Tomatoes arrive!

They've been holding the farmers market for several weeks already but unless there are local vegetables to be had why bother?  The farm-raised eggs, the local bison, the flowers and jams and the coffee-and-omelet special aren't on my shopping list, no matter what the season.  But last week we thought maybe there would be tomatoes.

There were!















And they tasted like actual ripe tomatoes!  Maybe not as deep red and magnificent as in August, but definitely worth savoring in the first tomato sandwich of the year.  I hope they'll be good all summer.

Always the exception

On the front of the menu:

Inside:

A beautiful gift

My fiber and textile art group recently had a full week of workshops with an internationally known teacher, who stayed at my house.  One of the workshop participants decided to bring a gift for the two of us -- a dozen eggs from her personal chicken flock.

I have never seen a more beautiful box of eggs -- ranging from white through browns and even some green!

And they tasted good too.  Thanks, Linda!

Buyer beware

I am a huge fan of Smartfoodwhite cheddar cheese popcorn.  No kidding, it has saved my life on more than one occasion, once being when I was on a two-stop flight home from Los Angeles, trapping me on the snack-free airplane for almost six hours.  I was late and had to rush through the airport early in the morning without breakfast, and contemplated starvation until I remembered a pack of Smartfood in the goodie bag from my convention.

Another time being when we landed hungry in Las Vegas at 4:30 pm, needing to eat before we boarded a shuttle for a two-hour trip into the boonies, and found all the restaurants outside security closed for the day.  Fortunately I had packed Smartfood in anticipation of needing snacks in the wilderness, hardly expecting that the wilderness would begin in the airport.

I could go on and on about how I love this stuff.  So when I was in the grocery and discovered that they have come up with a low-cal version, I had to try it.

Well, dear reader, do not make the same mistake. Low-cal Smartfood is Dumbfood in my book, only slightly more appetizing than styrofoam.  Nice texture, no flavor.

It's the opposite of the movies, where the white hats are the good guys. With Smartfood the white bag is the bad guy.  Save up your calories until you can afford a black bag of the real stuff.

Sausage fest

Last week was the annual sausage extravaganza put on by our friends, and a great spread it was!  There were nine different varieties, mostly porcine in origin.  What could be better?

My favorites were the country ham and the German pork.  Ken's favorites were the lamb mergueza and the Polish.  But we would have been happy with many different alternatives, had we been starving in Africa.

We're home -- need vegetables!

We've been away for three weeks (more later on our culinary adventures) and for the last couple of days of the trip all we could think of was coming home to our own kitchen and eating a lot of vegetables.  Not that vegetables were absent from our menus, but we were seduced by too many desserts, too much bacon, too many bar-food snacks.

When we inspected our crops we found that the arugula was tall and flowery, signs that it had bolted and become bitter with the onset of hot weather.  But it was lush with gorgeous dark green leaves that cried out to be eaten.  Perhaps too bitter for a salad, but OK to be cooked.

So here's our coming-home, vegetarian dinner: the arugula was tempered by the sweetness of pine nuts and the blandness of pasta, and tasted great.  I wish I had picked twice as much; I always forget how much greens shrivel when cooked.

And a big salad, of course, which comes with 95% of the dinners served at home.  It's good to be back.

Step one

I'm just too frugal for my own good sometimes.  (My children might say "cheap.")  When I think of all the hot water I've run down the sink in my lifetime after cooking pasta, it hurts.  But I've done two things to minimize the pain.  First, I've taken to cooking my pasta in the same pot as the sauce whenever possible.  But that doesn't work when you're making enough sauce for three or four meals, such as whenever I make a red sauce.

Second, for those times when you have to cook the pasta separately, I bought a pot system which has an inner pot with holes in it.  Boil up the water, add the pasta, cook, and then pull the top pot out to drain the pasta.

That leaves you with a nice pot of boiling water, already enriched with some starch from the pasta.  So in the minute or two while the pasta drains, grab a pound or two of dried beans, put them into the water and return it to the stove to simmer for an hour or two.  If you remember to turn off the heat then, you have time to let the pot cool enough to go into the fridge overnight, and a good start on bean soup for the next day.