My menu is all over the place this week — some meals I can cook without a recipe, like comfort food favorite spaghetti and meatballs. But I’m also trying a couple of new vegetarian dishes, one based on white beans and the other on chickpeas.
Still, I am most excited about the baking I have planned. I’m trying Ina Garten’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake to take to a morning event early in the week. Then I plan to test out Chewy Butterscotch Graham Cookies, but I’ll use toffee chips instead of butterscotch. I am participating in a holiday cookie swap at the end of the month, so I need to figure out what I’m bringing. I may make a batch of Martha Stewart’s Pretzel-Shortbread Bars, as well, since I think they’d make a unique contribution to the swap instead. Either way, I need to make small batches before I decide which sweet will be multiplied to 6 dozen.
No picture this week, as J. grabbed our share just minutes before we headed out to our first Rosh Hashana dinner last Wednesday.
However, we had some good news from our farm: a large island of vegetables in the middle of an otherwise flooded field (from Irene) was cleared by a Cornell Cooperative Extension agent for harvesting, since they had remained uncontaminated by flood waters. The produce in that island includes cilantro, greens, arugula, salad mix, and head lettuce which will now reappear in our share.
We received 3 onions, 1 bulb of garlic, 3 huge beefsteak tomatoes, 6 plum tomatoes, 1 bowl of beets (no greens), a small bowl of salad mix, a small bowl of arugula, 1 bunch of chards, a small handful of cilantro, and 1 basket of green beans.
These beets are huge! I boiled half of them so we could use them in salads, and then wound up giving a couple to my mom to take home. Thankfully, both J. and I like beets a lot, because we’re going to be eating them for a while. The chard was absolutely gorgeous, and I’d planned on sauteing it, but J. has been adding it to his smoothies instead. J. also blended the cilantro into a vinaigrette that we used on Rosh Hashana, which made a beautiful light green dressing for a tomato and sweet corn salad.
The recipe for this Roasted Eggplant & Red Pepper Dip (or spread) comes from the beautiful blog The Cilantropist, and I am not surprised the author says it is one of her favorite foods to make in the summer.
I followed the recipe as written, except that I doubled the quantities of everything but the oil — I kept that at a third of a cup in the doubled recipe. I did have to puree the dip in two batches, as my Cuisinart couldn’t handle all of it at once. That gave me an opportunity to go a little heavier on the tomato paste in one batch, and lighter in the other — the one with less tomato paste was better, with more of the roasted eggplant flavor shining through.
I knew this spread would be a hit with my mother-in-law, who adores eggplant, but it went over well with all of the adults in my extended family. We ate outside on a hot night, smoothing this creamy, tangy spread over bagels. I served hard-boiled eggs and a salad made from romaine lettuce, marinated onions, feta, and sliced beets, too. It was indeed a perfect summer meal.
Do you check the weather forecast before you plan your meals for the week? I’ve always built my dinner plan around our activities schedule, but this week I was derailed by a couple of near-100° F days where I’d planned oven-baked meals. Not only were we not in the mood for those hot dishes, I could not have handled turning on the oven.
This week should be a little more seasonally correct — high 70s and low 80s. I can handle an oven in those temperatures. I’m repeating several dishes this week that we didn’t make last week.
I'm Dara, the Chick in the Kitchen. Living in the suburbs of Manhattan with my two school-aged boys and husband. Feeding my family something more diverse than a different shape of pasta each night. Read more about me and CITK, and keep in touch:
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Cheesy Kale Crisps: We rarely eat kale now that our farm share is over, and I want to fix that. I've wanted to try using nutritional yeast, and this recipe looks like a tasty way to do it.
I'm Dara, the Chick in the Kitchen. Living in the suburbs of Manhattan with my two school-aged boys and husband. Feeding my family something more diverse than a different shape of pasta each night. Read more 
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