Hot futures

Oops...wrote this Wednesday and forgot to post it. I was waiting for a photo that never materialized.

The season's first plums today pointed forward to the arrival of all the stonefruit - peaches, nectarines, apricots, more plums - and the pie/crumble/cobbler-baking and jam marathons on the horizon. Luckily my love for peaches makes the prospect less daunting than thrilling. Also spotted today for the first time: corn on the cob. Can limas be far behind? Succotash, here I come!

Fruit-crazy:
2 lbs. cherries
1 pint raspberries
1 quart Tri-star strawberries
1 pint heirloom cherry tomatoes
1 bunch lacinato kale
3 heads celery
2 bunches carrots
2 lbs. yellow onions
1 lb. sugar snap peas
1 lb. shell peas
1 1/2 lb. mixed green & wax beans
1 head Romaine lettuce
2 heads garlic
3/4 lb. crimini mushrooms
Total spent: $65

Celery, carrots, and onions are simmering on the stove right now for vegetable stock. Local celery tends to be quite tough and leafy compared to the juicy and luscious California-grown stuff in Whole Foods, but it's also more flavorful - great for stock, not so much for the photo assistant's lunch snacks. But he can handle it.

No special plans for any of this, beyond giving myself a stomachache eating berries.

Pickle progress: The Kirbies went into the crock Sunday with their seasonings and brine, and they're already looking quite pickled. Waiting 2+ weeks is going to be really tough - the brine smells incredible!

Delicious stir-fry sauce; plum updates

Last night I was craving spicy green beans a la San Francisco's amazing House Of Nanking, so I improvised. Of course, they didn't hold a candle to the originals, but they were certainly salty, spicy, and delicious. They were so good that I wrote down the stir-fry sauce recipe for once:

Spicy garlicky stir-fry sauce for green beans (and tofu)
Enough for two green-bean-loving people

4 tbsp. vegetable broth
2-3 tbsp. tamari soy sauce
1-2 tsp. chili garlic sauce (I used about 2 and they were on fire!)
2 cloves garlic
about 1/2 tsp. cornstarch

Mix everything up in a little bowl with a fork. Start sauteeing your beans whole on medium-high, then add half the sauce when they're halfway done. Add the rest just when they're tender enough, and stir until everything's coated and sauce is thickened, about 5 seconds (seriously). Serve over LOTS of rice with many iced drinks on the side. You can also use this sauce for tofu, but you can figure out how to do that on your own.

In plum news, the lovely big Shiro plums were...well...still plums. I am afraid I'm doomed to disappointment by most plums. The combination of super-tart skin and extremely mild, sweet interior flesh is just not for me. I wish I could find the Green Gage plums from last year! Sigh.

Also, in only tangentially-related news (because they are only tangentially vegetables), Snapea Crisps are now available at Trader Joe's, which basically means all my meals are going to be spoiled by snacking from here on out.

Green vs. purple plums

People with luxuriant amounts of counter space have big, lovely, ceramic fruit bowls, which display the season's bounty to maximum effect. However, were I to allot so much space (12"+ in diameter!) to fruit, we would have to consider it a third roommate and charge rent accordingly. Instead, my fruit bowl is a Texas commemorative plate, which is luckily just the right size to hold these lovely Shiro plums.


I had to stop when the bags got too full:
5 ears corn
1 lb. "golden nugget" potatoes
1 pint heirloom cherry tomatoes
1 bunch rainbow chard
4 zucchini
1 lb. shell peas
1.5 lbs. green and yellow beans
1.5 lbs. peaches
1 lb. nectarines
1 lb. Shiro plums
Total spent: $44

Tonight I'm planning a multi-course dinner to use up the most perishable of my purchases: first will be corn on the cob, then tomato and goat cheese salad with salt and pepper, then for the main course, a plain omelet (using local eggs), peas, and roasted potatoes. I can't wait!

Hopefully the pretty golden Shiro plums will be more satisfying than the purple variety have been. I've expressed my dissatisfaction with regular plums in the past, and last year the only plums I liked were Green Gage, which have been absent from USG thus far this season.

As I feared, this week cherries were, for my purposes, gone: a few stands still had a limited supply, but they were mostly mushy and mottled, not worth sorting through. Peaches are still gathering momentum, but apricots, too, seem to be waning, but luckily nectarines have just started showing up. However, I haven't found an east coast nectarine that can compare to a good peach...

Otherwise, my week's purchases are pretty standard: green beans for blanching and serving plain or for stir-frying, zucchini for dicing and steaming in pasta salad (and stir-frying, I suppose), chard for putting in everything possible. Next week I have to remember to buy two bunches, since the kale has been really tough lately, and spinach is nowhere to be seen. I should experiment with other greens, but I have had some unlucky results with collards that make me hesitant. Maybe I can get some baby bok choy or tat soi next week. The lovely legumes have distracted me from my greens so far this summer.

Love hurts

It seems that the cherry season this year has been terribly short; it seems like only a week or two ago I was enjoying my first summertime cherries, and now they're already obviously on the wane. Strawberries disappeared all at once, but cherries are slowly fading - fewer USG vendors this week than last, and fewer next week, and soon they'll be totally gone, along with sugar snap peas, which are also past their prime. I feel winter creeping into my bones already!...and yet, it's mid-July.

Today's nevertheless-lovely harvest:

1 lb. cherries
1/2 lb. apricots
1/2 lb. plums (little purple ones, not sure what variety)
4 peaches
1 lb. sugar snap peas
1 1/2 lbs. green and yellow beans
1 lb. shell peas
1 bunch rainbow chard
3 zucchini
2 cousa squash
5 ears bicolor corn
1 pint orange heirloom cherry tomatoes
Total spent: $42

The tomatoes are delicious - as my photo assistant said while enjoying them with goat cheese, salt, and pepper, they're "outrageous" - and the little cherry tomato size is somehow less intimidating than the big ones, which I'm afraid will go bad before I can use them. The tinies are easy to snack on during every trip to the kitchen, which is good since I won't refrigerate them and they'll only last a couple of days in our hot lair.

Corn on the cob is quite a good consolation for the loss of earlier-summer crops - it's getting sweeter every week. There are already two husked ears in the steamer for dinner tonight, along with my favorite cherry tomato preparation, named above, and some squash and tofu sauteed together with garlic and spices, over rice.

I couldn't resist the green and yellow beans; I bought them from the same organic vendor I got them from last week, and they were delicious, and so versatile. They'll be blanched and served cold and salted in lunches, chopped into 1" pieces and added to pasta salads, stir-fried, and probably other ways I haven't imagined yet.

My fingers are crossed that the peaches will turn out better than the last ones I had; these are from the orchard I bought most of my peaches from last year, so I'm hoping they'll be as flavorful. I've already tasted a few of the plums and I'm experiencing my usual "blah" feeling about them; perhaps the Shiro and green gage varieties will be more to my liking, as they were last year.

I also bought some non-produce: goat cheese from Lynnhaven Farm (wonderful!), and fantastic basil pesto from an herb vendor. It's the second time I've bought the pesto - you get about 1 cup for $5, which lasts through lots of pasta salad servings - and it's really wonderful. I haven't made my own because I don't have a food processor... and I'm happy to buy it from the cute young couple who run the herb stand.

This morning I went to the USG about half an hour earlier than usual, as I had to get home early to go to the Sunburn Siren Festival, and it seemed more crowded than when I'm normally there. I wonder if there are more people who show up for the market's 8 a.m. opening than are there at around 9:30 or 10...before it gets crazily-crowded with regular folks around 11 or noon. I'm thinking of trying to get there when it opens one of these Saturdays, to see if I can get it on any extremely special, sells-out-immediately, produce...or perhaps that's a myth?

Just my luck

Of course all my plums ripened at the same time. After the tragic loss of two peaches to some sort of gross fuzzy mold thing, I have been longing for some fresh fruit for dessert...and now I've got it tenfold. The "yellow egg" plums are tasty - not superior like the Green Gage, but still very flavorful. Good thing, too, since I have five of them to eat with lunch!

How can I miss you if you don't go away?

Back to the dear, dear USG today after weeks of questionable eating. But while in Cali, I had some really delicious strawberries and pluots (sexy hybrids like that never make it eastward, it seems), as well as all the ripe, buttery avocadoes I wanted, which was lots.


I came home with:
4 "Early Golden" apples
2 Macintosh apples
2 zucchini
1/2 lb. yellow snap beans
1 1/2 lb. green beans
3 peaches
1 lb. "Yellow Egg" plums
2 ears yellow corn
3 tomatoes
2 Poblano peppers
1 Anaheim chile
1 lb. fingerling potatoes
Total spent: about $30

The peppers will go in a pot of black beans, the tomato, corn, and zucchini will comprise another (late-)summer saute, and I'll roast the potatoes in the oven with olive oil and salt (as the sign over the bin recommended). I usually try to avoid the simple starches, but the potato vendor had so many beautiful varieties that I couldn't resist, and it was easy to choose fingerlings of the same size for even roasting.

I'll boil the green beans quickly with salt, and keep them cold for lunches, as a substitute for edamame (we eat quite enough soy in this family) - and, of course, the apples will be slices for lunch. The Early Goldens are absolutely my favorite - so crisp and sweet-tart! - so I hope they stay around for awhile...but I'm going to try a different variety also each week.

The plums were a total gamble - I have no idea what they'll be like, but their color was similar to my beloved Green Gage plums, so I went for it. You'd think my spotty plum history would advise caution in this type of decision, but I was still dizzy with joy at my return to the greenmarket when I hit the Red Jacket Orchards stand. The yellow snap beans were $6/lb., but I couldn't resist getting a few - and, once again, the boy who sold 'em to me was a bright-eyed cutie of about 22. What is it with snap beans and good-looking boys?

I was so wrong!

I take back everything I said about you, plums. These Green Gage plums are so delicious. Forgive me!!!

Beets: they're what's for dinner

...or are they?



Today, I was on a budget:
1 bunch beets
4 peaches
5 Ginger Gold apples
1/2 lb. apricots
1/2 lb. Green Gage plums
3 ears white/bicolor corn
4 small zucchini
Total spent: $19

The apples are delicious, like last week's (but they're not the same type) - sweet-tart, crisp, perfect in slices - and I loaded up on them for lunches next week. And as promised, I am re-trying plums, this time with Green Gage, apparently the "plum of royalty" or something; we'll see if they live up to the hype.

Beets are the real experiment. I've never really eaten them on their own, or as the main ingredient in a dish. I've found a lot of ideas from Recipezaar, but from what I've read, baked beets are the way to go to really enjoy them - and that requires 1-2 hours of baking in a 400-degree oven. Today's not really a 400-degree-oven type of day, and for a few hours? Yikes. So do I suck it up and boil them? Or do I wait until a more oven-friendly evening? We'll see. Perhaps it will cool down 30 degrees tonight, and I can try 'em out.

Otherwise, a pretty pedestrian trip to USG. I did run into some friends, which made me seem a little less crazy for getting up early to shop for produce. But since Jeremy is going to be out of town most of the week (and since I'm broke), I couldn't go on as many interesting tangents as usual. The real tragedy was having to ignore the heirloom tomatoes this week - one stand had about 10 different varieties, all arrayed beautifully, labeled with their evocative variety names. Maybe next week!

Quick thoughts

Shelling peas is a lot of work, but seems worth it. We had fresh peas and the remaining baby Yukon Gold potatoes in a Spanish omelet with saffron (recipe from A Year In A Vegetarian Kitchen) - so delicious. And the leftovers were perfect cold for lunch the next day.

I don't think I "get" plums. My mom has always been a serious plum advocate, but I don't think they do it for me. The Shiro plums I bought were ripe, but the flesh was only slightly sweet and a little perfumey, with super-tart skin that forced my face into a comical pucker. To varying degrees, most of my plum memories are the same. Maybe they're just not for me. I'd rather have peaches.

Tricolor snap beans were just as delicious as I imagined, but like so many other veggies, the purple beans turned a disappointing dark green when cooked. I blanched them, then roasted them in a 375-degree oven with a little olive oil and salt for about 7 minutes. They still had some crunch - which is what I wanted, in order to highlight their freshness and sweetness. Despite the color change, they impressed my dinner guests last night. I hope they're available again!

We've been eating lots of spinach lately, and that coupled with my love for fresh green salads (rather than the bagged kind), makes me want to suck it up and invest in a salad spinner. They seem really dumb to me, but I might just need it. We'll see.