With the kids’ help, I decided on rice and miso soup as the basis for the meal, since everyone likes that, right? I built out from there, although just that is sufficient for the childy ones. Edamame (just a little), a salad (cabbage, greens, tomatoes, carrots, peas), very lightly pickled cucumbers, green beans with walnut dressing, and some portabella mushrooms, cooked with shoyu and sugar.

Pretty good, and we felt so healthy!

He requested cheesecake (which I never make, because I like cheesecake even less than I like regular cake). I made it yesterday, using a recipe from Epicurious for “Triple Cherry Cheesecake.” The triple cherries are dried cherries, frozen cherries, and cherry jam. Cherrylicious.

Then in the absence of a clear dinner request, I decided to make meat lasagna, since he always likes that. I’m using the bolognese recipe from Marcella Hazan’s book, and then will do kind of a combination of a classic lasagna with bechamel sauce, and one with ricotta. I’ll likely make a bechamel sauce, but then also put ricotta in. Maybe even some mozzarella.

Bread, salad, call it dinner.

Today, again, I had leftover rice + delicious smoked salmon (chunky, not flat) from New Seasons, and an egg, sprinkled with noriko.

Yum.

First: chopped one smallish yellow onion, from the garden. Heated a splash of vegetable oil with one slice of pepper bacon, medium heat, and sauteed the onion until it was soft. Then I added two chopped fresh tomatoes (garden, Black Krim – side note – if you ever want to know about all the varieties of heirloom tomatoes I’ve grown, let me know) and one clove of minced garlic (also garden). Let that cook for a few minutes, then I added three cans of black beans, which I’d drained and rinsed. Then, hmmm, about 10 chicken broth ice cubes. How much is that in cups? No idea. Maybe 2-3 cups. I did end up also adding about a cup of water to get the consistency I wanted. Added a teaspoon or so of adobo sauce (from canned chipotles). Covered it and let it simmer for about half an hour, once all the broth cubes were melted. I actually did not add any salt at all, because I figured that between the broth, the canned beans, and the bacon, we were salty enough. An odd thing – I was too lazy to peel the tomatoes before putting them in, because I knew that the skins would basically fall off during cooking. So I fished them out before blending. My sous-chef then removed the bacon and blended it all with the immersion blender. He also peeled eggs and grated cheese for the accompanying accompaniments.

On the side, a salad: lettuce (garden), fresh corn (garden), tomatoes (garden), avocados (not garden), toasted pepitas. Dressing of oil, lime juice, a bit of vinegar, chili powder.

The accoutrements for the soup included: hard-boiled eggs, tillamook medium cheddar, sour cream, lime wedges, chopped avocados, tomatillo salsa, and bacon.

I have a backlog of bad food photography (bad PHOTOS, not bad food) on my phone, but I’ll just ignore that. Some of it would be boring anyway: same old roast chicken, pesto pasta, black bean soup, blah, blah, blah.

Two noteworthy meals in the last week or so: first, our most recent Sunday dinner was excellent. Middle Eastern, with grilled lamb chops (chilled for a while with garlic and herbs), plus felafel with yogurt-tahini sauce,  pita and hummus, quinoa tabbouleh (that turned out very nice), black lentils and rice, and zucchini fritters with feta and mint.

We have finally arrived at something that approximates “summer” – no tomatoes, yet, but plenty of squash. What to do with squash is a dilemma every year. Honestly I don’t even like summer squash THAT much, but wow, it sure grows well. My sister makes a zucchini fritter recipe from Epicurious, with parmesan and bread crumbs. One of my cookbooks had a recipe with feta, mint, and dill, that was similar enough that I made a kind of amalgam of the two. It called for flour, but I used panko instead (a good binder for patty type things). No dill, because that’s gross. I might have put a bit of parsely in. My recipe called for cubed zucchini, cooked with onion, but I did more what the other recipe said: grate it, and drain for an hour with salt, then squeeze gently to get moisture out. No pre-cooking. Raw red onion, chopped small.

And it was very good.

The tabbouleh was basically a regular ol’ recipe, but with Peruvian red quinoa instead of bulgur. I used lots of parsley, and again, some mint. We have plenty of both in the garden. A cucumber, and all the cherry tomatoes we had, chopped fairly small. The dressing was what you’d expect: garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper. I like my tabbouleh to be not too grain-heavy, so I used less than 1/4 cup of uncooked quinoa. (Um, I mean, I did cook it before we ate it.)

I actually have a picture of this prodigious meal, but it turned out really yucky-looking, so I will spare you.

For lunch today I wanted something simple, but unfortunately it still took me about 45 minutes – leek and potato soup, plus a salad (lettuce and spinach from the garden, tomatoes, avocadoes, blue cheese). Nothing exciting, but good food.

For extra unhealthy oomph, I also toasted up two pieces of bread with lots of butter and three different kinds of cheese – manchego, mozzarella, and something else I couldn’t quite identify.

The kid-friendly version, unfortunately, is just scrambled eggs. Cooked carrots and broccoli (which we grew!) for the girl, raw carrots for the boy. Fortunately, we can cook the veggies quite simply by microwave.

The reason for the green garlic is that I failed to harvest some of the garlic last year (happens every year), and so I have these little clusters of garlic growing, a whole head in one place, when really the cloves should be separate. So I dug up a few and separated them (we’ll see), and then we just ate some that were too small.