Tomato tomato

I like using nearly identical ingredients to make two different things!

- garlic
- tomatoes
- gold bar squash (or zucchini)
- basil
- olive oil
- maybe some dry vermouth
- salt and pepper

A plate of pasta.

Soften fresh garlic in olive oil. Add a handful of halved grape tomatoes plus a pinch of salt and cook until crumpled. Add cubed gold bar squash and cook again, until done. Deglaze with dry vermouth if you want. At the end, add pepper and maybe some more salt. Toss it with pasta and eat it with torn basil and maybe some cubed mozzarella if you want any.

Panzanella.

Soften fresh garlic in olive oil. Dice a gigantic beefsteak tomato, add it and a pinch of salt, and cook until reduced. Add cubed gold bar squash and potential deglazing vermouth; cook another few minutes as above. Pepper and maybe more salt. Toss it over a plate of toasted torn sourdough; eat with a handful of torn basil and maybe a drizzle of olive oil to finish.

All produce, all the time

Seriously, I can't keep up.

Breakfast breakfast

Oh man. I have been having some awesome breakfasts lately.

Sourdough toast with butter, four minute egg, green beans with garlic, assam tea. Green beans are the best breakfast food ever. I want them right now. Four minute eggs are also great if you have any inclination at all toward a runny yolk mashed into toast. Double energy absorption bomb!

I finally told myself to suck it up and peeled a bowlful of the ever-increasing supply of peaches. Now I feel a little dumb for not doing it before. This is three peaches and one apricot and I totally ate it all.

Another egg, this one fried using the steam trick. Garlic herb toast, redleaf lettuce with good vinaigrette, green tea. I totally broke the egg yolk, folded the business over and had a fried egg sandwich.

This one was the best, though. I woke up yesterday with a serious need for bagel. Ok. So I went to the bagel shop and got a sesame bagel, although without the creamy creamy cheesy cheesy creamy cheese. No! Instead I also went to the grocery store, where, among other things, I got an actual brick of cream cheese. When I got home I whipped out a bunch of dill that had been slowly expiring in our refrigerator. I cut out all the good dill fronds, minced them up, and mashed them into a big whack of cream cheese. Then I toasted my bagel and covered it with as much cheese as possible. Voila: bagel of herbal awesome!

It also helps that it totally looks like a big smiley one-eyed monster. I'm just saying.

Greens greens everybody likes them

So here are a few things we're buried in up to the neck:
- ears of corn
- gold bar squash (basically yellow zucchini)
- piles and piles of greens

Obviously I had to make them into, uh, quesadillas. No, seriously. I didn't even put cheese in them, and yet they were still totally quesadillas. What? The technique remains!!

Awesome greens-oriented quesadillas

olive oil
garlic
good corn
summer squash of some type
kale, chard, or other wiltable greens
salt, pepper
red pepper flakes (aka "flake")
tortillas
some form of cooked beans

Cook vegetables, layer with beans in tortilla, toast.

Warm some olive oil in a big saute pan while you peel and chop a few cloves of garlic. Soften the garlic in the oil. Onion or shallot would also be reasonable here.

Husk a couple ears of corn and saw them gently off the cobs. Try not to get either cornsilk or kernels all over your kitchen. Don't try this next to a hot burner. Trim and dice a squash or two; wash, stem and chop a couple big handfuls of greens. I think we used an entire small bunch of kale, which worked very well here; kale is awesome. Oh, you didn't think kale liked this kind of thing, did you? IT DOES. Other vegetables you could use: bell pepper, jalapeno, maybe some precooked potato or sweet potato?

Ok. When the garlic has softened a little, add the corn and squash. Salt the pan to help release some of the squash juices. Add some black pepper and red pepper flake while you're at it. Cook together for maybe three to five minutes.

Add your chopped greens to the pan, along with a splash of water. Cover the pan and let it all steam for a couple minutes, then check for doneness, stir, and steam a little more if necessary. Something delicate like spinach will take just a minute or two to steam; kale will take up to five minutes.

Now make it all into quesadillas!

For each quesadilla, I spread a flour tortilla completely with black beans. On this occasion the beans were in the form of spicy black bean dip. I have no apologies! It was good! Clearly, any kind of southwesterny spreadable bean preparation will work here, though; I imagine a pan of fresh refried beans would be pretty sweet.

Cover half the tortilla with a couple spoonfuls of the greens mixture. At this point you could add anything else you might want in a quesadilla setting, such as cheese, but you don't have to; the beans should be adhesive enough to keep everything together.

Now fold the tortilla over and toast until slightly golden brown. Either use a frying pan, flipping halfway through, or use the toaster oven. You don't want to turn on the real oven at a time like this.

Garnish: do you want to add sour cream, guacamole, or salsa? If so, go ahead.

Now eat them!

You could clearly turn this business to a number of slightly different uses.

Tacos: steam corn tortillas, then fill with hot beans and greens. Lime or lemon juice as appropriate.
Enchiladas: roll beans and greens into tortillas. Fill a pan with these, cover with a good enchilada sauce, and bake. I think a red sauce would work best, but green or even mole is worth trying.
Big bowl of delicious mess: make rice or other grain, add beans and greens, and eat.

Delicious mess is delicious

Oh man, I have to write something. I am pretty stressed out, you guys.

However, we have vegetables. LOTS OF VEGETABLES. They are delicious. I will totally eat a vegetable every once and again.

Up there we have a nice plate of messy messy deliciousness that John made me a bit ago. So messy and so delicious. We had totally just gotten our first head of fresh serious garlic from the farmer's market. It was all over that business. Oh man. I wish I had some right now.

Besides garlic, the star here was SUMMER FREAKING SAUSAGE. I know! But said summer sausage--or is it beef salami? I threw out the wrapper, but it's from the severely local Larchmont Charcuterie--is so gorgeous and perfect that I have been using it not only for occasional big awesome sandwiches but also in cooking. Yes! Oh! I had totally been looking for a tiny whole salami or summer sausage to bring home with me for ages, before we even moved out of CA, since the Saag's sausages disappeared suddenly from the Milk Pail. AND LO. This one appeared out of nowhere, with far better textured and flavored meat and a lower proportion of fat than Saag's ever had.

Delicious mess of vegetable and sausage

olive oil
garlic
decent whole salami/summer sausage (or a drop of smoke seasoning, maybe?)
good summer tomatoes
good summer zucchini/summer squash
mushrooms
dry vermouth
salt, pepper
did we even put any basil in here?

Ok! Essentially we're going to make a big vegetable ragout thing with a little bit of rendered chopped meat. You could make a pot of rice or something to serve it on, or you could do what I did and just eat a whole huge plate full of mess. Either will work fine. Good?

Get a pan medium hot and add in some olive oil. Smash and chop several cloves of garlic, maybe four; I like a lot, but our garlic was so fresh that we really didn't need all that much. Cut maybe an inch of sausage off the whole, then dice into small bits.

Throw the sausage into the pan and cook a few minutes, letting any available fat render off. The time here will depend on the fattiness of said sausage; ours had very little fat, so it only took minute or two to permeate the oil. Then add the garlic and cook another few minutes. While those cook, core and chop a couple of good tomatoes. The proportion here is pretty much up to you; I really don't know how many we used, since John made this, not me. Two sounds good.

Throw your tomatoes into the pan, raise the heat to medium-high, and cook to reduce, stirring occasionally. I find that tomatoes can take ten or even fifteen minutes to reduce. If things start to stick at any point, deglaze with a little water or dry vermouth, then keep cooking.

While that's cooking, trim and dice some zucchini or squash. I think we used one of each, or maybe one and a half total. Also bust out some mushrooms and chop them roughly. Five or six mushrooms? I don't know. It's all good.

When the tomatoes are reasonably reduced, toss in your mushrooms, give them a little salt, and let them express their juices for a minute or two. Then add the zucchini, along with a shot or so of vermouth; it should sizzle. Stir the business together and let cook for maybe three minutes, or until the zucchini is just cooked. Whip it off the heat, salt and pepper as needed, and serve.

If you want some basil, rip it up and throw it all over your plate. Or you could stir it into the pan to wilt a little before serving. It's all good.

Eat it eat it!

FOOD. Now I really want some.