Finally, it is the end of summer. It has been long and hot. Though it’s not officially over if one consults a reliable calendar, the school busses have been trundling down the street again, the Labor Day parties are over and we can rudely entertain the notion of shocking the old-school thinkers as we still wear our white jeans and tennis shoes well into the fall. I probably need a better outlet for my misperceived misbehaving.
Congratulations must ring out for the Chestertown Farmers’ Market, placing third in the state for America’s Favorite Farmers Markets! https://action.farmland.org/site/PageServer?pagename=top_5#MD
How very proud you all must feel! We hope you have had an equally rewarding summer season of growing and harvesting. Everything was quite beauteous at the market. There was always something lovely to see. Nothing can compare with a gleaming mound of deeply purple, glistening eggplant, or the towering pyramids of fragrant and oddly-shaped heirloom tomatoes.
We turned the oven on last night, but only for about half an hour. I still need to take baby steps, coming back into the kitchen after a summer of hedonism and swiftly prepared and barely-cooked foods. We tried this scrumptious tomato dish last night, accompanied by a comfortingly warm and fragrant yeasty loaf of French bread and some chilled and delicious cheap white wine, our favorite house wine. https://food52.com/blog/4369_sarah_leah_chases_scalloped_tomatoes
It was easy peasy and cleared out the bowl of week-old tomatoes, as well as trimming back the basil farm a little bit. I only needed to run out for the bread and some new Parmesan cheese. It was a little skimpy to be an entrée, but as an appetizer it could not be beat. And if I used olive oil and not bacon fat, it would be suitable for our pescatarian, too. It was like crustless pizza, with the croutons and brown-baked Parmesan adding a frisson of crunch. I can see serving it at room temp to be a bruschetta-like spread for our next casual-but-oh-so-elegant cocktail party…
The abundance of tomatoes in everyone’s garden is a little laughable right now. (Though sharing tomatoes not as endemic a pastime as shiftily hauling secret piles of zucchini to silently dump on friends’ porches under the cover of night…) Folks proudly present bowlfuls, armfuls, plastic tote bags full, brown cardboard deli containers full, sand buckets full and L.L. Bean canvas totes full of tomatoes hunted and gathered in far-flung and tomato-rich parts of the country. Last weekend I ate tomatoes from Florida, Cape Cod, the grocery store and from gardens in Trumbull and Shelton, Connecticut. We had tomatoes in salads, in sandwiches, and salted, eaten out of our grimy little fists. It has been a fine year for tomatoes.
And soon it will be time to fire up the stove and get those tomatoes ready for sauces and stews and other comforting foods to warm the cockles of our chilly little hearts. Fall is coming. I have seen birds heading south. The crazy robins are getting ready for their fall travel season. Today I saw a small gathering of ducks standing around an ankle-deep puddle near the high school football field. I think they were comparing GPS routes on their iPhones. Surely there is an app for that.
Here are three transition recipes to ease you back into the kitchen- make summer last as long as you can!
1:https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/jamie-at-home/the-mothership-tomato-salad-recipe/index.html
3: https://mamasgottabake.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/heirloom-tomato-tart/
“There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!”
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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