Yesterday the Farmer’s market was so gorgeous – it made you want to buy everything and start squirreling away stuff for winter. There’re still some summer crops like melon and tomatoes and corn, and fresh second growths of the herbs and greens that were looking wilted in the heat just a week ago. And the fall stuff is piled high – squash and potatoes and all colors of bell peppers. It’s not going to be a good year for apples because of wacky March heat snap and then freeze, but there’re some apples, too. Mark said the market is not just green, it’s green and orange and red.
We have house guests – a visiting fellow at the library school, and his wife, from South Africa, and for supper last night, the wife made a big chicken and rice dish – Biryani, but a little different from the Indian kind – she says it is Malaysian, but by way of South Africa. Curry spices, chicken, rice and fried potatoes – it was rich and delicious. I made a salad with tomatoes & delicata squash from my CSA box, and parsley from the market. And crostini with oven-dried tomatoes and herbed cream cheese (leftover from the roasted broccoli sandwiches I made for the book launch party, right before we left for Toronto) and pickled purple onions. I put ut a few figs with the crostini, but they mostly just rolled off onto the floor. I’d already sneaked mine earlier. And a vanilla pudding with bananas and struesel topping, but no pictures of that.
Today for our big Sunday breakfast, Mark and I had a ham, tomato, and cheddar omelet with fried fingerling potatoes – the potatoes saved from almost going bad on top of his fridge – eaten just in time. And I ate three of the figs that had rolled off the appetizer tray on Saturday night.
I was fairly restrained with my Farmer’s market purchases – I got a cabbage to make a curried cabbage to go with more Biryani on Monday night (shucks, never got tofu – maybe I can leave it out). Apples that I turned into a pre-birthday tart for Mark – adapting this Smitten Kitchen recipe – which is itself an adaptation of a Jacque Pepin recipe by way of Alice Waters. 5 pounds of tomatoes: two pounds got made into a batch of Marcella Hazen’s butter & tomato sauce, and the rest skinned and diced for the freezer. A baker’s dozen of corn, that I cut off the cobs and blanched and ended up with two quarts for the freezer, and the cobs are simmering with all the tomato skins & squeezings to become a corn-tomato stock, that might be the base for the soup at School Woods 6th anniversary. And a giant butternut that I haven’t done anything with. Yet.
