Sunday: raw pasta sauce

Pasta with raw heirloom tomato-basil sauce.

This may not be a great year for tomatoes, because late blight (the same fungus that caused the Irish potato famine way back when) got a foothold in the U.S. during the cold and rainy beginning to the summer. The big box stores, which rely on very few plant suppliers, actually contributed to the spread of the fungus by selling blighted plants from those suppliers all over the country.

In any case, heirloom tomatoes have finally arrived, so we took advantage of their wonderful flavor in this raw pasta sauce. It has to be one of the easiest meals we ever cook: you just chop up a couple cups of tomatoes, throw them in a bowl with a couple tablespoons olive oil and a few peeled cloves of garlic, and add about a quarter to a half cup of chopped basil. Let it sit a couple of minutes for maximum flavor.

The basil pictured here is "bush basil," a varietal with attractive tiny leaves, but any basil works well.

Saturday night pizza

Homemade pizza with broiled eggplant, fennel, mozzarella, Parmesan, and anchovies.

Making pizza dough at home is surprisingly easy, if you allow enough time in advance for the dough to rise. We've made pizza on a few occasions now, but we hadn't done anything more exotic than tomato-basil-mozzarella-anchovy. Tonight, we decided to branch out, using our first eggplants of the year:



Aren't they beauts? Eggplants are in the nightshade family (solanaceae), along with tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes. Like its siblings, eggplant seems prone to hybridize -- or, at least, there are a mind-boggling number of varietals available.

Here's a shot of a pizza ready to go in the oven, with some dough resting in the background:

Saturday picnic lunch

A friend of ours was dogsitting, so we headed out to Morningside Park today for some idyllic doggie picnic time. The sandwiches we brought were made with fresh bread from the greenmarket, Vivace Bambino cheese, grainy mustard, lemon cukes, and purple radish sprouts.

The bean salad incorporated the first sweet peppers we've bought this year:



Lemon cukes, besides being yellow and lemon-shaped, do actually taste a bit less grassy and more lemon-like than an average cucumber. They have a nice dense consistency, whiteish flesh, and their seeds are surrounded by neon green jelly. Here is a lemon cuke looming ominously before the peppers:



Our white bean salad included the diced sweet peppers, minced shallot, garlic scapes, cilantro, parsley, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and lemon juice.

Farmer's Market Haul, 8/1/09

Only half as much stuff as usual this week, since on Thursday we'll be heading to Iceland...!

VEGGIES:
heirloom tomatoes (first of the year!!)
curly mustard greens
eggplant (purple)
Tokyo turnips
lemon cucumbers
flat-leaf parsley
cilantro
bush basil

FRUIT:
peaches
plums (3 kinds)
blueberries

OTHER:
milk from Milk Thistle Farm
yogurt from Milk Thistle Farm
whole wheat sourdough bread
Vivace Bambino cheese from Cato Corner Farm

Friday cat blogging

Friday: Something quick

Angel hair pasta with pesto.

We got home late and we were starving, so we wanted to cook something fast. Luckily, we had some leftover pasta in the fridge that just needed a sauce - and we still had some basil that a nice guy at the farmer's market threw in for free last week.

Farmer's Market Supplement, 7/30/09

We make our main grocery run on Saturdays, but sometimes we need to pick up something extra to get through the week. Luckily, there's a greenmarket on Broadway, outside the Columbia campus, on Thursdays.

This week, I picked up a pint of local strawberries, which we had for dessert Thursday evening. (Sorry, no picture -- they didn't last long enough.)