Quintessential Summer Supper

 Cherokee Purple, Sungold and Pink Bumblebee tomatoes with some summer friends

I can't get through July without posting about this most summery of plates.  We've been eating some combo of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and snap beans once and sometimes twice a day for the past couple of weeks.  I do not tire of this grouping as I know it will never taste quite the same at any other time of year as it does when it comes fresh from the garden.

Some S&P, O&V and a smattering of feta or cottage cheese with some purple onion for bite and fresh basil for pizazz, its just hard to go wrong.

On the left up there is a zucchini stuffed with a custard made of fresh corn, egg, milk and cheese.  It's topped with fresh tomato sauce made of nothing but onions and garlic sauteed in olive oil with peeled chopped plum tomatoes.  It is so sweet and simple.

I added a pile of lentils last night for some more protein.  French lentils are great eaten cold, worth a try if you haven't and they cook up quickly too.

Best news of all.  It's raining.  Rained last night too.  A half an inch and I'm feeling maybe we'll have another half inch or more tonight.  Everyone, even non-gardeners, are breathing a sigh of relief.

 Corn Stuffed Zucchini (Calabacitas rellenas con elote)

           Adapted from Diana Kennedy's The Cuisines of Mexico 

3 large zucchini- wash, trim the ends and cut in half lengthwise.  Scoop out the flesh and save for another dish, leaving a 1/4-1/2 inch thick "boat" to hold the custard.

Put in a blender:

   Scraped kernels from 3 ears of corn

   1 egg

   1-2 T milk (enough to free the blades of the blender)

   1/4 t salt and some fresh pepper

Puree

Add 1/2 cup of grated cheese, and give another zip in blender

(I like muenster but you could use jack or cheddar)

Put zucchini boats in a baking dish, pour the custard into the boats, top with more grated cheese.

Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes-one hour.

Serve with fresh tomato sauce and some chopped fresh parsley or basil.

Where's Jack?

The rain just won't quit.

Another 7 tenths last night, after 7 tenths the night before, after.... I can't keep track anymore, it seems its rained almost everyday.  As a result things are growing very tall, I guess they are trying to reach for the sun?

Standing in front of the pole bean trellis

David added  3 feet to the top of this trellis and still the beans have grown another three feet beyond that, winding and wrapping around themselves in an attempt to grow higher.  They are finally setting flowers and beans, I may have to get a ladder to pick them though.  In addition to Jack in the Beanstalk references I keep hearing Aretha singing The House That Jack Built "But I ain't got Jack, and I want my Jack back".

The extension David made for the cucumber trellis was so heavy with vine and fruit that it snapped and folded over on itself.  So now picking cucumbers is more like an excavation.  But they keep putting on, with all the rain they are watery, crisp and sweet.  I am glad we will be leaving for a vacation in another 10 days and when we get back, hopefully all the cucurbits and tomatoes will be dead.

After making 4 gallons of tomato sauce, half in the freezer, half in jars and tucked safely away for winter, I am happy to see the tomatoes coming to an end.   But not quite, so last night we took advantage of the first 3 fat eggplants and the squash surplus and made a big pot of ratatouille.  So tasty.

 Vat of Rat + Today's Harvest

Back in my restaurant days we would make 5 gallon buckets of ratatouille and put it in everything from omelets to crepes or serve it as a side dish along side cold roasted lamb.  There, we actually flash fried each vegetable in oil and added it to the cooked tomato sauce.  At home, I sauté batches of each veggie in olive oil and then simmer it all together with tomatoes, onions, garlic and a healthy handful of fresh basil.  Yum.  Some of this is headed for the freezer too.

In fact, we are slated to go out and buy a new larger freezer today as our 25 year old 10 cubic foot freezer is stuffed and we need more space. It's making this groaning sound that gets me nervous, I would hate for the old thing to die right now as its filled to the brim with cherries, blueberries, tomato sauce and more.  I hate shopping but sometimes you just gotta do it.  25 years for an appliance is not bad, and I fear the new one won't last half that long.

The Lotus Pond

Last summer David brought home a black plastic tub and some tiny lotus plants.  He filled the tub with mud, brought water from the farm pond to introduce a few water creatures, nestled the plants into their new home and we waited.  Within a couple of months we had breathtaking, spectacular flowers.

D would visit the little pond daily to see what was up, who was hatching, growing, zipping in and around the floating leaves.  All kinds of frogs moved onto the scene.  The lotus pond became a source of entertainment and natural wonder.

During the first warm nights this past spring, when we opened the windows to let in the night air, along with the breeze came a deafening call of dozens of tree frogs just outside the bedroom window where the little pond sat.  David constructed a plywood sled that he hoisted the pond onto and then used to drag the heavy pool across the yard and settle the tub further away from the bedroom window.  He brought soil to pile around the edges and planted iris and ginger lilies to soften the black plastic rim.  Just this past week the lotus began to bloom again. 

They are ethereal.

Along with the frogs and whirly gig beetles, tadpoles and skimmers came dragonflies.  Nymphs that spent the winter in the mud began to crawl up out of the muck onto the stalks. Their backs split open and out hatched the winged creatures, filling up like butterflies coming out of a chrysalis, then taking wing around the yard, snatching up mosquitoes and other small flying insects.

Dry nymph shell above, dragon ready to fly below

Buddhists consider the lotus to be representative of the journey to enlightenment, from the murky mud rises a beautiful flower, its opening an awakening or rebirth.  I'm glad to see the fat purple buds and pink flowers gracing the yard again and its timely that they came at the summer solstice, I certainly have felt my own energy rising after the passage of the first day of summer.  I've not reached enlightenment, I'm far from that, but I do feel a release from things that were weighing me down, a renewal of my spirit moving me forward to new things. 

I'm trying to embrace summer as best I can.  

Swimming outside, riding my bike, long evenings drinking gin and tonics, playing croquet and watching the fireflies rise up from the lawn, suppers of tomatoes, corn, squash and cucumbers, and I picked our first ripe blueberry today.

Yep, summer has arrived.

Turn on that oven and bake!

With the drop in temperature the interest in cooking has been renewed with verve. Building on the fact that I had a dairy extravaganza last week, precipitated by an over accumulation of cream in the freezer.   I made two pounds of butter which also yielded about 2 quarts of buttermilk and some creme fresh.  I also made yogurt and yogurt cheese.  Next came two buttermilk apple crumb cakes and last night a bodacious buttermilk spoon bread.  Spoon bread is an interesting cross between cornbread and polenta or mush.  Last night I added fresh corn, pasilla chiles, and chopped green onions, the resulting dish was hearty, creamy, sweet, (though I added no sugar) and quite satisfying. Recipe below.

I was surprised in the garden yesterday to see the sweet potatoes blooming.  A pretty flower, like a morning glory, which is in the same plant family.  There has been a battle of sorts going on for the past couple of months between the sweet potatoes which always grow rampant and run over everything around them and the Long Island Cheese squash.

Sweet potatoes are one of the happiest crops in our climate.  There is a reason North Carolina is the largest producer of sweet potatoes in the country raising close to 40% of all the sweet potatoes grown in the US, they grow VERY happily here.  Lately, eating the greens seems to be the rage, everyone is talking about it, and the way they grow, its worth trying.  So last night we did.  Just the tender tips and youngest leaves, washed and sauteed like spinach in olive oil with a little garlic, S&P, they were quite tasty.  I've heard they are also super nutritious.  Researching a bit I see its recommended that they are blanched in boiling water for a couple of minutes before stir-frying them, but we did not do that and they were still good.

The Long Island Cheese squashes huge pizza sized leaves rambled down through the sweet potato patch and even up into the pepper cages. They have traveled easily 40 feet down the row and back again.

One squash hangs down between a couple of pepper plants, another is over in the asparagus patch.  I had tried this squash once before but unsuccessfully.  They are a type of butternut but not as dense or sweet, the flesh is slightly more stringy, a little like a spaghetti squash, light and good flavored. This year we put the seeds in the ground and just got out of the way!  The result; four good sized squashes from two plants. I think pound for pound the sweet potatoes will win out but everyone seems to have come to an amicable sharing of space.

This one here is the biggest and best. 12.5 Pounds 

I can just see Cinderella riding off to the ball in this dude

So for the spoon bread, here's the recipe which is a doubling of the original from the Joy of Cooking, plus my embellishments, always embellishing...

Buttermilk Spoon Bread 6-8 servings

Pour 3 cups boiling water over 2 cups yellow cornmeal, mix well and let cool
Meanwhile:
beat together 2 eggs, 2 T melted butter, 2 cups buttermilk, 2 t baking soda and 1.5 t salt
Scrape the kernels from two ears of corn (or open a can or use frozen, about 1 cup of kernels)
Roast, skin, seed and chop 2 pasilla, poblano or other mild green chiles
Chop a cup of green onions
Mix it all together and pour into a buttered dish to bake at 350 for about an hour or until set.
I used a deeper corning ware dish , if you used a flatter baking dish, like a 9x12 it will probably bake faster and be drier.  I think sprinkling some grated cheese over top, cheddar or jack or a combo would be a good addition too.

Garlic!

I harvested the garlic today, after 4 inches of rain in the past week I thought I better get it out of the ground to start drying. It was a good haul and about 35 of the heads are what I would call really big, another 25 were quite respectable, there was just a handful that were puny for some reason. So we enter another season with a good garlic crop to get us through making lots of tomato sauce and ratatouille and pesto and last us again into the late winter I hope, it's more than one head per week and I think that ought to do us fine.

David has been harvesting chanterelle mushrooms from the woods this week and we will be eating squash very soon too.