This week’s haul was patty pan squash, a ginormous zucchini, potatoes, two pounds of tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and a pound and a half of green beans. I’m thinking of freezing at least some of this batch of beans, and the tomatoes are going to be made into gazpacho tonight (so it has a full 24 hours to marinate for tomorrow’s dinner.)
Last week, I used the cherry tomatoes and zucchini to make Gnocchi with Zucchini Ribbons & Parsley Brown Butter, which was absolutely amazing. I used the long edge on the box grater to shave the zucchini, which were so thin they cooked up amazingly fast, and were wonderfully tender. I’ll definitely be making this dish again. About the only bad thing is that these are the kind of leftovers which need to be hot, so I’ll need to remember to take the extra effort to nuke them at work the next day.
I also made a fabulous blueberry cake with some of the haul from the freezer. I was trying to replicate the cake that my mother made many times when I was growing up, and this definitely fit the bill. I brought most of it to work the next day, and it was gone in record time.
On Friday, I rounded out the week with Sauteed Green Beans with Garlic and Tomato from the Serving up the Harvest cookbook. I used those as a side to the Lemon-Basil Grilled Chicken from the Recipes from America’s Small Farms book, and it was a great meal. Both dishes had a nice hit of lemon, which gave a nice freshness to everything. The chicken marinade was nice and light, and the leftovers have been good fridge-pickings.
So it was a pretty good food week until we finally got the first official heat wave of the summer just in time for the first of September. The first day, I used up the rest of the tomatoes to make a lovely uncooked tomato sauce with fresh mozzarella and basil. It was so incredibly good, but it did require cooking pasta. After that, I couldn’t bring myself to cook again. Yesterday, we went out for Mexican food, and today, since I was on my own (BF is out with the boys), I made an avocado’s worth of guacamole, and ate it all, straight out of the bowl. One more night of this, and I’ll be back to cooking weather again.