, yellow and purple
-1 lb orange carrots
-2 onions
-1 ginormous yellow tomato
-1 regular-sized red tomato

I find heirloom tomatoes entertaining. This one had some issues–I failed to notice that the bottom was torn up, so I had to do something with it right away but most of it wasn’t really that ripe, so the less said the better. The colors, though:

Anyway, I looked at those peppers and eggplant and thought “ratatouille.” Which is hilarious to me, since as a kid ratatouille was one of the very few things I refused to eat. I remember calling it out as the most disgusting food of all time, one time when I was asked about favorite/least favorite foods–I hated the name, I hated bell peppers, I hated the idea of it. I really did eat nearly everything as a kid, but ratatouille just grossed me out. Now, though, I find anything with zucchini and eggplant cooked in tomato sauce with olive oil so deeply, deeply appealing… Something about the way olive oil soaks into those soft vegetables, and then they get so silky and flavorful?

For the second or third time since June, I did have to go buy some vegetables–zucchini is long-gone from the CSA at this point–but all the rest of it I had on hand:

I basically made a half-batch of the EveryDay Food recipe, which is very simple:

Ratatouille, from EveryDay Food
1/3 cup olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 large eggplants, (2 pounds), peeled in strips and cut into 3/4-inch cubes
4 to 5 medium zucchini, (2 pounds), cut into 1-inch cubes
Coarse salt and ground pepper
3 yellow or red bell peppers, ribs and seeds removed, cut into 3/4-inch cubes
1 can (28 ounces) diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon dried thyme [I didn’t have any, so I used a pinch or two of herbes de provence. Sadly mine are the type w/ lavender flowers in them, which lent a bit of an odd note to the bites containing it!]
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil

Directions:
In a Dutch oven (or other heavy 5-quart pot with a tight-fitting lid), heat oil over medium heat. Cook onions, stirring occasionally, until soft, about 5 minutes. Add garlic; cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Stir in eggplant and zucchini; season generously with salt and pepper.
Add 3/4 cup water; cover, and simmer until vegetables are beginning to soften, stirring once, about 5 minutes. Stir in bell peppers; simmer, covered, until softened, 5 minutes.
Stir in tomatoes and thyme; bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low. Partially cover; simmer, stirring often, until vegetables are tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from heat. If serving immediately, stir in basil. (If freezing, leave out basil.)

It did feel sinful to use canned tomatoes in august, but I didn’t have fresh ones and I did have a can of Muir Glen. Still, next time I’ll definitely blanch/peel/chop up a couple pounds of tomatoes instead of using canned, if I can.

Ben grilled sausages and I toasted some oiled bread on the hot grill, then rubbed it with garlic. A simple and delicious meal: It was perfect for the chilly evening that night; still summery with all the vegetables, but also warm and comforting.

Plus, even making a half batch I had enough for lunch the next day AND a big ziplock full to freeze.

I was reminded, eating that night, that I always meant to make the Ratatouille-the-movie version: The NYTimes published the recipe back when it came out, and I still need to give it a shot… How pretty is that?

(Image from the movie, via inuyaki.com)

A couple weeks ago I got lovely multi-colored carrots in the CSA share, and since I’d seen Jamie Oliver’s “Carrots & Beets” Jamie at Home episode a few days before, I was inspired to make carrot ribbons for a salad.

I just peeled the carrots, then kept using the peeler to make strips of carrot:

Made a tangy dressing to counteract the sweet carrots, and voila. It was tasty, but I think shredding the carrots would have made them juicier, as well as easier to eat. I’ll try again soon! They sure looked pretty, though…

By the way, that’s a stuffed pepper (made using some CSA peppers and onions) that I took a major short cut to make. Mom, avert your eyes. Trader Joe’s sells, ahem, vacuum-packed precooked rice. I only found wild, brown or flavored varieties, so I used brown. One package was exactly as much as I needed for the recipe. You can’t tell the difference between white and brown in this, since there’s so much else going on, and I loved the convenience. (Last time I used cooked white rice from the Whole Foods hot bar–this was way cheaper.)

First, the goods:

-3 ears corn
-1 cucumber
-1 japanese eggplant
-1 pound….beans
-1 bunch lovely small leeks
-1 enormous heirloom tomato
-1 bunch sage
-1 pound red potatoes

So shortly before I picked up the bag full of goodness, I read that article in the NYTimes food section about slow-cooked green beans. And then I sent it to my mom, who has loads and loads of everything in her garden right now, and she cooked them and e-mailed something like “OMG, those were great,” and when I got the bag of beans I thought “Perfect!!”

Ok, so. I won’t lie, I’m pretty confident in my vegetable-identification skills. I’ve been eating farmer’s market heritage-style vegetables since I was a kid. My mom cooks all SORTS of things that you see on trendy farm-to-table restaurant menus. And yet it didn’t occur to me that the slightly tough-looking bag of beans I’d picked out (I grabbed biggish ones because I was going to slow cook them!) were, um, not string beans. They were….some other sort. Shell beans of some kind. As evidenced by the giant bulges in their sides, I realize as I look at the photos. But being an IDIOT, I didn’t work that out until they started to shell themselves while cooking, when lavender beans started tumbling out like a pinata prize. A starchy pinata prize. But more on that in a moment.

The recipe is a starting point: Basically the idea is to cook beans slowly, in liquid, until they are tender. I caramelized shallots and then used a bit of dry vermouth instead of wine. Again, as I think back I probably should have tried using the recipe (with tomatoes, etc.) the first time, but oh well. I did add water to keep the liquid level up, as she recommends.

That first batch of shallot met a truly tragic fate when I stepped away for, I swear to god, 20 seconds and they burned to a crisp. Dammit.

“Oh Kate, those don’t look so bad! Definitely salvageable!” Yeah, sure. Tell that to the bit I tasted, which I think is STILL stuck in my teeth. (Gross, not really.)

Ok, much better.

I don’t have photos of the intermediate steps, because I panicked. The pods started opening up and revealing those gorgeous purple beans inside and I didn’t know what to do, so I cooked the whole mess until the beans were at least edible. Maybe not quite how I’d have cooked them if I had realized in advance, but not so startchy they couldn’t be choked down.

And they looked lovely (the chicken was leftover; I sliced it and tossed it with the beans to warm it up):

And as a matter of fact the pods were awfully tasty–do you usually throw away the pod from shell beans? Are these even shell beans? Mom or Germi, can you help me out here?

We also had that One Pound Monster of a tomato in a very simple salad:

(I don’t believe in mucking around with a tomato that lovely–a drizzle of sherry vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper, and some basil.)

Those beans really were tender and delicious, in the end. I can’t wait to try again with actual green beans. And next time I luck into shell beans I want to make bruschetta!

Whee! August!

-1 huge bunch cavolo nero
-3 onions
-1 head amazing juicy fresh garlic
-2 green peppers
-5 carrots, white, yellow and orange
-1 ear corn
-1 bunch fresh oregano
-3 tomatoes
-3 small hot peppers

The very day I got this bag of treats, Germi commented about a long-cooked cavolo nero at Suzanne Goin’s AOC restaurant. I did some googling and am still not 100% sure I found the recipe, but the closest I could get was a recipe from Chowhound:

“Italian Greens

Heat a medium saucepot over medium heat and pour in 1/3 cup Dandaragan Estate Olive Oil. Add the rosemary sprig and one chilli and let them sizzle in the oil for about one minute. Add the thinly sliced onion and garlic. Season with salt to taste and cook gently over medium to low heat for about 10 minutes, or until the onion is soft and starting to colour slightly. Then add the cavolo nero to the pot and stir to mix well. Season with more salt and cook the greens slowly over low heat for about 30 minutes, stirring often until they turn a dark, almost black colour and become slightly crispy on the edges. Adjust seasoning and set aside.”

I sort of followed those direction. I didn’t have rosemary so I threw in some fresh thyme (didn’t end up tasting it).

Strips of cavolo nero:

The difference between normal old grocery store garlic and the fresh stuff from the farm was amazing. Instead of being sticky it was juicy and sliced into lovely translucent pieces:

Am I weird that I find vegetables so beautiful? On a similar note, check out the water pooling up on the kale while I washed it:

I am always amazed by the wilting power of greens. You saw the cleaned ribbons of chard, above. Now here’s the same amount after being boiled for a couple minutes…

…and after I squeezed a crazy amount of bright-green water out of it (along with all the nutrients, I’m sure):

In addition to the garlic (love!) I cut up one of the lovely new onions from the farm, to flavor the greens along with a chili de arbol and the thyme leaves:

The amount of oil called for in the recipe seemed high, and I didn’t use quite so much. Still, the end result was too oily for my taste (and I love oily things–just give me some bread to mop it up with and I’m a happy girl). Very tasty, but not quite the “Now my life is complete” greens I hoped for. We’ll see if I end up with more as fall approaches; I’ll keep experimenting.

We ate the greens with grilled sausages and yet another tomato/cucumber/feta salad.

So with that lovely japanese eggplant lurking in the fridge, I picked up a pint of cherry tomatoes and put together a quick pasta sauce one night.

Ingredients:
1 japanese eggplant, cut into chunks (quartered lengthwise and chopped)
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1 anchovy
Copious garlic, minced
Chopped basil
Salt/Pepper
Olive oil
Penne

Wheee, summer!

I cut the anchovy up into very small pieces and cooked that first, dissolving it into the olive oil. Then I softened the garlic and added in the eggplant, then salted it. Eggplant, I will say once again, needs to be WELL-COOKED, and I don’t just mean “cooked with skill,” I mean “cooked thoroughly,” so that it is silky and delicious instead of bitter and spongy. I covered the pan a couple times to help it soften.

Once all the eggplant pieces were getting so they felt squishy under my spoon, I added in the halved cherry tomatoes and cooked the whole kit and kaboodle for a brief while.

When everything was nicely melded I tossed in a handful of basil ribbons and turned off the heat until the pasta was cooked. Then, after draining the pasta, I brilliantly poured the sauce over the pasta (in the pot) to toss it, instead of spooning pasta into sauce (my pan was too small). As a result, I had a bit too much pasta for the amount of sauce I had, SIGH. I crumbled feta on top and put on a few tiny basil leaves.

Despite the excess pasta, it was quite tasty and Ben really loved it. He seems to like nearly every vegetable now, which is a pleasant development.

Ok, now I am literally walking out the door to London, THIS VERY MINUTE. See you on the flip-side!

(Missed week 7 since I got a double box for the lake…)

-4 ears of sweet corn
-1 bunch basil
-1/2 pound assorted cherry tomatoes
-1 pound beets
-1 japanese eggplant
-1 very small round watermelon, lots of seeds

I don’t believe in messing around with freshly picked sweet corn and cherry tomatoes. There’s a reason cooking gets easy in the late summer, and it’s because you’re better off not doing anything to those ingredients beyond a light dressing or quick boil (for the corn).

I haven’t run into too much, um, organic life in all this organic produce this summer, but it turns out the corn has been fairly riddled with caterpillars. I shucked the first couple ears with no problem but when I started on the third a really, really large caterpillar reared up at me, I shrieked and dropped the ear in the bag of husks, and he fell off before I could take a photo.

I have very strong memories of eating fresh “butter and sugar” sweet corn at my grandmother’s house in Western Massachusetts when I was little. The Williams’ Farm was across the street, and once the water was on the stove getting ready to boil we would go across and pick as much as we needed, leave money in a can, then shuck it and get it straight in the water. It’s important to eat corn on the cob as soon as possible after it’s picked, because the sugar in it starts converting to starch as soon as it is off the plant. When the corn is super-fresh you barely need to cook it; I think I boiled ours for about four minutes, tops. Remember: Don’t salt the water you cook corn in, it will toughen the kernels. Lots of butter, salt and pepper are crucial, too.

Beautiful:

Not quite as beautiful:

A much smaller Little Friend, found in an ear from the next week:

The fourth ear was similarly afflicted, so I broke off the ends of those two and we each had a little more than an ear and a half to go along with our tomato salad and a little fish fillet leftover from Ben’s Trader Joe’s fish and chips over the weekend.

BTW, here’s the lovely inside of that darling little watermelon: