65. Caprese Salad and Crostini

It is summer. August, specifically.

There have been many Augusts of Caprese salad. This year is no exception, although the tomatoes aren't coming from my yard this year, but from the CSA. Little candy-sweet sungold grape tomatoes. Romas. Big red lovelies for $1/pound because the farm that raises them doesn't consider them worthy of full price.

Mozzarella, the soft white kind, not the gummy string cheese kind. I found the latest batch at a local grocery chain, hormone free.

Basil from the yard. Handfuls of it. It's getting a little on the anise-ish side of basil this time of year (I've missed the perfect moment to make pesto but I'll still make it).

And we had this package of crostinis from the CSA. Crunchy, tasty, perfect with a slice of mozzarella, a basil leaf, a little orange tomato.

We've had it for dinner, just this and maybe some chicken strips from the freezer for the kids, for 2 nights this week. I'm out of mozzarella but that will be remedied tomorrow.

4. A Hankerin

hanker: possibly from Icelandic "hanga" meaning to cleave to.

I mentioned in Post #2 that we rarely bought meat that didn't come from the CSA in our regular share, unless we really had a hankerin' for something. We have fish and deer and whatever comes from the CSA. Really, that's enough.

But last week at the CSA, it was mostly non-perishables. It's the end of the season, truly, and we're about to take our month long break. Garlic, onions, potatoes, but not much else even remotely close to fresh. Frozen green beans and eggs and ground lamb. Took all that--but I traded the popcorn and apple butter and a few other things. I traded enough that I looked at the other options--sprouting onions, a butternut squash--and asked her about meat.

When we get red meat in our share, it is either ground into burger, made into sausage of various kinds, or rarely cut up into stew meat. We never get regular cuts because they're more expensive--but we can always trade up. Never have before, although I've ordered things special like a brisket for Leo's baptism. So I asked her about meat and she took me back to the cooler. There were fresh cuts back there, not yet frozen, delivered that day. I took a chuck roast and never looked back.

The next day I seared it on the stove and put it in the crockpot. Deglazed the pan with white wine and then sweat 8 cloves of garlic. Chopped up a few carrots, a parsnip, 6 little Japanese turnips, and 4 or 5 large potatoes. Three stalks of celery. All of it into the crockpot. I poured more wine on top and set it to low. Two hours later, I added more wine and a little water. About an hour before dinner, a bit of cornstarch and water.

It was a crowd-pleaser. I can tell my kids are getting older--we had enough leftovers for Mike's breakfast but nothing more. Ah well.

2. Scratch Cooking and Scritch Cooking

I cook from scratch most of the time. I don't have a lot of processed foods--my pantry and freezer are mostly full of ingredients. I have things like canned green beans and frozen vegetables--but not a bunch of frozen microwave meals and stuff like that. Got frugal one year, oh, when Sophia was a baby, and never looked back.

We belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Ours is a combined CSA--several local farms and bakers and so forth gather together, so we don't simply get beets all August long like the first CSA I belonged to. The Amish farmer makes the pickled beets and egg noodles and honey and peaches. My favorite pork farmer provides, well, pork. Little local farms have heirloom and hybrid tomatoes and cucumbers and all the produce that will grow in Missouri and Illinois. Dried beans and locally made tortillas and eggs and teensy little Japanese turnips and butternut squash and whole chickens and on and on. You can trade non-perishables (like the applesauce we never eat) for whatever they have on hand. You can buy extra. You learn how to cook just about anything.

That's what I mean by scritch cooking--cooking what you have even if you wouldn't have chosen it for yourself. Early spring brings greens. Lots of greens. And there are more, tougher, greens later in the summer into the fall. I NEVER ate greens before the CSA. Why would I? Bleah. But no. Olive oil and lemon juice. Or bacon and onion. Or baked in the oven with parmesan cheese. Mmm.

Beets no longer frighten me. Turnips, bok choy, pumpkin, ground lamb, salsa verde, whatever. I pack the fridge with our $50 share and it spreads through the week. No, that's not all I buy for my family to eat. I go to the local supermarket every other week or so--our weekly food bill is probably close to $120 for a family of 5 (well, Leo doesn't eat much...). Less in the summer, more in the winter. It helps, of course, that besides the bit of meat from the CSA, we have a deer in the freezer and some fish from my father-in-law and that's just about it meat-wise unless we get a hankering for something more interesting (rarely, to be honest).

Last night I made a pretty simple dinner of chicken in marsala based sauce with capellini (oh, there is the every-so-often trip to the Italian grocer, I AM SO SPOILED). For dessert, though, I made something that was definitely scritch: peach pumpkin cobbler.

I had a vacuum-sealed package of frozen peaches. I had a jar of peach butter that I was eying suspiciously. I'm not a peach fan. And I had way too much frozen pumpkin. So I dumped these three ingredients into a 9x13 pan and sprinkled it with lots of pumpkin pie spice and some turbinado sugar. Topped it with my mother-in-law's biscuit cobbler recipe and stuck it in the oven.

The girls wouldn't touch it. And I didn't care. I never make them eat dessert. Truly. And I sat down with a little mug of it, topped with just a few tablespoons of vanilla ice cream (because I was, frankly, apprehensive)....and ate the whole thing. It was like a pumpkin pie with a hint of summer and the salt in the biscuit top made it just lovely. Ah.

There was a time when I never would have done something so obnoxious as that. But I'm glad that time is over.