Last Thursday, the last day of the new online students’ on-campus orientation, I got a big, summer-y CSA box.
That’s a few green beans, “silver” and green cucumbers, something like 2 1/3 pounds of tomatoes, bunches of basil and leaf lettuce, an onion two little melons, and 10 ears of corn.
After I brought all the new veggies home, I hauled out everything I could find in the fridge and made rice pilaf. Using the week before’s farmers market corn, leftover rice cooked in tomato juice, bacon, and broccoli & cauliflower “rice” – the cauliflower was from a bag of Green Giant cauliflower crumbles that Al brought home, and the broccoli was leftover from a veggie platter from Willy Street Co-op, that had been served at the Bootcamp. I also made some boiled potatoes that had been lurking in the veggie drawer into oven fries and served them with basil mayonnaise, starting to use up the basil. As an aside, I found a new way to store it – inside a cloth vegetable bag, inside a plastic bag, in a less cold part of the fridge, and it worked!
I didn’t cook much over the weekend – Friday it was my birthday, ans normally I’d’ve made a pie or a cake, but we went to the State Fair, and ate stuff there – corn, tots, flavored milk, cream puffs.
Saturday we went out for dinner at Pig in a Fur Coat – delicious, and nice view of the Capitol on the way home.
Sunday I went for a walk and took lots of pictures of flowers. Megan was posting flowers in California, too. We had toast, made with ancient grains bread, and bacon and corn & tomato pie and lots of fruit – remember those melons in the CSA box – for breakfast.
[portfolio_slideshow pagerpos=disabled size=large]
Wednesday evening I was scheduled to do a tomato cooking demo at the McFarland Library, so Monday night I drove over to Terese’s to borrow her electric burner. There was a tiny snippet of rainbow.
On Monday morning, while I was waiting for her to get dressed for walking, I took a picture of Ann’s tomatoes, because I thought it might be useful for the demo, and then Wednesday morning I bought sungolds and 6 plum tomatoes at the Hilldale market, and a baguette for attendees to dunk into the sauce. I showed them how to blanch and skin tomatoes, and we made a roasted tomato sauce, and Marcella’s tomato butter sauce, all on Terese’s burner.
I made another tomato corn tart and I think it was better than the one I made Sunday – the bottom crust was nice and crisp. On the bottom, has a layer of almost-pesto, basil pureed with olive and garlic, using up more of that bunch of basil from my CSA box.
Friday one week later I made roasted green beans, and we ate them with turkey meatballs in the tomato sauce left from the demo. I mixed the Marcella sauce and the roasted tomato sauce, and cooked it down a bit more with diced tomatoes and the other half of the onion, so I had a pot full of a thick, tomato-y sauce. After the sauce cooled, I mixed in the last of that almost-pesto. We also had corn on the cob and garlic toast, and went downtown to see New Pornographers.
And Iris Apfel is the featured image because I just love her. At the beginning of the Albert Maysles documentary about her, you hear her jewelry clattering, and it reminds me of the sound of my mom rubbing in her Jergens hand lotion with all her rings clicking together.