Home and the Eating is Good

I got back home on Saturday and although I had a cold I needed to tend to (thank you Airborne, cold caps at night, and Tylenol now and then to make sure I didn’t get a fever), I was determined to use these last few days before treatment well.

I’m not anywhere near where I was physically a few weeks ago, so my real hope was to make some simple dinners for me and Steve and do my own harvesting (and just a wee wee bit of weeding) in the garden. I also got into work for 2 hours yesterday and did 2 hours of work online. Not too shabby.

The cold is almost entirely gone, and we have had some great eats. On Sunday night I pulled out a remaining jar of tomatoes and cooked up some sauce with green garlic (two bulbs that were growing too close to another so I pulled them early), garlic scapes, shallots, salt and olive oil. I was inspired by at NYTimes set of recipe suggestions (I can’t resist reading those) that talked about quick tomato sauce. She recommended cooking it only 10 minutes and using an immersion blender to turn it into sauce. Brilliant. But my pan was too shallow for the immersion blender, which is OK because we like it chunky. Pour over 3-cheese tortellini (frozen) and serve with a salad with radishes and the last of the year’s asparagus. So, so good to be home.

Last night I kind of pushed it, but I was glad I did. I was really craving cardamom rice for some reason– the kind in Jerusalem with chicken thighs. It is really not hard to make at all, and I had all the ingredients. I even took the time to carmelize the onions. And even though I couldn’t taste all the spices, it had a great texture and I could definitely smell it. Again, salad on the side. I am so in love with white balsamic vinegar, olive oil, mustard and lime juice as a dressing.

(Sorry, no pics of that meal– it was all I could do to harvest the dill and make the yogurt sauce at the end! But here’s a link to the recipe.)

There’s usually a gap in garden produce now– the lettuce we’ll have until it bolts in the heat, and in past years I’d have beets, too– until the zucchini kick in. But I’m lucky this year in that the peas are doing well. Peas are a total gamble in this area.  (Wait until next year when I employ my trusty greenhouse!)

I had to go downstairs and look at the seed packets to see which ones have the purple/pink flowers and which have the white (I can’t believe I was smart enough to write that down). I didn’t get any vines with white flowers (unless they are the very stunted ones at the end of the row). Those are the shell peas– hurrah! That means these purple flowers will soon turn into tender snow peas! And that will get us pretty darn close to zucchini season and green bean season.

Tomorrow I start my last round of treatment. Three more. Quite a happy countdown.