If you already know why you should know how to make soup stock, you can skip this first paragraph and go on to the soup rhapsodizing beneath it.

OK, now that I’ve culled the cognoscenti, let me make a quick case for one of the best ways to save money, make good use of every last bit of food you’ve paid for, and make great soup. AND make the house smell like you imagined your grandmother’s home should have smelled and didn’t. Stock. Yes, you can buy it in boxes these days, but buying it should be a choice based on time and energy constraints, not because you don’t know how to make your own.  Soup stock in the freezer is like money in the bank. Chicken, meat – what remains of a ham bone, beef roast or shank, lamb shoulder, chicken or turkey or duck carcass, whatever — fish, and vegetable stock all make use of the last stalk of celery, a single carrot, half an onion, a few seasonings, and water. Leftovers that might be thrown out (or composted, which could bring me to another mini-rant, but won’t).   Freeze stock in pint containers (be sure to label them) and you can come home, pull out one or two, put it into a pot set on low to defrost while you pull a few things out of the frig to add – a potato and some cheese, peppers and leftover rice, a can of beans and some garlic and parsley and a squeeze of lemon. In no time flat, you have a real meal that costs, depending on ingredients, as little as a buck or two for a couple of people. (We’re not including in either the ‘people’ category or the financial equation growing teenage boys, who are voracious and need food that upholsters their insides for more than an hour.). OK, think it over. There’s a link below that will give you something of a soup stock tutorial.

Now, for the soups. Soup not only makes terrific use of leftovers and stretches your dollar, but is virtuous too since it can help to edit the waistline as it fills you up without being heavily caloric. Additionally, it usually offers about half of your daily recommended veggie requirement in one go.

Fall (once we’re through our current Amazon Forest Period) is soup time. It’s the homey, turn-of-the-season, days-closing-in warmth we’ve been longing for in our imaginations since the dog days and those 100-degree temps. And right now there’s still a variety of fresh local ingredients available at the farmers’ market and coming out of unruly season’s-end gardens.

Mulligatawny with an apple and the last of the tomatoes, which never taste quite right after August. Oxtail, gumbo, boullabaisse, split pea, albondigas with pork and beef meatballs, stracciatella, an Italian egg drop soup that you can make in about 10 minutes and throw in some kale or spinach for greenery, harvest corn chowder with bacon, Scotch broth with barley, oyster stew with thyme and sautéed onions, clam chowder, salmon and potato chowder, duck and tortilla soup, green bean and bacon with orzo and herbs, minestrone, Thai shrimp and noodles, old-fashioned chicken noodle.

For the vegetarians: Roasted sweet potato soup with poblanos, peasant lentil vegetable, leek and potato, Ghanian peanut soup, vegetarian minestrone, Swiss cheese and onion, Hungarian mushroom (you can use tamari sauce to add the kind of umami flavor that a beef stock imparts), vegetable chowder, cauliflower with mushrooms and stilton, creamy roasted parsnip, carrot and turnip with aged Edam, Gumbo Z-Herbes, eggplant and mushroom with sautéed sweet pepper, Tuscan bean with tomatoes and kale, roasted tomato-and-onion – the fresh tomatoes may not taste like much this time of year, but roast them on a cookie sheet for about an hour at low heat along with an onion and you have something sweet and magical. It’s great pureed for pasta sauce, and is a lovely coulis with broiled salmon slathered in curried mustard.

For  Rosh Hashanah, which begins today: artichoke potato, beef and barley, chicken with matzo balls, creamy sweet potato, Hungarian vegetable and more.

Sometimes, it’s just a help to meander through cookbooks or the internet with the ingredients you have on hand looking for new combinations to try.

Here are some options.

Mexican Squash Soup

2 tblsp butter or olive oil

1 small onion, chopped

¼ cup chopped celery

¼ cup sweet pepper, chopped

4 cups chicken or vegetable stock

1 dried red Mexican chili or 1 fresh Serrano or other hot pepper to taste, whole or omit.

1 ½ cups peeled, diced winter squash (acorn, hubbard, butternut, etc)

1 cup frozen or fresh corn

Melt butter or heat oil in saucepan. Sauté vegetables until soft, about 5 minutes. Add stock and bring to boil. Add squash and simmer until tender.

Roasted Sweet Potato and Poblano

2 sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed

1 tblsp smoked paprika

1 tblsp chili powder

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp salt

1 tsp pepper

2 tblsp olive oil

1 shallot minced

1 med poblano, chopped

1 tblsp olive oil

4 cups chicken stock or 4 cups water and a large chicken bullion cube

3 tblsp fresh cilantro

Toss cubed potatoes with spices and olive oil. Roast on a cookie sheet at 325 for about 3o minutes or until semi-tender.  Sauté shallot (or onion) and pepper in olive oil until onion is translucent and some of the peppers have some browned edges.  Put all into a soup pot with stock or water and bullion and simmer for about 15 minutes. Puree with a hand blender or cool a bit before putting it into the blender.  To serve, top with chopped fresh cilantro.

Minestrone

½ lb meaty bacon

3 tblsp olive oil

2 carrots, chopped

1 turnip, chopped

2 onions, chopped

2 ribs celery, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

3 large tomatoes or 1 15-oz tin chopped tomatoes with juice

1 cup green beans, chopped

½  cup sweet pepper. diced

3 tblsp fresh oregano, minced

3 tblsp fresh parsley, minced

1 15-oz. can cannellini beans or 2 cups of dried beans that have been plumped and simmered until al dente

1 cup elbow macaroni

7-8 cups beef stock

salt and pepper to taste

Use a large heavy pot for this – enameled iron works well. Heat olive oil in pot while you slice bacon into inch-long pieces. Sauté in hot olive oil until crisp-ish. If there is too much fat in the pan, spoon some out. (You can also substitute ham if you don’t want bacon.). Meanwhile, cube/dice the carrots turnip, onions, celery and add to the hot fat/oil.  Sauté for about 10 minutes until starting to brown slightly on edges. Add garlic and sauté for another minute. Then add tomatoes, sweet pepper, green beans, herbs and stock. If using plumped dried beans, add them now.  Simmer for about 40 minutes. Add canned beans and macaroni. Cook, stirring to keep things from sticking on the bottom for about 15 minutes or until pasta is done. You may need to add liquid by this point; this soup is thick.  Serve with crusty garlic bread and robust red wine.*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_(food)

https://allrecipes.com/Recipe/mulligatawny-soup-i/detail.aspx

https://www.care2.com/greenliving/peasant-lentil-vegetable-soup.html

https://allrecipes.com/Recipe/african-peanut-soup/detail.aspx

https://www.thehungrywife.com/appetizers/vegetable-chowder-recipe/

https://www.marthastewart.com/318061/vegetable-chowder

https://glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.com/2008/10/roasted-vegetable-chowder.html

https://www.cook-book.com/recipes/harvest_corn_chowder_bacon.html

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Gumbo-Zherbes-with-Red-Beans-14272

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Duck-Tortilla-Soup-234250

Kosher soups:

https://kosherfood.about.com/od/koshersouprecipes/Kosher_Soup_Recipes.htm

https://www.kosherdelight.com/Soups.shtml

*This is my last Sunday Cooking column for the ChestertownSpy and TalbotSpy.  But I’m sure it won’t be the last word from either Spies about food. Thanks to you all.

Originally they were called crockpots, but now they’re most often called slow-cookers.  And what a boon they are! They came into vogue about 30-odd years ago when women were leaving the house to work all day, and yet were still expected (as most still are) to come up with a wholesome, nourishing, delicious meal when the rest of the clan crashes through the door. (Yeah, well. If it were easy, anyone could do it.).

A crockpot is a big help on that score. The beauty of a crockpot, especially the most recent incarnations, is they do everything but throw the ingredients into the pot for you. One advertises that you can set the cook time to anything from 30 minutes to 20 hours, so you could stuff a pot roast into the thing while the dog is doing his last round of the bushes, go to bed and arrive home the next evening after work to dinner. Some are programmable so they turn themselves down or off and let you know how long they’ve been set that way. (I have crockpot envy; mine is ancient and manual.). Either way, you end up with a real meal — not a microwaved plastic tray, not a bag of chips and dip (however tempting that may be sometimes), not another pizza or bag full of cholesterol and carbs, but supper. Real food. AND the removable stoneware interior goes into the dishwasher, so cleanup is easy, too.

Since school has started, along with the attendant after-school sports, extra-curricular stuff, evening PTA meetings, et. al., it’s even more important to eat well and get enough sleep.  Pizza three times a week alternating with fast food is not eating well. A crockpot full of rib-sticking soup or a stew with vegetables is.

Crockpots and slow cookers hark back centuries to the iron stew pot hanging on the trammel arm over the fire all day. The wife/cook/tallest kid would give it a stir now an again, maybe add some water or cider or small beer – often homemade — and by the time everyone came in from the fields or the barn drooping from hunger, there was something satisfying to enjoy together and sustain the fam through the next day’s onslaught. Some clever women even made breads in it, or added drop biscuits to the stew toward the end so you really did have a one-pot meal.

I’ve heard of people using the crockpot for anything from cakes to dips to lasagna, which is possible I’m sure, though it sounds like you’d end up with gummy pasta, and since I’ve not tried it, I won’t recommend it here. However, it’s great for roasts, stews, soups and chili with whatever meat you have available –the sort of things you’d have put into the iron pot over the trammel arm. Just the kind of food autumn calls for — butternut squash soup with chicken broth, apples, and onions that you stick on low in the morning before you leave and come home to in the evening. Minestrone with fully cooked sausage (you can add the pasta when you get home), the slow cooker equivalent of baked beans, coq au vin. Visigoths in your life want red meat?  Cassoulet with beef or lamb shanks — economical, delicious and filling. Or stuff in a roast, a tin of tomatoes, an onion, garlic, red wine, beef broth, maybe a few herbs – honestly, this takes all of 10 minutes – set it and go.  There are links to a variety of things below, but one of my favorites is Sarah Bowers’s pulled pork.  Sarah, who works at the family’s cafe, barVino in New York, often makes it for parties and we all battle for the tongs until someone scrapes out the last bit with a crust of bread.

Sarah’s Easy-as-Pie Crockpot Pork

1 large boneless pork loin, though pork shoulder works very well too.

2 large yellow onions, quartered

2 bottles of dark beer, brown ale, porter or stout

salt and pepper

Barbeque sauce – homemade or store-bought

Choose a pork cut based on the capacity of your crockpot.  The pork should pretty much pack in with room for liquid and onions. Salt and pepper the pork and cover with 1 ½ -2 bottles of quality dark beer, brown ale, porter or stout. Stuff in the onion quarters. Make sure the liquid more than covers the meat and veg. Slow cook on low for about 7 or 8 hours (Sarah usually starts at night because she’s something of a night owl, and takes it off in the morning), or cook it on medium-high for around 4 hours, which is great for a Sunday evening meal. If you leave it all day on low, use both bottles of beer. “I check on the pork and make sure liquid is covering it,” she says. “Sometimes I flip it over if the top looks dry.” If you use a pork shoulder, there will be more fat than with a loin. Sarah leaves it on and skims excess after it’s cooked.

The pork is done when you can take a fork and shred it without much effort.  Remove pork and place on large cutting board. With two large forks shred the meat.  Drain the remaining liquid into a glass bowl or saucepan.  Put the shredded meat back into the crockpot.  Mix equal parts of your favorite barbeque sauce (Sarah makes her own – kind of sweet, spicy, but not smoky) and the drained roasting liquid. Serve on yeasty small rolls with some diced white onion and cole slaw on the side.

https://crockpot365.blogspot.com/2010/01/enchilada-chicken-chili.html

https://crockpot365.blogspot.com/2010/02/slow-cooker-carnitas-recipe.html

https://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,2212,154178-232202,00.html

https://family.go.com/food/recipe-cp-629852-asian-beef-with-mandarin-oranges-t/

https://family.go.com/food/recipe-cp-786778-ham-split-pea-soup-t/

https://family.go.com/food/recipe-cp-630085–wild-mushroom-beef-stew-t/

https://family.go.com/food/recipe-cp-787167-louisiana-gumbo-t/

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/baked-slow-cooker-chicken/detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/onion-elk-roast-stroganoff/detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/shredded-tri-tip-for-tacos-in-the-slow-cooker/detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/slow-cooker-shredded-venison-for-tacos/detail.aspx

Goodbye strawberries and melons. Hello fall fruits – plums, apples, pears.  Fall is nearly upon us, and with it we turn the corner on how we cook if we’re doing the seasonal/local thing. Fall fruits – plums, pears and apples in particular — lend themselves to cobblers and tarts, crumbles, steamed puddings (very British), quick breads and betties (a fruity variation on bread pudding for the uninitiated). All spend a fair amount of time in the oven, a welcome thing when the weather turns cool.

Apples and pears keep longer than summer fruits. Apples, of course, store, which makes them good fresh fruits for winter, and pears can be picked unripe and will ripen in time off the tree, so they are pretty long-lasting in the frig, too. Plums, though, are best picked when ripe or nearly ripe and used fairly quickly, which is not hard when you can add them to salads, stick lots into plum bread pudding*  and shove them fresh into a roasting pan around a chicken along with onions and sage and some white wine. Stew some for a quick, nourishing and delicious breakfast with yogurt, an after-school snack topped with granola, or dessert drizzled with cream or enrobed — a favorite food marketing term of years gone by — in custard sauce.

Most of us can easily tick off their favorite fall fruit dessert – Fredrika Teute’s apple cake, plum almond cake, and poached pears with custard sauce in my case — but these three fall fruits are also wonderful additions to meat and fish dishes, a sweet-savory combo with a long history. One of the more well-known historical meat and fruit dishes is plum pudding, which in the 15^th century mixed minced meat, suet and dried fruit – but no plums — in a lumpy, gruel-like mushy mix. (Sounds irresistible, doesn’t it?). The ‘plum’ part was the fruit. Historians tell us they called prunes ‘plums’ in those days, a term that eventually encompassed all dried fruit. I’ll buy that, though I wasn’t there despite what my children may think, since the British now refer to all dessert as ‘pudding.’ (The British are fond of speaking in code.).

Apples sauteed with pork chops, hot homemade applesauce with fried chicken, and apples, sauerkraut, onion, and various bits of pork and sausage slow-baked into something akin to a choucroute garni. Pears are great sauteed until caramelized and used as a sauce with brandy and cream over chicken with sauteed mushrooms.  For those looking for vegetarian options, there’s always chard stuffed with couscous, garlic and apples, or Rachel Ray’s pumpkin soup with apple relish (link below). And when all else fails, you can put out a plate of fall fruits with cheese (gorgonzola, sharp cheddar, a camembert-type) with a fruit knife a fork and a good port.

* Take a good baguette sliced thick (1 1/2 inches or so) and  soaked in good custard – 3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1/2 cup plum wine, 1/2 cup brown sugar, cinnamon, 1 tsp vanilla –for  a couple of hours in a bowl in the frig. In a buttered gratin dish, half-stand these soaked slices on their sides, filling the dish. Stuff plenty of fresh sliced plums into every crevice, pour whatever remains of the custard overtop, then drizzle with melted butter and bake in a 325F oven for about 50 minutes or until golden on top.

Ruby Venison Ragout

4 pounds venison (or beef)

1 cup red wine vinegar

2 cups red Bordeaux

1 tblsp whole black peppercorns

6 juniper berries, crushed

8 cups water

4 cups pearl onions (frozen is easiest)

4 slices bacon

1 stick sweet (unsalted) butter

2 tblsp potato starch or corn starch

1 ½ pounds fresh ripe purple plums, pitted

1 cup beef broth

2 tblsp brown sugar

1 cup dried figs or fresh cut into pieces

2 tblsp red currant jelly (or seedless raspberry in a pinch)

Combine the venison, vinegar, 1 cup of wine, the peppercorns and juniper berries in a large non-reactive bowl. Marinate covered in the refrigerator for 5 hours or more. Drain venison, reserving marinade, and pat dry. Fry bacon in a large heavy casserole to render fat. Remove bacon pieces and reserve. Add 2 tblsp of butter to the fat and heat over high to medium high heat. Add the venison pieces a few at a time and brown, removing the browned pieces to a plate or bowl until all are done. Pour reserved marinade into the casserole and boil for five minutes, scraping up the browned bits [aka the fond] on the bottom. Sprinkle the potato starch on the venison and toss to coat. (If using the corn starch, leave this thickening step until the last few minutes of cooking.). Return venison to casserole. Add remaining 1 cup wine, plums, broth, brown sugar, figs and bacon. Simmer, covered, over low heat stirring occasionally, about 1 ½ hours. Remove cover and stir in the onions and jelly. Simmer uncovered 30 minutes.  With a slotted spoon, scoop out the solids and put into a bowl for a moment. Here’s the time you add the corn starch; dissolve it in 2 tblsps of sherry and whisk it into the boiling sauce until the sauce color returns to the luscious ruby-brown of before. Return solids to the casserole.  Serve with lots of hot noodles.

Apple-Cheese Muffins

4 tblsp (1/2 stick) sweet butter, softened

½ cup sugar

2 large eggs

1 ½ cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

¾ cup rolled oats

1 large tart apple

2/3 cup grated sharp cheddar

½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans

¾ cup milk

1 or 2 large tart apples

4 tblsp butter, melted

2 tblsp sugar mixed with 1 tsp cinnamon

Cream 4 tblsp butter and ½ cup sugar together. Add eggs and beat well. Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt and stir into butter-sugar mixture. Stir in oats. Chop tart apple into 1/8-inch dice and add along with cheese and nuts. Gradually stir in milk, mixing lightly. (Rule of thumb when mixing muffins is 50 strokes tops, less is better and a little un-mixed is OK). Fill well-buttered muffin tins 2/3 full. Cut remaining whole apples into 12 thin slices same diameter as the muffin tins; brush slices with melted butter and coat with cinnamon-sugar mixture. Top batter in each muffin tin with 1 apple slice. Sprinkle remaining cinnamon-sugar evenly over muffins. Bake for about 25 minutes.

Poached Pears

Bosc pears work well for this, though you can use Barletts or comice or other firm pear. Just don’t let them be too ripe.

5  fresh pears

1 orange, navel is good since it’s juicy and its skin is zest-filled

1 lemon

1/2 vanilla bean

4 cups water

2/3 cups brown sugar

1 cup apple cider or other fruit juice (or wine if you prefer)

Peel the pears leaving stem intact. You can slice off the bottoms and scoop out the interior if you like, but I don’t since they sometimes get away from me on the stove and collapse more easily without the core. Easy enough to eat them with knife and fork and take out seeds later. Bring water and sugar to a very low simmer until sugar is dissolved. While doing so, add the juice and zest of the orange, ditto the lemon, the cider and the vanilla bean, which has been split and its seeds scraped out into the water. When water is barely simmering, add pears gently, one at a time. Poaching is done very gently, virtually no movement in the water. Poach for 15 or so minutes, or until you can slide a fork into the pears with a little resistance remaining. Gently scoop out the pears and cool. They store well in their liquid, once it’s been cooled, for a week or more. You can usually use the liquid more than once, bringing to a boil each time, and it makes a nice basis — simple syrup — for a cocktail with a little champagne, some Poire Williams or pear brandy, and a dash of angostura bitters.

Bluefish Baked with Apples and Mustard

4 tart apples

4 bluefish or rockfish fillets  (about 2 ½ pounds)

3 tblsp sweet butter

1 cup coarse mild mustard

1 cup fish stock or chicken stock (or bullion)

2 cups medium-dry white wine

1 tblsp minced shallots or onion or garlic

Slice apples thin and sauté them in butter until lightly browned. Reserve. Lay fish filets in a shallow baking dish just large enough to hold them in a single layer. Smear mustard evenly over the filets, spread apples over and around fish. Pour stock and enough wine in to come halfway up the sides of their thickness, about a half cup. Put into t 350F oven and bake for 8 minutes. While fish is baking, combine remaining white wine and shallots in a small skillet and reduce to almost nothing. When fish is almost but not quite done, remove from oven. Drain liquid from fish into the wine-shallot reduction and turn heat on full. Cover fish and apples with foil and keep warm while finishing sauce. When liquid is reduced by half, whisk in a couple of tablespoons of cold sweet butter. When butter is incorporated, divide filets onto four plates, spoon apples around them and spoon sauce over  top. Serve immediately.

https://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Plum-Pie/Detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/pork-cutlet-with-plums/detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/plum-jam-2/detail.aspx

https://www.usapears.org/en/sitecore/content/Common/Recipes/Baked%20Brie%20en%20Croute%20with%20Pears.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/french-orange-poached-pears-poire-avec-orange/detail.aspx

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/spiced-apple-and-pear-pie-recipe/index.html

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/pear-and-blue-cheese-salad-recipe/index.html

https://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/pear_butter/

https://www.foodnetwork.com/topics/apple/index.html

https://mark-knowles.hubpages.com/hub/Pork-with-Apples-and-Cider

https://www.thetasteoforegon.com/2010/03/pork-and-apple-cider-stew/

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/neelys/apple-crisp-recipe/index.html

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/pumpkin-soup-with-chili-cran-apple-relish-recipe/index.html

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/french-apple-tart-recipe/index.html

I don’t get the whole Labor-Day’s-the-end-of-BBQ-season thing at all. Why is summer the only time people think you should barbeque?  In the first place, summer’s already hot, so why would you want to spend any time in front of a fire?  Plus it’s mosquito-y, at least at our house, which means you need to either cover up or spray on something that’s lethal to skeeters, but who-knows-what-to-us.  And summer’s hardly the time when you want the kind of stick-to-your ribs meals that often come with barbeque – ribs, steak, whole pig.

In summer, the grill is a test of endurance, but from here on out it’s a pleasure.  As the days get cooler and shorter, the warmth and flickering light of a fire combined with the smell of dinner is a primeval call to our DNA.  Shishkabob with the last of the summer vegetables, grilled lamb chops with homemade chimichuri since the spring lambs are just now going to the butcher, oysters opened on the grill and downed with lemon and garlic butter, slow-smoked brisket, shoulder roasts, and Asian-marinated beef. Years ago at Thanksgiving we used to spit a whole lamb in the driveway on a make-shift rebar rack. We’d stand around, turning the spit and keeping warm both outside and in (the inside was helped with wine and other serious libation) and chatting.

While the smell of charred meat may be anathema to the vegetarians among us, that doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate the grill. It offers terrific and varied options: grilled pizza, which is a superb alternative to what can be greasy and gooey; grill-roasted corn with flavored butters; grilled eggplant and squash with bread slathered with goat cheese; grilled portabella burgers; grilled quesadillas; and grilled avocado corn salsa.  (Anyone who hasn’t seen Steven Raichlen’s  yummy and inventive stuff on Barbeque University is missing something, and the notion that any of us could, in a pinch, produce a cooked meal over a fire when the electricity goes off is empowering.).

Post-Labor Day. Or even later. THAT’s when you want to barbeque. The Visigoth’s hunt club is a bunch of outdoors-y guys, who really know how to put food on the table – it’s a time-honored skill here on the Eastern Shore. They also know about cooking and eating (oh boy, do they know about eating), but they don’t truly crank up the flames until hunting season. THEN they really get going.  They kick it off with a barbeque sometime in early fall  (dove season opened September 1 this year) then close it up with another big grilling in January, whenever the Canada goose season closes. The gathering is like a throw-back in camouflage to the stories-by-the-campfire of eons ago.  The conversation while standing by the grill consists primarily of a rehash of the season.  Some are cautionary tales, some are out and out lies, and some consist of the detailed observations of these amateur naturalists, which is what true hunters are. Lovers of nature, who have both appreciation and respect for it.

There is wild game – duck, goose breast marinated in garlic and herbs and red wine and flash-grilled until barely done then thin-sliced and served with good baguette — but the main edible attraction is usually a whole barbequed pig that is sprawled, poor delicious devil, out on a flatbed with plenty of vinegary sauce on the side for dipping.  Retro. Primal. And comforting.

Leftover barbeque not only tastes great all week. It also lends itself to reinvention in soups and stews and sandwiches with grilled vegetables on really good bread beneath melted mozzarella cheese. As a bonus, the aroma alone catapult you back into that gathering by the fire.

The recipe below is from James McNair’s Favorites cookbook (Chronicle Books, 1999, $29.95). Korean Barbequed Beef is great right off the grill, and just as delicious cold for lunch when wrapped up in a lettuce leaf with some shredded daikon, pickled cabbage or slaw, shredded carrot, green onion, toasted sesame seed and hot sauce, all of which are eminently packable. Let your cubical-mates drool.

Korean Barbequed Beef

I pound beef ternderloin (I also use very thin-sliced top round, bottom round cut across the grain or beef sirloin tip roast. You can slice it very thin by freezing it for about 2 hours so it’s firm.).

Marinade

1 cup soy sauce

½ cup sugar

¼ cup Asian (toasted) sesame oil

¼ up finely chopped green onion, including green tiops

2 tblsp minced fresh ginger

2 tsp fresh garlic, minced

freshly ground black pepper

Using a very sharp knife, slice the meat diagonally across the grain as thinly as possible.

To make marinade, combine all marinade ingredients  in a bowl and mix well, until the sugar is completely dissolved.  Add beef slices and stir to coat evenly.  Marinate in the refrigerator, stirring occasionally, for at least 4 hours or overnight. Return to room temperature before cooking. Grill over fairly high heat — this goes very quickly, only a minute or two for each strip.  It keeps well in the frig.

https://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Marinated-Pork-Tenderloin/Detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Grilling-Pizza/Detail.aspx

https://www.bbqu.net/season2/201.html#cuban_pig

https://www.bbqu.net/season1/107.html#beer_can_duckling

https://www.bbqu.net/season3/310.html#bean_cheese

https://www.bbqu.net/season4/403.html#portobello_burger

https://www.bbqu.net/season3/304.html#beer_can_chicken

https://www.bbqu.net/season2/211.html#matambre

https://www.bbqu.net/season3/308_4.html#hog_island_oysters

https://www.bbqu.net/season2/206_4.html#quesadillas

I’m a little cooked out right now. Yes, I love to grow, cook, preserve, plan and do just about any other thing that has to do with enjoying good food, but at the moment, I’d love a reprieve from all that togetherness with my stove.

Tough. When my chain-saw-wielding Visigoth is in residence, I gotta cook the way I use-ta gotta for the off-spring, who now cook for themselves in their own caves. Since this weekend is The Official End of Summer, it is also The Official End of Barbeque Season (which seems silly; the Visigoth grills year-round, like the postman, neither rain nor sleet nor dead of night, etc.). But as the last gasp, it means the men will be standing around charring food, while the women, if we have any sense at all, will have done the prep ahead of time and be sitting idly by sipping margaritas and making scintillating conversation. I love gender roles.

The prep can produce not only the vegetable and fruit side dishes for the weekend’s feasting, but a lot of things that will last well into next week and be great for lunches and whatnot without additional fuss in the kitchen. With all those things made, or at least the ingredients made and ready to be tossed onto a plate or into a bowl together with a little dressing, the first true week of school and the beginning of Working In Earnest will not be drudgery. Open the frig, decide what to put into a dish and sit down to something delicious and a whole lot better for you and yours than chicken nuggets and fries. Closest thing to a vacation from cooking a cook can get.

Salads, particularly, are great for that. They are virtuous in terms of getting your required daily veggies. They are also usually (though not always) virtuous in terms of the calorie-count versus the quantity, so you feel more full with less damage to your waistline.

Quinoa with fruit and nuts, two kinds of slaw, sweet potato salad with lime dressing, 10-layer salad (very retro and calorie-laden with the mayo, cheese and bacon, but so delicious), sesame pasta, corn and black bean with the last of the cherry tomatoes, broccoli and tomato salad, Greek salad with lemon dressing, which is lovely stuffed into a pita pocket for lunch (you can put the salad in one container, and stuff the pita just before you eat it), a julienne of root vegetables with plum or raspberry vinaigrette, green bean and potato salad, Salade Nicoise, marinated cucumber salad, German potato salad, the list goes on and on.

Some salads even begin on the grill so you can hand that part off to the male with the tongs — grilled eggplant salad, grilled zucchini and bell pepper fattoush, grilled potato salad with balsamic dressing, grilled mixed vegetables with lentils and arugula. Others you can prep the ingredients for and put them together at the last minute –lentil salad with tomato and dill, roasted eggplant with mozzarella and basil, roasted butternut with warm cider vinaigrette. And others are great made a day or even several days ahead – old-fashioned Swiss salad with rice and peas, sesame noodles with peanuts, Asian cole slaw.

Any way you look at it, you may have to work this weekend when what you really want to do is sit beside the grill looking decorative with a drink in your hand and friends across the table, but if you do it all before friends come, you can do that AND you can put your feet up, kitchenwise, for the rest of the week.

Asian Cole Slaw

4 cups shredded white cabbage or 2 bags of already-shredded cabbage

6 green onions with tops

2 packages of Oodles of Noodles

½ cup sliced almonds

½ tsp sesame seeds, toasted

1 tblsp butter

1 tblsp toasted sesame oil

6 tblsp white wine vinegar

½ cup vegetable oil

½ cup sugar

1 tblsp soy sauce

2 ea. seasoning packages that came with the noodles

Break up noodles and brown them along with almonds and sesame seeds in butter and oil.  Cool slightly. In a large bowl mix this with cabbage and chopped green onions. In a separate bowl, mix soy sauce, sugar, vegetable oil, seasoning packets, and vinegar together. Pour over noodles and cabbage and mix thoroughly. This is better if it sits for a few hours before serving and is good for several days in the frig.

Grilled Zucchini and Bell Pepper Fattoush

From Bon Appétit Magazine

For the grill:

3  bell peppers – red, orange,  or yellow add a nice color contrast – with stems and seeds removed but otherwise whole

4-5 small zucchini, cut in half lengthwise

2 pita breads, separated horizontally into 4 slices

Brush with olive oil and grilled on medium heat for about 6 minutes, turning often.

For the salad:

1 cucumber, diced

12 cherry tomatoes, halved

3 green onions, thinly sliced

1 cup pitted Kalamata olives

½ cup mint leaves

1/3 cup chopped cilantro

½ cup olive oil

¼ cup lemon juice

1 tsp cumin

4 oz feta, cubed

Cut peppers into ½ inch pieces. Slice zucchini into ¼ inch wide half-rounds and put them into a large bowl with tomatoes, cucumber, green onions olives, mint and cilantro. Toss. Add bread. Whisk up dressing with olive oil, lemon juice, cumin and a little salt and pepper. Add to salad and mix gently. Add feta. Serve. The bread will eventually get a little soggy (like panzanella aka bread salad) and the tomatoes will ooze. For our tastes, this is good for about 2 days, so you eat these leftovers first.

Roasted Butternut Squash Salad with Warm Cider Vinaigrette

Barefoot Contessa from House Beautiful

1 butternut squash, peeled, seeded and ¾ inch dice

Good olive oil

1 tblsp pure maple syrup

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

3 tblsp dried cranberries

¾ cup apple cider or apple juice

2 tblsp cider vinegar

2 tblsp minced shallots

2 tsp Dijon mustard

4 oz. baby arugula washed and spun dry

½ cup toasted walnuts

¾ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Put butternut on a baking sheet, toss with 2 tblsp olive oil, maple syrup, 1 tsp salt and ½ tsp pepper. Roast in a 400F oven for about 15-20 minutes, turning once. Five minutes before squash is done, add cranberries to the pan. Meanwhile, combine apple cider, vinegar and shallots in a small saucepan and bring to boil over medium heat. Cook for 6-8 minutes until cider is reduced to about ¼ cup. Off the heat, whisk in mustard,  ½ cup olive oil, 1 tsp salt and ½ tsp pepper. Put arugula in a large salad bowl and add the roasted squash mixture, walnuts and grated Parmesan. Spoon just enough vinaigrette over to moisten and toss well. Serve immediately.

Note: If you want to make this ahead and serve it cold or warmish but later in the week, you can roast the squash and cranberries, put them in a container in the frig for several days, and take it out to become room temperature before serving. Make the dressing ahead then warm it briefly in the microwave just before putting the salad together. Or put it together without the arugula, since all leafy greens begin to wilt the minute they are dressed, and add them just before serving.

https://www.fannetasticfood.com/2011/01/21/quinoa-salad-5-minute-packable-lunch/

https://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pasta-Salad-with-Homemade-Dressing/Detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/cranberry-pear-tossed-salad/detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Sesame-Pasta-Chicken-Salad/Detail.aspx

https://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/German-Potato-Salad-6

https://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Course/Salads/Potato-Salad-Recipes

https://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Baked-German-Potato-Salad

https://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Grilled-Potato-Salad-with-Balsamic-Dressing

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Sweet-Potato-Salad-with-Chili-Lime-Dressing-102099

When I was first married and moved to the Eastern Shore, somewhere during the Pleistocene Age, everyone out here in the hinterlands canned — even if they didn’t have a garden. They’d buy produce in bulk from farmers or roadside stands and ‘put it by.’ A lot of the women in our area didn’t work outside the home, but they worked inside and canning was part of the work they did to contribute to the whole family enterprise.

Canning fell out of favor when women began to leave home to work, but in the great turn of the mandala, which seems to have also brought back miniskirts and plaid, today’s women (and a few guys) are once again turning to canning.  Part of the reason is the current economy and a yearning for some sense of self-reliance in a fluky job market. But the renewed interest is also linked to a desire for healthy food whose provenance we know.

As a result it’s once again possible to find canning supplies, to bore your neighbors with the number of quarts of spaghetti sauce you put up today, and to swop recipes for cornichons and spiced peaches and imaginative chutneys. Ironically, all of this is taking place at a time when the fear of litigation for giving canning advice has gone through the roof.

So I won’t tell you HOW to can anything, particularly since the research on how to do it safely has changed slightly since I first began. (There are links to credentialed sources below.).

Change based on knowledge is good. When I was first canning, some of my neighbors ‘canned’ green beans by boiling the jars, boiling the beans, then putting them in the hot jars with boiling bean juice, and turning down the lid. Terrifying. Why their nearest and dearest weren’t dropping like flies at the dinner table was a mystery.  Beans need pressure canning unless you’re adding a fair amount of vinegar to acidify them.

Canning is chemistry, botany, and culinary skill, but primarily it’s the ability to follow reliable directions well.  It’s usually hot work, especially if you do it in bulk over the course of a summer as I do. So it’s not always fun, though it’s usually more fun if you do it with a friend. But either way, it’s sooo satisfying when you open up the cabinet and pull down a jar of your own homegrown organic salsa, Bloody Mary mix, spaghetti sauce, pickle or jam.

So, in the interests of encouraging you to put up at least some of your garden’s (or the farmers’ market and produce stands’) offerings this year, especially if you’ve never tried it before, here are a few general rules of thumb to guide you, and then below, are some links to reliable canning sources for more detailed instruction.

First, acidity matters. Pickles are easy to start with since they are acid (thanks to the vinegar). The acid will kill any undesirable bacteria that might be in the vegetables. For centuries, people layered pickled anything and everything into crocks (sauer kraut, kimchi, pickled walnuts even) and kept them, covered with a cheesecloth or board lid so the flies and animals couldn’t get to them, in a cool dark place. (They also kept crocks of brandied fruit in the cellar and would go down to stir – and sip – periodically.).

Tomatoes are acidic, though not always as strongly acid as they need to be (5% is the rule of thumb). Hybrids bred for sweetness are sometimes quite low acid, and some recipes recommend adding anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon of vinegar, lemon juice or citric acid before you put them into the canner’s water bath.

Sugar is also a preservative, and jams and jellies have for generations been made, poured into a clean jar, topped with paraffin and stuck in a vermin-proof cabinet with a bit of waxed paper over them. I’ve eaten many a jar done that way myself when I lived in Britain, though now the recommendation is to process them in a relatively short hot water bath to be extra sure.

Second, make sure everything that will touch food is sterilized – jars, lids – and kept really hot. If you fail to get a good seal on things, it could be because there was a seed or some tiny thing that stood between the lid and the jar rim for a total vacuum seal, but it could also be that the jar, the lid and what you put into it was not hot enough.

Third, never reuse a canning lid. If your jar didn’t seal the first time, throw that lid away and reprocess using a new, sterilized lid.

Fourth, make sure you actually like to eat what you’re putting up. It sounds silly, but some of us (and by some I mean I) get carried away with interesting-sounding recipes, and with preserving every last bit of whatever comes out of the garden. My family doesn’t really like tomato-apple jam  regardless of how I try to dress it up. And there’s only so much mustard pickle any one family – and their friends, neighbors and passing strangers – can consume absent threats or coercion.

Last: Start small and be unafraid. When you first read the instructions, canning seems to be complicated and have a lot of steps. There are definitely a series of steps you need to take, and you need to pay attention to each one.  But like riding a bicycle or any other thing you haven’t done before, listing all the steps can be daunting; once you get into the rhythm of it, it’s not hard.

We eat a fair amount of bread and butter pickles – on sandwiches and paninis, diced in tartar sauce, in chicken or egg salad, with sausages, and just out of the jar. I make pints and quarts of the stuff using a recipe from Maryland’s Way cookbook. Maryland’s Way also has good recipes for watermelon pickle (lovely with ham), pickled peaches (ditto), green tomato pickle, pepper relish, and peach chutney, which when spread with cream cheese on Triscuits is a Christmas brunch tradition with champagne for us. Maryland’s Way also has a recipe for something called Ma Comp’s Soup Seasoning, a spicy tomato-based concentrate with plenty of spices and pepper that we call tomato bullion. A couple of tablespoons of that in a mug of hot water makes a great pick-me-up in winter.

Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preserving includes canning instructions and 400 recipes for salsas, marmalades, jams, jellies, pickles, pie fillings and more.

The recipe below is what I make with ‘Big Mama’ San Marzano paste tomatoes, which are huge and easy to peel. I use it with vegetable or shrimp quesadillas, with fish, and with chips.

Nancy’s Tomato Salsa

10 pounds tomatoes, skinned

2 sweet peppers

2 large or 3 small onions

3 jalapenos, several serranos, 3 or 4 lemon peppers or other hot pepper

3 fresh garlic cloves, minced

1 large bunch cilantro, chopped

1/3 cup fresh lime juice

2 tsp cumin

2 tsp chili powder

2 tsp paprika

1 tblsp kosher salt

2 tsp fresh-ground pepper

To peel tomatoes, dip for several seconds (usually about 12) into simmering water, then into cold water. Skins should slip easily from the fruit. This process is easy if you wear rubber gloves to protect from the heat. To keep salsa from being too thin, halve peeled tomatoes, then with your thumbs, sluice out seeds and interior juice into a large bowl. You can easily strain this for tomato juice, Bloody Marys, or for making vegetable juice or soup.  Rough-chop all vegetables and put into a large stainless pot. If you have a broad, non-reactive pan or several pans, which will allow for some evaporation while the salsa’s cooking so much the better, but you need to stand by a bit to be sure it doesn’t stick and burn. Add garlic, cumin, chili powder, paprika, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and simmer for about an hour or until vegetables are done. Add cilantro and cook another 10 minutes. Run a hand blender through salsa to keep from having huge chunks, but don’t make it into puree. If you don’t have a hand blender, you can use a potato masher. Add lime juice. Keep salsa simmering while you put it into hot canning jars. Process according to directions in the links below.

https://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/can_home.html

https://www.growit.umd.edu/Images5/FoodPreservationResources.pdf

https://www.freshpreserving.com/home.aspx

 
.

There’s really almost no point in buying melons out of season. They’re one of the emblems of summer, product of the sun and the soil and the rain in specific amounts. If they get picked before they’ve had their fill of being attached to the plant, they won’t ripen properly and therefore will not have that same juicy-fruity refreshing flavor that makes melons so fabulous. Yes, you can get melon-like things in the supermarkets at other times of the year, though you may notice that A) they rarely come up to the standard we’ve grown accustomed to here on the fecund Eastern Shore, and B) that you can rarely find them in December or January. Mexico grows them, and so do the Caribbean and Central America, so we get them several months earlier than our own, coinciding with the southern seasons. But melons grown for transport from far away means they ‘re a tougher variety and have been yanked off their vines way before their time. Here endeth the lesson.

Meanwhile, we’ve got melons from here, right now. Despite the drought, our local growers have been judiciously watering throughout their growth, then picking each melon when the stem slips easily from the fruit.  Now THAT’s gourmet. Not esoteric, not froufrou, just a very good thing picked at its peak and offered for our tables within a day — two at the most. Luxury.

Melons, which offer niacin, vitamin B6 and folate, vitamin A, vitamin C and potassium, are generally about 60 calories a cupful, so you can pretty much eat your fill with impunity.

Let’s face it; melons aren’t quite as versatile as a lot of other fruits and vegetables. But that’s OK since they are one of those ephemeral annual pleasures that you never have the chance to tire of. Just when you think you’ve had enough Jenny Lind or Cranshaw or Honeydew,  they’re gone.

Of course, melons are terrific on their own. There’s nothing quite like a cool slice of ambrosia melon maybe drizzled on a hot day, or a slice of cantaloupe with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or lemon sorbet in it for dessert.  Dress it up for company with the tiniest drizzle of Grand Marnier. And we’re blessed with a lot of different melons that have distinctly different flavors.

But you rarely think of melon when you’re doing barbequed  pork.  Melons are distinctly summertime eating, so lend themselves to lighter fare, usually dessert-y kinds of things: sorbets, fruit slushes and smoothies, fruit salads. Fresh-chunked melon with a few fresh berries (blackberries, blueberries, raspberries) in a bowl liberally doused with yogurt mixed with honey and nutmeg is the perfect end to a summer supper.

Having said that, melons have made inroads into the main course, and add beautifully as a salsa to things like lemon-grilled chicken or shrimp, seared scallops or sautéed fish in white wine, since the more subtle flavors have chance to shine. Yet even with the blessed creative freedom cooks have these days, I would not have thought of combining black beans with watermelon as Chef Kevin McKinney’s in his watermelon and black bean relish.

“For lunch, we used this as an accompaniment to griddled fish with a few mixed greens and a little spiced citrus vinaigrette,” says McKinney. “For dinner, we put it under some seared tuna with a little bacon and lemon butter sauce. The relish also makes a great healthy snack.”

(I can tell you first hand, it’s yummy.).

Brooks Tavern Watermelon and Black Bean Relish

1 cup black beans (recipe for preparing below)

1 cup finely diced watermelon

1 tsp finely diced jalapeno (or lesser Scoville-unit pepper, like fish or peppado)

1 tsp very finely minced garlic

2 chopped scallions or one minced shallot

4 tblsp grapeseed or other mild oil

3 tblsp lime juice

2 mint leaves, finely chopped

salt and pepper

To prepare the black beans: Put 1 cup dried beans in 2 cups water (or 2 cups of water leftover from boiling corn on the cob, which adds sweetness). Bring to a boil and boil for 5 minutes. Turn off heat and let sit for 1 hour. Pour off water. Put beans into a pot with 2 more cups of water, 1 stick of cinnamon, 1 star anise, a bay leaf, a dried chipotle pepper, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and simmer until tender, about an hour. (You can double the recipe and use these beans for other recipes, including a black bean quesadilla with melon and mango salsa). When beans are tender, turn off the pot and let them cool in the water to absorb all the flavors.  Drain and chill. Mix together all ingredients except the melon. When everything is well-distributed, fold in the watermelon. Serve with fish.

Melon Salsa

2 cups cantaloupe or honeydew

1 lemon pepper

¼ cup red onion or scallion

3 tblsp lime juice

1 tsp chili powder

1 tsp paprika

½ tsp powdered garlic or a ¼ tsp finely mince garlic

¼ tsp cumin

Dice all ingredients and mix gently. Serve chilled.

https://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cucumber-Honeydew-Smoothie/Detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/best-melon-mango-and-avocado-salad/detail.aspx

https://healthy.food.com/recipe/watermelon-soda-173651

https://www.food.com/recipe/watermelon-blueberry-salad-witha-hint-of-heat-462239

https://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/melon_sorbet/

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/lime-honeydew-sorbet/detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/watermelon-and-feta-salad-with-arugula-and-spinach/detail.aspx

https://www.wholeliving.com/photogallery/melon-recipes

https://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2011/08/cool-melon-soup

https://www.perfectentertaining.com/page1425.html

https://www.perfectentertaining.com/page1417.html

https://www.perfectentertaining.com/page1420.html

https://www.yummly.com/recipe/Tuna-Steaks-With-Melon-Salsa-Allrecipes

This would be delicious with baked rockfish or grilled perch.

https://www.yummly.com/recipe/Grilled-Bass-With-Green-Tomato-And-Watermelon-Salsa-Epicurious

When the squash come in, they usually come in like gangbusters. Especially the zucchini, which have the reputation of being unwanted by virtue of their usual profligacy. As a result, zucchini’ve been the brunt of jokes, stealth doorstep deliveries and chunkin’ contests for years. Which is a shame, since they’re actually super veggies — about 20 calories a raw cupful, very high in vitamin A, B6 and C, manganese, magnesium, riboflavin, potassium and phosphorous as well as some other good stuff. And you can do a ton of different things with them. Raw in salads and dip platters, casseroled, shredded, baked, frittered, tempura’d, marinated, pickled and frozen for winter use. You can even use the blossoms in frittatas, Mexican soups, stuffed and fried. (Use only the male blossoms if you’re picking your own. They are the ones standing up on long stems without tiny little squashes at their base.).

There are several different zucchini varieties available now in addition to the usual dark green cylinders that you can usually find at this time of year. Lovely pale green cylinders, golden zucchinis, which are milder tasting than the dark green ones, and artsy ‘Gadzukes,’ which has creamy ridges along its length and is drier, sweeter and longer-lasting in the fridge. ‘Eight Ball’ zucchinis look like their name (there are now pale green ones, too), which make good little individual stuffers. Finally, there is Zuchetta Rampicante or Tromboncino, a climbing zucchini with an exceedingly long-necked squash that will feed a family of four for about a week.

Pick the cylindrical ones small and tender, and they are called courgettes. (Sounds like something fast and sleek, doesn’t it?) Pick them too late and they are brickbats –aka marrow if you live in Britain where they are fed to the hogs. But if you live by the adage, Waste not; Want not, you can shred the oversized ones, whose skin tends to be thick, into soups, use them for zucchini bread and make really good pickles out of them.

For a quick, easy side dish, thin-slice zucchini, onions and potatoes and sauté them in olive oil with a little salt and pepper. Cover that with cheese, or use that mix as the basis for a frittata, add some fresh basil, chives, rosemary and you’ve got a whole meal.  You can stuff them with anything from couscous, dried tomato, lemon thyme, cucumber and garlic to corn, onions, fresh tomatoes, peppers and cheese to shredded barbequed pork.  Deep fried zucchini fritters are terrific – crispy on the edges, creamy and flavorful in the middle. Cooked the size of pancakes, they are a filling meal with red wine. Bite-sized, they are a great platter-passed hors d’oeuvre. A slightly lower impact version is zucchini pancakes — less oil and lower cooking temps, so the kitchen doesn’t heat up. Zuke pancakes are easily portable and are good the next day cold, like Scotch pancakes, but savory. (They’re  way less messy to stuff into a foul weather gear pocket during a jibe than half a tuna sandwich, which I’ve also done. Once.).

Shred the larger ones to make zucchini bread  — there’s a great, easy recipe in Silver Palate – which is good with cream cheese and lemon frosting. Or put the raw shreddings into pint freezer bags (which is about a cup and a half of zucchini), squeeze out the air, seal and freeze. Half-thaw a bag in winter for use in soups, rice or pasta casseroles and even bread, though you have to pour off about half the half-thawed water before you put them into the quick bread batter.

An easy casserole that’s usually a crowd-pleaser uses fresh zucchini, tomatoes and pasta. Cook elbow macaroni, rotini, or ziti until about half-done. (The fresh vegetables will render enough water to finish cooking the pasta.). Chop about a cup of tomatoes, cube a cup or two of fresh zucchini, an onion, a sweet pepper, chunks of leftover cheese (cheddar, gruyere, mozzarella, Parmesan, blue), some grated carrots for sweetness if you like.  Aim for about 3 cups of pasta to 3 cups of cheese. Add some fresh herbs. Add browned ground beef if you want, or leftover barbequed chicken or pork. Top with Parmesan and bake for about 45 minutes or until the whole thing is bubbly.

Zucchini Fritters with Adobo Sauce

Jean Sanders and I entered this recipe in Food52’s zucchini recipe contest last year. Didn’t win – the picture alone should have, I don’t get it! Don’t know what did win in the end, but the entries I’ve tried since were fabulous,especially the summer squash gratin, whose recipe is listed in links. The only thing I’d do differently in the gratin recipe is add much less oil.*

• This recipe was entered in the contest for Your Best Summer Squash Recipe .

Nancy has a fecund garden, and knows off the top of her head several recipes that will deal with the inevitable summer deluge of zucchini. She is wise in the ways of the zukes!

SERVES 4

• 1 medium zucchini, grated
• 3 tablespoons finely chopped poblano
• 3 tablespoons finely chopped onion
• 1 cup mixed fresh herbs – lots of basil, lime basil, parsley, oregano, thyme and chives
• 1-2 tablespoon lime juice
• 1/4 cup flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon Spanish paprika
• 1/4 teaspoon cumin
• Salt and pepper
• Vegetable oil for frying
• Adobo sauce
• 1-2 Adobo chilis with tomato sauce mixed in 1/3 cup best-quality mayo

Heat oil (about an inch) in iron frying pan. Grate zucchini and mix all of the fritter ingredients in a bowl just before you’re ready to start frying. (If you do it too soon, the zucchini will give off a lot of its water and the fritter will be gummy rather than light.). Ease batter into hot oil by tablespoons-full. Pat into a flattish cake. Fry on medium high heat until golden and cooked through. Drain on paper towels. Serve with adobo sauce. (And Margaritas on the side!)

https://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Zucchini-Risotto/Detail.aspx

https://allrecipes.com/recipe/zucchini-fritters-with-fresh-mozzarella-and-tomato/detail.aspx

https://www.food.com/recipe/creamed-zucchini-460245

https://www.food.com/recipe/zucchini-relish-461225

https://www.food.com/recipe/gordon-ramsays-zucchini-cannelloni-with-ricotta-pine-nut-370297

https://www.food.com/recipe/zucchini-filled-with-three-cheeses-with-homemade-tomato-sauce-268915

https://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/zucchini-oven-chips-10000001087041/

https://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/grilled-zucchini-and-summer-squash-salad-with-citrus-splash-dressing-10000000222864/

https://kitchenmouse.rozentali.com/2010/09/flor-de-calabaza-sopa-squash-blossom-soup/

https://www.food52.com/contests/162

https://www.seasonalchef.com/recipe0805b.htm

https://www.food52.com/blog/2162_summer_squash_gratin

— *The recipe calls for ¾ cup olive oil. I prefer it with no more than about 1/3 cup. The cheese is rich already. Too much oil masks the vegetables for me.

 
.

Corn on the cob is such an integral part of the summer cornucopia – Norman Rockwell pictures of grinning kids chopping down on ears of corn dance in our heads – that we even have special little corncob holders whose sole job is to keep your fingers from getting all buttery while you eat it. How many vegetables have their very own plastic tableware?

We eagerly anticipate the corn-on-the-cob experience, and often push the envelope on timing, buying the first ears that come into our supermarkets early in the season. But those first ears aren’t local. And it ain’t the same. This isn’t just local loyalty or hype. Corn’s luscious, sugary kernels begin their conversion to starch within hours of being picked, so getting a good sweet ear right off the farm and cooking it right away is the like difference between fresh-brewed coffee and the leftover stuff in the office at the end of the day. (If you can’t cook corn right away, immediately stick it in the frig or a cooler to retard the sugar-to-starch conversion.).

Corn (Zea Mays) is one of the few fairly caloric vegetables – about 155 calories per ear of sweet corn on the cob, depending on what authority you’re looking at, in large part because it’s loaded with carbohydrates. (Actually corn’s a grain, not a vegetable, which makes the calories and the carbs more understandable). Interestingly, some places say it has no vitamin C, others that it has anywhere from 11%-17%, though all say that iron and vitamin A are components. No one disputes corn’s lutein, which is a help against macular degeneration.

Corn is one of the Three Sisters of Native American cooking: corn for carb; beans for protein; and squash for vitamin A and minerals. As most of us know, the three were grown together – the beans climbed up the corn stalks, while the squash meandered beneath, fairly effectively preventing weeds by their coverage.

Few of us garden that way. Instead we buy from the farmers’ market or screech to a halt at roadside farm stands to gather the gold, which is usually picked that morning. Cooked barely tender (4-5 minutes in boiling water) is the corn purist’s summer treat. Butter if you must, but plain offers unmasked sweetness. One friend soaks the unshucked ears in water for about a fifteen minutes, then peels back the husks to expose the cob and lays them on the grill, using the dampened shucks to turn the ears until they are beautifully marked on each side.  Eaten with a bit of lime butter, they are a little bit of heaven. These same smoked kernels, cut off the cob and added to black bean and tomato salad with cilantro, olive oil and lime –a dish I first tasted years ago when Chef Kevin McKinney made it at Kennedyville Inn – is unbeatable.

Once you’ve had your fill of that, you can go on to Three Sisters burritos, corn and leftover rice casserole, corn and tomato salsa, corn fritters, corn pudding, Guy Fieri’s roasted corn quesadillas (link below), corn and crab soup, corn, ham and jalapeno muffins, and fanesca, a fabulous South American vegetable soup using virtually everything coming out of the garden and fields right now. Of course most of these dishes can be made with frozen corn, or even canned, though the fresh stuff makes a big difference in flavor. But one of the things that demands the in-season original is Chef Bobby Flay’s fire-roasted snapper wrapped in green corn husks with charred corn/charred jalapeno salsa. What a terrific meal to share with friends on a weekend – margaritas, cold beer, good conversation! Link’s below. I’m gonna try it (with whatever fish I can find, maybe a rockfish) as soon as my grilling Visigoth gets home.

Ecuadorean Fanesca

There are lots of recipes for this soup on the net, using a wide range of ingredients, and it’s described on at least one site as the soup that’s made only for Easter. It’s also described as a spring soup, which makes little sense to me since the ingredients in many of the recipes I found would not be coming out of gardens in South America at that time. Howsomever. The recipe below I make at least once at this time of year. It’s from Garden-Fresh Cooking, and is a delicious combination of flavors that creates a real taste departure from the European-inspired things I often make.

2 cups chicken stock

1 cup chopped onions

1 tblsp fresh oregano

1 tsp cumin

2 cloves garlic, minced

½ tsp black pepper

1 bay leaf (Bay is a nice houseplant and the fresh leaves have so much more flavor than dried)

1 cup corn kernels

1 cup peas

1 cup shredded cabbage

1 cup sliced celery

1 cup diced sweet red peppers

1 cup julienned carrots

1 cup green beans

2 cups pureed zucchini

2 cups skim milk

1/3 cup peanut butter

½ cup shredded Meunster or Monterey Jack cheese

In a large pot, combine stock, onions, oregano, cumin, garlic, pepper and bay leaf. Bring to a boil and simmer for 5 minutes. Add corn, peas, cabbage, celery, peppers, carrots and beans and cook for another 5 minutes. Meanwhile in large bowl, combine zucchini puree, milk and peanut butter. When thoroughly blended, stir into soup and simmer for another 5 minutes. Turn heat off, remove bay leaf and sprinkle cheese on top, stirring before serving. This is terrific with toasted garlic bread.

Three Sisters Burritos

This is a quick, easy and satisfying thing to make for supper on a weeknight or when you’re rushed and people are hungry.

3 ears of corn, shucked, blanched in boiling water for 4 minutes and cut off the husk

1 can pinto, cranberry, or black turtle beans

1 zucchini or other summer squash (Gadzukes is a nice sweet-fleshed dry type), chopped

1 med onion, diced

¼ cup diced sweet pepper

1 small hot pepper, diced, if you’re inclined

1 cup cheddar or Monterey Jack cheese, grated

1 tsp smoked paprika

1 tsp dark chili powder

½ tsp cumin

3 tblsp fresh herbs – cilantro/lemon or lime basil, parsley chopped

4 flour or corn tortillas

Sauté zucchini and onion in a little bit of oil along with the spices, about 5 minutes. When they are barely translucent, add the beans, corn, herbs and sauté for about 3 minutes more. Divide cheese into four portions. Lay a tortilla open on a plate. Make a burm of ¼ of the cheese down the middle. Add ¼ of the sautéed vegetables along its top. Fold the tortilla flaps in, to make a roll, and turn so that the folded sides are face-down on the plate (which brings the encased cheese to the top). Microwave or put into the toaster oven or oven for a minute or so, just long enough to melt the cheese. Serve with tomato salsa and, if you like, a dab of sour cream.

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/bobby-flay/fire-roasted-snapper-wrapped-in-green-corn-husks-with-charred-corn-charred-jalapeno-salsa-and-jalapeno-pesto-recipe/index.html

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/fish-and-corn-chowder-recipe/index.html

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/guy-fieri/roasted-corn-quesadillas-recipe/index.html

https://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/seasonalcooking/summer/cooknow_corn/recipes/food/views/Cold-Avocado-Corn-Soup-with-Cilantro-Oil-231993

https://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/seasonalcooking/summer/cooknow_corn/recipes/food/views/Summer-Corn-Chowder-with-Bacon-109569

https://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/seasonalcooking/summer/cooknow_corn/recipes/food/views/Corn-Fritters-with-Salsa-103817

https://basic-recipes.com/veget/cn/corn027.htm

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/lemon-curry-corn-fritters-recipe/index.html