We hope you've been enjoying your summer veggies so far this season! Now that the "warm summer crops" like melons, peppers and tomatoes are "on," here at the farm, we're all eating a lot of fresh salads and taking many melon breaks together! Here's what I did with this week’s produce, when I got home from work on one particularly hot evening recently:
Not wanting to turn on the stove for any reason, I began by thinking cool summer salad. I peeled and rough chopped a couple of cucumbers. I rinsed off a pint of sungold cherry tomatoes and combined with the cuke chunks in a bowl, with some rough chopped parsley. In a cup I combined olive oil and balsamic vinegar at roughly 2:1 ratio, then added salt and lots of fresh ground pepper. After a moment’s consideration, I pressed in a clove of garlic into this “dressing”, and mixed up with a fork. To my taste, this dressing is best applied to the cucumber/ cherry tomato mix just before serving. But you could of course marinate in the fridge (I think cuke chunks get a bit soft and discolored w too much time in cold and vinegar, but that’s just one opinion).
For this particular meal I made sliced tomato sandwiches, on good bread I dredged quick in olive oil and toasted briefly on the grill. This evening, I broke down and heated enough water to flash blanch a pile of snapped green beans (but roasted sweet corn on the grill would be good, too). Because two of our hard (farm) working sons were at the supper table, I grilled a few chicken sausages, but this meal would have been great without them.
And of course this time of year, all we needed for desert was a fat ripe watermelon. This meal took less than 30 minutes to prep (washing and snapping the beans was the most time consuming part!) and relied on an impulse from a cook who saw what was “in the box” and went with it. But a different cook could certainly use a recipe (perhaps better results!!). We DO NOT eat like this often in summer, I’ll admit (we seem to have less time to cook, even as daylight hours are so plentiful…). But when we do have time to enjoy the fruits of our labor at the start of “summer fruit season” (now!), this is what I think of preparing. This upcoming week, it could be gazpacho!
Here at Featherstone, we wish you and yours fresh and flavorful summer meals as we head into the dog days of summer!
Gratefully,
Jack
