Week Eleven

It's getting to be autumn!

Tomatoes, tomatoes, zucchini, beans, and acorn squash!

Week ten- roasted peppers

It's hard to use all this fresh stuff sometimes, so I look to my mom for advice on how to store veggies for the winter. I've seen her roast peppers and have done it once myself, but this time I was trying to be careful and keep track of the steps.

First I set the oven to broil, placed the peppers on a cookie sheet, and turned them so all sides got nice and black. Then I put them in a bowl, covered the bowl with a towel, and let the whole thing sit for 20 mintues or so, till the skin was loosened and the peppers were cool enough to handle.

The skins peel or rub off easily, then I used a spoon and my fingers to clean out all the seeds. This is what they looked like then:

Packed them nicely in freezer bags, and I have roasted red peppers for the winter!

Week ten- tri-colore pasta

Is this kind of a rut? I dunno, but I really love to just cook tomatoes with olive oil and have it with pasta. Look how pretty this variety of tomatoes is.

And after cooking for a little bit, this is what it looks like. Look at all the garlic!

And this is what it looks like in the bowl. Fresh pasta from the local fresh pasta place, sprinkled with flat leaf parsley from the share. I'm running out of things to say about cooked tomatoes with pasta. It's good!

Week Ten

Week ten is a beautiful week. Various heirloom tomatoes, bright red peppers, vibrant flat leaf parsley, coppery little shallots.

The little yellow tomatoes are kinda fuzzy, like a peach. As soon as we got them we had to slice one up and marvel at it's uniqueness.



Phil declared them wonderful.

Week nine- tomatos two ways

We've had lots of tomatoes in the house all summer, and with these little cherries Phil and I each got to have tomatoes our favorite ways.

His favorite way is raw, so I cut up several cherries, diced a cucumber, halved some pitted olives, and mixed it up with a little Italian dressing and fresh dill. Phil says it's the dill that made this quick salad out of this world. Oh, he also said a little feta cheese on top made it out of this galaxy.


My favorite way is cooked, so one night I got home way late, so I did the old sautee of olive oil-garlic-smashed tomatoes that I so love. Used the rest of my orzo which I'd boiled a day or two before, then added some shaved hard cheese-- something from Trader Joe's, of course. This dinner was the best of the week, if you ask me.

Week nine- zucchini bread revisited

I posted a zucchini bread recipe earlier this summer. It's a recipe I totally love, but have been experimenting with throughout the summer to see if there was any way to health it up. Mostly I was interested in seeing if I could reduce the amount of oil and/or white flour. I tried to substitute half the white flour with whole wheat flour, but the bread was too chewy. I made a batch with 1.5 c. white flour and .5 c. whole wheat, but I don't know if it was worth the trouble. What did work out well was subbing apple sauce for the oil. There's 1/2 c. oil in the recipe, so I did an even switch with apple sauce and it resulted in a great tasting, way healthier bread.

So, if you tried the zucchini bread from a few weeks ago, try it with the apple sauce substitution. And if you haven't tried it, try it. It's so good.

http://imacsablogger.blogspot.com/2011/07/week-five-zucchini-bread.html

Week nine- beets with orzo

I've been looking forward to this experiment all summer! I love roasted beets, and have been thinking about orzo-beet salad for weeks, but could never find a recipe that sounded great to me, so I just kinda winged this, and was pretty happy with the results.

First off I roasted the beets. These were medium-sized beets, and I rubbed them with olive oil, wrapped them in foil, and roasted them at like 375 for about an hour. After that, the skins just slip off, and the knife (and your hand) get very red.


I diced the beets and tossed them with some orzo pasta, which is awesome (it's also awesome how it got beet-stained). I really like orzo. I made a citrus vinaigrette and chopped up some dill and tossed it all together. Topped it off with some great Vermont-made goat cheese that I got at Fresh Market. I loved this salad; it was different and beautiful.