Summer came early this year

It’s been so hot and humid, I’ve already received like 5 pounds of zucchini in my CSA box(es). Yesterday – the summer solstice, only the very first official day of summer, and already a zucchini glut – I made zucchini bread and discovered that I need to tweak my recipe. I think I usually make a large batch and I must’ve been trying to cut it down to one loaf and went too far. I ended up with this cute flat loaf. It rose OK it just wasn’t enough batter to fill the pan and I suspect it would only make maybe 8-9 muffins rather than a full dozen.

So I made the flat zucchini bread into cream cheese tea sandwiches.

I was going to take them over to Steve & Heike’s for Make Music Madison Day, since they were having music in their back yard. I think they managed to have some musicians in the garage, solo artists, but Steve texted me a little before 6:00, just as I was about to head over, that the later acts got rained out, as did many of the Make Music Madison events. And, poor predicting on my part, I had cancelled my tickets to an indoor show, Young Fresh Fellows at Kiki’s basement, in order to do Make Music Madison. Scott even wore his Brewers hat for us. Oh, well.

Because in addition to the heat and humidity, it’s been rainy. Friday the weather was just wacko, no better word for it. There’d be short bouts of rain, some pretty hard, and the temperature would drop into the 70s. It was actually only 67° and cloudy when I got up. After a rain it would clear up and the sun’d come out and it’d be 90°. A lot of the Make Music Madison events chickened out and cancelled in advance.

The tea sandwiches will just have to come with me to my Monday afternoon meeting.

And it’s rainy again today – Saturday. We drove to the Farmers Market and walked around with our umbrellas and that was pretty nice, not crowded and really not raining that hard either, although the prediction is for thunderstorms and heavy rain this evening. We really didn’t need anything at the market, since I just got box 3 of my 4 CSA boxes, from my CSA farm’s short season. Like I said, when they put out the sign up last fall, I thought if they were only doing four boxes I’d take them all, but now that I’m in the midst of getting them, how to use all the veggies is haunting my dreams.

And I also tried to be conservative in my Farmers’ Market purchases, since we are about to reduce from a family of three down to two, since our exchange student goes back to Germany on Monday.

Plus last Saturday was a strawberry U-Pick out at the farm. I think I must’ve picked abut twice as much as I usually do; I think it was abut 16 pounds. I blame the big flat boxes they gave us, scroll down to the last image to see them. And oh, haha I see in the fine print that they told us the boxes can hold 10 pounds, and up to 14 carefully piled. Which I didn’t want to do. I was afraid if I overfilled my boxes I’d spill them. Usually I take a couple of my one gallon ice cream buckets and fill those and go home. This year I filled two of the boxes, probably 8 pounds in each, and was surprised when I got back to the car to see I’d been picking for over an hour, also more than usual.

2018 for reference:

I made strawberry jam, and also froze a bunch, 4 quarts initially and then I did a fifth the next day.

To use up all the veggies, I’ve been making lots of salads, tried this NYT one, subbing in romaine and leaf lettuce and dill and green garlic and chives and provolone. Went over OK with the fam, but I did compost at least one serving. I didn’t have fennel, but of course this week I do, and need to figure out what to do with that. I had a ton of dill from the June 9th food history/DCFM cookbook event, so I made creamy cucumbers with dill. That went over a bit better, but still some of it went into the compost. One of the recipes I suggested for CSA was radish salsa and we had it with with tacos and it kept OK in the fridge for a few days, but after the first night, I don’t think anyone ate any of it but me. Another CSA one was these mushroom and spinach grilled cheeses, and they were good, everyone thought so. Of course I added more cheese, not much, just a little provolone that was already grated from the salad above. The recipe’s written by a dietician, and I’m not. I froze the extra filling. Leafy greens pesto, loosely based on this recipe, made with chives, dill, spinach, and walnuts, was the one that everyone liked the most, though. We had it on penne.

At the book sale on Monday I added all these cataloging manuals to the discard cart, and the only one I even felt a vague twinge about chucking was Gorman’s Concise AACR. Sadly, I didn’t literally get to chuck the books in the dumpster myself. There was someone working in the trash room, so I left the cart for the Wednesday volunteers to fling.

I have two Jasper Wednesday’s worth of pictures, too, since I never posted last weekend. The first five are from the week before Fathers Day, when for our morning activity we walked to Colectivo and then met Pia and went to the little park. I thought it’d be fun to have another adult so Jasper could climb the big play structure, or the little one for that matter, with another adult to catch him at the end of the slide or off any edge where he might fall. But it was too hot. He declared the small structure hot, and even though it seemed like he wanted to run around in the grass a bit, he stomped in dog poo almost right away. Fortunately wearing crocs that I could scrub. So we went home and he ate, including icy pop, and took a good nap.The last three pics are from the week after Fathers Day when we started by strollering over to his 10:00 music class and it was also hot. And no nap but plenty of running around in the house in just a T-shirt & a diaper because little kids can do that in the summer.

Mark and I celebrated his Fathers Day on Friday before all the Make Music Madison rain outs with a drive out to Mineral Point for a diner breakfast and a walk at Governor Dodge. Training for our October walking trip in England. We went to Red Rooster Cafe, and I had eggs and toast and potatoes. My eggs were perfect and the potatoes were really good with onion and American cheese, except the bread was pretty generic. Mark had apple French toast and same thing – good except the syrup was just “pancake syrup” probably not even a speck of real maple. We split a cinnamon roll, and then went to walk at the park. We did almost 5 miles in two hours, over pretty rough and muddy and buggy terrain, so I think I’ll make it through our trip because the walking should be gentler, and also we’ll have all day to walk 10-12 miles; I think 15 a couple of times. And my knee feels perfectly fine today.

Here’re the pics.

Now I’m going to go and make zucchini foods, muffins and pickled, I think. I’ve been going to make this sheet pan dinner all week to use up some of my abundance of kale (giant bunch of mixed red and green last week, smaller bunch of Lacinto this week). I thawed out some turkey brats for it. Today this potato salad from Hailee Catalano showed up in my Insta and it sounds delicious. And it will use up the scallions I got in this week’s box and I have everything else, well, except for brewers yeast, but I can leave that out. I even found some brat buns in the freezer. So I’m going to blanch the kale and freeze it for future and we will have brats and potato salad for dinner. Much more summery.