Tuesday: Spaghetti alla carbonara....sort of

"Spaghetti alla carbonara" with summer squash.

This recipe, from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, substitutes summer squash and an onion for the bacon or pancetta that gives spaghetti alla carbonara its artery-clogging goodness. Never fear, cholesterol lovers: this recipe still calls for some eggs and Parmesan, so we trust it's not TOO healthy.

Thursday: Barley salad

Pearl barley salad with summer squash and almonds.

This tasty grain salad actually included two types of summer squash: some left-over Cousas, as well as the shiny green "avocado" squash.  You can see the distinctly yellow flesh of the avocado squash in the picture above.  Up until now, we had really only used barley in soups, but we thought its chewy texture was nice here punctuated by crunchy red onions and toasted almonds.

Monday: Summer squash for a summer night

Yogurt with cousa squash.

In this World of the East recipe, Madhur Jaffrey directs you to cook shredded summer squash with onion and mustard seeds, and then stir the mixture into yogurt.  It's a bit like a large raita or a yogurt and cucumber soup - appropriate for a very hot day.

Monday: Summer squash pasta

Whole wheat pasta with summer squash-walnut sauce, topped with Parmesan.

This is another good example of how a pasta sauce can be made from basically any vegetable. Some frozen mixed summer squashes from our CSA were sauteed with a little olive oil and tossed with dried thyme and walnuts.

Wednesday: Less-than-photogenic zucchini soup

Zucchini soup.

This is a repeat of the Italian zucchini soup that we made (and loved) back in September. Here, we used frozen summer squash from Winter Sun Farms. The flavor was good, but somehow the photo did not quite do it justice. You'll just have to take our word for it.

Tuesday: Blast from the Past

Quesadilla filled with black beans, Monterrey Jack cheese, bell peppers, and summer squash.

Over five years ago, when your humble bloggers were just learning how to cook, we considered a cheese quesadilla to be an impressive feat. Today we went back to our roots and made these quesadillas with veggies from our frozen CSA, plus black beans. Simple, but satisfying.

Monday: Cod Stew

Cod stew with olives and capers, and Pecorino cheese melted on baguette.

Although we cook fish a few times a month, we don't typically incorporate it into more complicated dishes. Usually we just bake or broil a fillet and then put it on a plate with two neatly separated piles of starch and vegetable matter. But it was high time to branch out, so we decided to make this tomato-based cod stew. We both love dried salt cold, known as bacalao (or baccalà, bacalhau, etc), which is also wonderful in stews, but here we used fresh fish.

This stew combines cod, tomato, olive, and capers with lightly floured and fried zucchini/yellow summer squash. (We used the summer squash from our CSA!) The recipe comes from The Silver Spoon, a classic Italian cookbook.

Thursday: Step right up!

Frittata with bell pepper, zucchini and yellow summer squash, and pecorino cheese.

The frittata was nice, but that's not what we're here to talk about today. Get a load of the eggs below:



Yes - on top you see an egg that had TWO YOLKS. Two yolks, people! We understand more or less how that happened, but it's not something we had ever seen before. Kind of disturbing. Ate it anyway, though.

Friday: Cousa soup, special swine flu edition

Simple soup of Cousa squash, tofu and tomato.

We know we've been doing a lot of summer squash-tomato soup recently, but a warm soup sounded good to Giselle when she was sick, and those cute little Cousa squashes were begging to be used. Since we only had a little fresh tomato left, we actually flavored the broth of this soup by using tomato paste - not a bad method when you just want a tomato flavor to permeate your dish. We recommend buying tomato paste in tube form, which is how it's typically sold in Italian shops. Though you can buy it in little cans in every grocery store, it's hard to use a whole can at once, so the tubes make much more sense storage-wise.

Wednesday: Cranberry bean soup

An improvised late-summer soup of zucchini, red and yellow carrots, "cranberry" shell beans, tomato and scallion.

Yet more uses for summer squash

Usually there is a point at the end of the summer at which zucchini plants completely overrun the garden and overproduce their veggies, and everyone in the family gets sick of eating summer squash for dinner and desperately tries to give it away to neighbors. In any case, I recall that generally happening when I was growing up. Given our small New York apartment we don't have a garden nor the problem of overproducing zucchinis, but in honor of this summer tradition we decided to buy a bunch extra and make some good old-fashioned zucchini bread.

I imagine you can make this with other kinds of summer squashes, though I haven't ever tried - basically all quickbreads just call for adding a cup of grated, squeezed squash to the regular ingredients. This adds flavor and also moisture to the bread. You can make carrot bread, apple bread, and others in the same way.

Sunday lunch: Micro-coddled squash

Micro-coddled Pattypan squash with leftover eggplant salad with sesame dressing and baba ghanoush; yellow carrot sticks for dipping.

We had a few too many summer squashes, so we decided to reserve the two mini-Pattypans. Luckily we found this ridiculously cute recipe to use them in. First the Pattypans are cooked in the microwave until the flesh is tender enough to scoop out. Then a few slices of cheese are placed in the hollow, and an egg is cracked in. The squashes go back into the microwave for a few minutes, just until the egg white is solid.

We don't use our microwave for much except making tea, so this recipe was uncharacteristic for us, but it worked well. We've heard that some people make scrambled eggs in the microwave, so maybe that shouldn't have been a surprise...

Saturday dinner: Penne with summer squash

Penne with summer squash, tomato and parmesan. (And check out what the smoke did in the picture!!)

We got a nice assortment of summer squashes:



It was a very simple pasta recipe, but fresh and satisfying. Like most pasta sauces we cook, this recipe started with onion and garlic, but instead of chopping them up and starting with a saute, this recipe called for them to be halved, placed in the oil and allowed to sizzle gently for a few minutes. This gave the dish a different, less-developed onion flavor.

For dessert: Kefir-peach smoothies.



We bought kefir from Tonjes Farm at the greenmarket last week, on a whim. We did not, at the time, actually know what kefir was. As it turns out, kefir is a dairy product made with cow, goat or sheep's milk, which is inoculated with a specific culture and allowed to ferment. The resulting drink is somewhat like yogurt, but with a cheesier flavor. We didn't like it much plain, but blended with peach and some sugar it made a good smoothie. Like many things we eat, the recent macrobiotic craze has apparently been a boon for kefir, so if you keep an eye out you may find it at a grocery or farmstand near you.

Thursday: Zucchini Soup

Zucchini soup with tomato-Parmesan-egg broth.

We bought an Italian varietal of zucchini at the greenmarket on Saturday, which we believe is called Costata Romanesca. It was a behemoth, over a foot long (tomato for scale):


Was this the vegetable you saw, ma'am?

Although it's been a pretty soup-y week, we were intrigued by this recipe that we found in The Silver Spoon, a classic Italian cookbook recently translated into English. It's a fairly straightforward zucchini soup with a tomato broth, but at the end you remove the pot from the heat and add an egg beaten with grated Parmesan. It's almost like an egg-drop soup, but because the pot is off the heat when you add the egg mixture, you end up with a thickened broth instead of large filaments of egg.

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.

Monday: Stuffed Squash

Cousa squash stuffed with a mix of squash innards, quinoa, millet, chickpeas, dill, paprika, and Parmesan cheese. (Cousa is a Middle Eastern variety of summer squash.)

Thursday summer squash

Mixed summer squash sauteed with garlic scapes and dill with red quinoa and assorted cheeses (not pictured).