Monday: Raw pasta sauce reprise

Ok, we just made raw pasta sauce recently, but heirloom tomato season is short and we like to make the most of it. (Especially this year - the late blight is still taking a toll.) As you can see, we added a little variety by throwing in a green salad mix that we picked up at YuNo Farm. We don't usually buy baby greens mixes, mostly not being salad people, but we liked this mix a lot - it contained fun things like baby red mustard greens and edible flowers.

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.

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.

Herbed rice with favas and zucchini-purslane soup....and butter!

Herbed rice with fava beans and zucchini-purslane soup.

Our friend Tom came in from out of town last night (because he happens to like New York) and he kindly joined us for dinner. The rice dish was somewhat like a pilaf, but baked, so that the herbs infused the surrounding rice with flavor. It contained dill, parsley, cilantro, and garlic scapes (our substitute for scallions), and we threw in some chopped walnuts at the end for added texture. Lizz picked up local summer squash at the Morningside Heights greenmarket to supplement last week's haul.

For dessert, Lizz also picked up some local blueberries. We were so enchanted with our discovery of last night that we planned to use our last quarter-cup of cream to make whipped cream for a topping. We supplemented it with a little bit of milkfat from the top of a nonhomogenized bottle. However, as Tom graciously whisked the cream with a little sugar, the mixture didn't seem to be reaching the same hard peaks stage we had seen the previous night. And then, in just a couple of seconds, it suddenly turned into THIS:



After we all got done exclaiming in shock and horror at the unexpected transformation, Lizz bravely took a taste, and suggested that perhaps we had just accidentally made butter. It seemed too good to be true that we would stumble on TWO different whipped dairy products within two days, but indeed, a little internet research confirmed that this actually IS how butter is made! If you continue whipping plain cream past the hard stage, it will in a matter of seconds fall out into butter and the thin buttermilk you see in the picture.

So we didn't have any whipped cream with our blueberries, but we were extremely pleased with the discovery nonetheless, and decided to incorporate it into the dessert in another way.



Blueberries with cinnamon toast....with homemade butter.

Wednesday: Double-mustard potato salad

Double-mustard potato salad with tuscan kale.

We've both always had an irrational fear of potato salads. (Perhaps this had its origins in seeing the mayonnaise-drenched mush that appeared at midwestern picnics.) We recently decided to conquer our fears by finding a potato salad recipe we could respect. This one is easy: the potatoes are chopped and boiled for fifteen minutes, and then tossed with dijon mustard, grainy mustard, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and basil. Weird, but it really works.