Homework

I understand why many people don’t care for okra: it’s slimy.  Or at least it has that tendency.  Even while you’re just trimming it, it exhibits an alarming capacity for oozing a clear sticky substance that sort of splits the difference between Superglue, dog drool, and spider silk.  The bits you pare away often stick quite staunchly to the knife blade.  Or your fingers.  Or the cutting board.  Or the scraps bowl.

When you cook okra with moist heat, as when you put it into a gumbo, for instance, this sliminess becomes more pronounced.  In gumbo, it becomes a thickener, part of what gives gumbo its characteristic texture. In other applications, well, it’s just slimy.  Oozy.  Sticky.  It reminds even me — and I like okra — of the rather amazing microbial cavedwelling life forms known as snottites.

What many folks don’t know is that okra can be prepared to be slimeless.  One way is to pickle it.  The acid counteracts the slime.  I don’t pickle okra myself, I buy it in jars made by the good people at Talk o’ Texas, who are not just whistlin’ Dixie when they claim their pickled okra is crisp.  I like the hot kind, but the mild isn’t bad either.

The other way you can make slimeless okra is to cook it very very fast over very very high heat, with no added liquid at all, in the style of a classic “dry” Chinese stir-fry.  That’s what I usually do.  Sometimes I flavor it in Chinese ways, other times I flavor it in Indian/Bengali/Pakistani ways.  So  I don’t know if this is an actual recipe in Bengali cookery, it may well be. To me, it is the application of a Chinese technique to Bengali flavors and oh, is it tasty. And not the tiniest bit slimy.  It’s all about the intensity of heat and the absence of water.

You must have small, thin okra pods for this to work.  Larger woodier ones will not cook quickly enough and will become slimy from their own internal water being cooked.

About 1 pound cleaned, trimmed small fresh okra pods
2 medium onions, diced
3 Tablespoons or so minced fresh ginger root
about 2 Tablespoons panch phoran
about a half teaspoon ground turmeric
one or two fresh hot chilis, minced (optional)
salt
juice of one very juicy or two not so juicy limes
a couple of handfuls of cilantro, coarsely chopped
neutral cooking oil or ghee

Cook over a high brisk flame at all times. Heat enough oil/ghee to coat the bottom of the pan in a heavy large pan, big enough to accept all the okra in a single layer. WHen it is almost smoking, add the onion and ginger and cook until the onion is thoroughly brown but not burnt. Add the panch phoran, turmeric, and hot chilis if using, and stir-fry until the mustard seeds in the panch phoran begin to pop. Add okra and toss to coat the okra with the oil. Fry, stirring frequently, until okra is just soft, about 5-7 minutes in all. Add the cilantro and toss, stirfry for about a minute, and dump in the lime juice, stirring just enough to deglaze the pan. Salt to taste and serve.

Once you’ve got your supply of shelled, washed, cooked beans, what next?

There are so many options it’s honestly hard to know where to begin, but here are two of my favorites.

For beans that will lend themselves readily to Tex-Mex, Cajun, and many Southeastern US style meals, stew your cooked beans with a large quantity of minced onion, sauteed in some plain oil (peanut or canola or whatever) with a somewhat smaller quantity of bell pepper and a similar quantity of celery, a few crushed cloves of garlic, and a little cayenne or other spicy pepper.  Sautee all the veggies first until the onions are transparent and soft, then add the beans and enough water or broth to just barely cover the beans.  Simmer until about half of the water has cooked off.  This will give the flavorings time to penetrate the beans, and vice versa.  Salt, stir, then wait 10 minutes, and taste and add more salt if it needs it. To further Tex-Mexicanize this method, add ground cumin.

My favorite way to eat beans as cooked above is in a bowl, topped with an approximately equal volume of fresh homemade pico de gallo or salsa of whatever kind I happen to have made lately.  Today’s salsa is diced Tula Black and Pink  Brandywine tomatoes from the garden, lots of onion and garlic, two huge bunches of cilantro diced fine, salt, lemon juice, and three fresh ripe guajillo chiles and one fresh ripe tientsin chili from my garden.  It’s awful tasty.   My second favorite way to eat beans cooked like this is with hot cornbread.

For beans that will make your imaginary Italian granddad smile, stew the beans with a moderate quantity of minced onion sauteed until just turning brown in a generous sufficiency of good olive oil, then add a couple of cloves of sliced garlic and several large fresh sage leaves cut into a chiffonade (roll the leaves up like a cigar, then slice across into thin threads).  Or use a slightly smaller amount of dried sage.  Sautee the onion, garlic, and sage until they smell awesome, then add the beans, and again, just enough water/broth to bring the water level up to the top of the beans.  Add a little salt and a little black pepper and simmer it down until the water is halfway gone.  Taste, correct the salt if need be.

If you like, you can toss beans prepared this way with a small shape pasta like farfalle or rotini.  Gild the lily with a little slosh more olive oil, and some chopped parsley, which are also nice even if you don’t have the pasta with it.  I also like sometimes to dribble a tiny bit of good balsamic vinegar (not the $2.99 crap) over the top of the beans.

We had a great big Hollywood-style summer storm early this morning, dark and windy, with plenty of thunder and a truly impressive sudden pounding rain.  After it had cleared I went out into the garden to check on things… and to pick up the windfall.

There were two more large tomatoes, in addition to these, but they didn’t all fit on the plate.  Later today I plan to make some pico de gallo and some salsa.  They’ll go with the mess of kidney beans I cooked up yesterday.  Mmmm, beans and fresh salsa!

Do you recognize the objects in this picture?  They look a little like bean pods, don’t they?  Not the nicest bean pods, perhaps.  A little dried-out looking, a little brown and spotty. Probably not good to eat. Or are they?

The little hints of red you can see in there might be a clue as to what’s really going on here.  These aren’t way over-the-hill green beans, as it happens.  They’re kidney beans.  If you have never encountered shelling beans still in their pods, it can be a little startling to realize that they start their lives looking quite different to what we think of when we think about kidney beans, or black beans or flageolets, or any other kind of shelling bean.

They look so different, in their raw and completely unprocessed state, in fact, that many people won’t buy them, afraid that they won’t know what to do with them.  That’s more or less why I ended up with these: a greengrocer friend gave me heaps of them earlier today because they’d been sitting unloved in her coolers for several weeks.  Ironically, the very customers who had told my greengrocer friend how much they loved beans and how they wished they could buy fresh local beans from her had simply not bought them.

When my friend told me a week or so ago that the beans weren’t getting purchased, I said “I bet customers are freaked out by the way they look.  I bet they don’t know what to do with beans that have to be shelled.”  Seems that I was right.  Which is her loss, but my gain, and as a thank-you, I’m  writing this little shelling bean tutorial, so that next time she sells shelling beans, she can point people to a blog post that explains what to do with these unpromising little podlets.

What you do is quite simple.  You sit down with a bowl, and a bowl or bag to toss the empty shells in, and you pull apart the pods with your fingers.

The pods are pretty sturdy.  If they are on the dry side, they will be leathery or cardboardy in texture.  If they are just off the vines, they will be woody but flexible.  Usually all you have to do is pinch the bean to open the seams up, then split down one seam or the other (or both!) with your finger, taking the beans with you.

Discard any beans that are discolored, moldy, extremely shriveled, or extremely tiny.  Throw the shells into the trash or onto your compost pile.

When you’ve shelled them all, give them a good wash in a colander and let them drain for ten or fifteen minutes.

Shelling beans is a fairly quick process.  I know it sounds tedious, but really it doesn’t take long at all.  I shelled almost five quarts of beans in about 40 minutes today, while hanging out in the kitchen with my Belovedary.  That is a lot of beans.  But still not a lot of work.

It’s worth doing large batches of bean-shelling and bean-cooking when you have the time, so that then you will have the beans available when you want them.  Beans can be frozen directly after shelling and washing, or you can freeze them after you cook them.

To cook fresh beans, put them into a large heavy pot or a slow-cooker on the high setting with an equal volume of cold water.  Boil until they are nice and soft all the way through, but not mushy.

You can eat them as-is once they are thoroughly cooked, or use them in recipes, just as you would use canned cooked beans.

A note about kidney beans/red beans:  Red and white kidney beans are high in haemagglutins, a class of chemicals that can cause a form of usually nonfatal but highly unpleasant poisoning whose symptoms include vomiting and diarrhea.  The way to avoid it is thorough cooking of the beans.  A minimum of ten minutes in which the entire pot of beans is at or above the boiling point of water — 212F, or 100C — takes care of it.  This is why if you cook them in a slow-cooker, you should cook them on the higher heat setting, not the lower, and ensure that things do boil properly.

Leftover salad is an unlovely thing.  What was sprightly and crisp, distinct and resilient becomes soft and tired, limp and worn.  If you have dressed the salad, especially, you can expect to find it the next morning in a swamp of its own juices, sodden and dispiriting.

The temptation is to just compost the lot of it.  There are some things even a guinea pig won’t eat.  But good fresh veg are expensive, and if you grow them yourself it seems even more insulting to just let the food go to waste.  It’s not spoilt, after all, it’s just… not very nice.

Enter the blender.  Why fight what is obviously the natural tendency of leftover salad to want to liquefy?  While the salad may no longer be very satisfying as salad, it can make a fantastic cold soup, a sort of gazpacho-y concoction that is, to tell the truth, not too dissimilar from eating a salad, except that now the liquid texture and the softness of the components have become an asset.

Last night I made salata horiatiki for a get-together, and having overestimated the number of mouths it might be likely to feed, I came home with a fair quantity of leftovers.  Salata horiatiki, for those now scratching their heads and wondering what fresh hell I’m up to with this fancy-pants foreign salad business, is just a rustic Greek village-style salad, usually composed of onion, tomato, cucumber, sweet peppers, and oregano, with a wine vinegar and olive oil dressing.  Usually it also has feta, sometimes ripe olives, sometimes little pickled hot peppers, peperoncini.  It’s an easy-peasy salad.  Chop everything up, toss it together, sprinkle your oregano over the top — I used the blossoms from my Greek oregano in the Forest of Unruly Herbs in the kitchen garden — a little salt, a little black pepper, and dress it with 1 part wine vinegar to 2 parts olive oil.   Quick and easy and delicious and, as you might expect from peasant food, uses up what’s fresh and abundant this time of year.  Perfect.

Not so perfect the next day, though.  But this need not worry you, as I discovered just this morning.  Put your leftover salad in the blender and press “transmogrify.”  (Or “puree,” if your blender somehow lacks a  “transmogrify” button.)  If it seems too thick, you can add a little water, or throw in another tomato or cucumber, as you like.  It makes a lovely soup, which you may, if you like, drink out of a tall glass as I just did, for your breakfast.

A nice thing to add are a few oil-packed anchovy fillets.  Let your conscience be your guide.  After you give them a whiz, though, you won’t notice anything like a HELLO I’M AN ANCHOVY flavor, but more a mysterious, profound savoriness that, as the good Rev. Sydney Smith wrote “half suspected, animate(s) the whole.”  (Even if he did say it about the onion.  The anchovy sauce, by contrast, he described as magic, and he was correct.  Who doesn’t need more magic in their life?)

Speaking of Rev. Smith, you do know the poem I refer to, don’t you?   Well, you do now.  It’s called “A Recipe For A Salad.”  It does make a very fine salad, too. should you choose to follow his instructions some time.  The recipe is actually for a salad dressing, so choose your greens and so on as you will, then proceed with the Rev. Smith.

To make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes,
passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.

Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.

Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
And, lastly, o’er the flavored compound toss
A magic soupcon of anchovy sauce.

O, green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!
‘T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat:
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day.” –   Rev. Sydney Smith (1771–1845)

The weather report says that the heat index reached 125F or so today here in Baltimore, which is simply unspeakable.

So I won’t speak of it.  Instead I will show you pictures.

Lilies and hydrangea from the garden.  I’ve been cutting the lilies as they hit their peak, and bringing them into the house so they can stink up the joint with that heady, sweet scent of theirs.

This morning’s farmer’s market was a wonderful orgy of high-summer fruit.  We bought white peaches and yellow, white nectarines (one of my favorites), and the most glorious tiny sweet yellow-orange cherry tomatoes.    It’s a little MStew of me, but I always think fruit looks prettier on Depression-era glass, somehow.  (And to make up for the MStew quotient, you can enjoy my very old, very faded, very seriously worn and stained tablecloth, heh.)

So pretty.  Now if my own tomatoes would just hurry up and ripen…

This is some crazy weather, isn’t it?

Batidas — buy some frozen fruit.  What kind?  What kind do you like?  There’s always frozen guava pulp in my freezer, that much I can tell you.  But strawberries are delicious and easier to find at the grocery store.  Puree the frozen fruit in a blender.  Add cachaca or rum, if you’re a grownup, puree again, and either eat with a spoon or drink with a straw.  If you’re not a grownup, use some ginger ale instead of the hooch.  Technically it’s still mostly fruit, and therefore mostly good for you.

Leaf Roll-Ups — wash and dry a bunch of large leaves — chard, lettuce of whatever sort, spinach.  Probably not kale or broccoli leaves, they’re a little too tough.  But savoy cabbage could work.  Find some savory leftovers lurking in the fridge and nuke them if needed.  Alternatively, julienne or shred some leftover meat, sausage, fish, cheese, etc.  Plop a reasonable quantity of leftovers or shredded/julienned proteiny matter onto the end of one of your leaves and roll it up like a cigar made of yum.  Do not smoke it.  Eat it.  Repeat until hunger is satisfied.  This is particularly grand with egg salad.

Deviled Eggs — I know, I know, you have to cook the eggs.  But really, this will not heat up your kitchen much if you do it the right way.  The Right Way To Hardcook Eggs being to put eggs into a pan of cold water that is deep enough to submerge all the eggs by about an inch and a half.  Put it on the heat with a lid on it.  Bring it to a full rolling boil.  Turn off the heat and let the eggs stand in the water for 18 minutes.  Set a timer.  After 18 minutes, drain the eggs and fill the pot with cold water.  Add some ice or an ice pack.  Let sit for a while, until eggs are completely cool.    When you’re ready, peel the eggs and off you go.  I highly recommend deviled eggs made with a healthy dollop of sweet chili garlic paste stirred into the egg yolks and mayo.  Or go totally old-school and do mayo, mustard, a pinch of celery seed, and some finely chopped bread and butter pickles.

Things On Bread — Open-faced sandwiches in the Scandinavian manner are highly agreeable when the weather is evil.  I adore smoked kippers, sardines, and other delicious oily little fish, particularly with onion and greens.  If you don’t, try dry-style large curd cottage cheese with lots of black pepper, some salt, and a little thinly-sliced onion.  Use sturdy, dense bread.  Oh, and you might also save out a hard-cooked egg or two, and slice them, and eat them on bread with good mustard and maybe some lettuce.  This is also a good time of year to just get an interesting chunk of cheese, a piece of good bread, and pour yourself a beer.  With maybe a little green salad, it’s enough dinner for a heat wave.

Cold Cream of Pea Soup –  Frozen peas. Blender.  Thin with half veg or chicken stock, half milk/soymilk/half-and-half.  Dill.  Lemon zest.  A small amount of onion.  Blender blender blender. Black pepper.  Salt.  Sip.  More filling than you’d think, and so pretty.

Grown-Up Ice Cream Float, Butch Version — If you’re going to do this, do it right.  Pour a glass about 2/3 full of cold Guinness, or if you prefer, an Imperial stout.  Add 1-2 scoops of extremely high quality vanilla or dulce de leche ice cream.  Gild the lily with a few shreds of candied ginger if you like.

Grown-Up Ice Cream Float, High Femme Version — Again, if you’re going to do this, do it right.  Pour a glass about 2/3 full of fruit lambic–peach or raspberry are best.  Add 1-2 scoops of lemon or raspberry sorbet.  Again with the shreds of candied ginger if the spirit moves you.

Grown-Up Ice Cream Float, Non-Alcoholic Version — Get some real ginger beer, not namby-pamby ginger ale like you drink when you have a tummyache.  You want something with a bite, like Gosling’s or Reed’s.  One scoop lemon sorbet, one scoop vanilla ice cream.  Good enough for anyone.

‘Cause dayyum, it’s hot out there.

1. Flavored Waters — I see them for sale in the shops and I think “I may really be incapable of understanding how far people will go to avoid doing something that is nearly effortless to begin with.”  Because $1.49 for 20 ounces of water with a little mint in it?  It’s not highway robbery if you voluntarily part with your money, my friends.  Get yourself some sort of reasonably wide-mouthed jug (a recycled glass juice bottle is tops) and fill it 7/8 of the way with water.  Plunk in something that tastes nice: cucumber slices, citrus zest, borage flowers, mint leaves, sliced fruit of any kind, a couple chunks of watermelon plus a few chunks of rind (white part only), a quartered tomato, basil leaves, a clove or two, orange flower water, rosewater, kewra water, knotted strips of lemongrass, a pinch of fennel seed. Play with the combinations and mix it up.  Try mint plus orange flower water, cucumber plus rosewater, watermelon plus basil, borage flowers plus halved green grapes, tomato plus fennel seed, citrus zest and a dill blossom.  Refrigerate your water and its add-ins and let infuse for an hour or two before drinking.

2. Cucumber-Almond Granita — Puree two large peeled seeded cucumbers in a blender.  Add a couple of handfuls of almonds and a couple handfuls of green seedless grapes or honeydew melon.  Add a tiny splash of orange flower water and just a touch of honey or agave nectar.  Pour into an ice cube tray and freeze.  To serve, pop out as many cubes as you want and turn them into slush in your blender or food processor.

3.  DIY Creamsicles — 2 parts freshly squeezed orange juice to 1 part buttermilk (or soymilk plus a little extra lime juice), about a half a lime’s worth of lime juice, and a little agave syrup.  Pour into popsicle molds or paper cups, freeze, and eat.

4. Beans Love Greens, Hot Weather Version — Drain and rinse a can of good quality cooked white beans like cannellini.  Get a bunch of the nicest, tenderest, most voluptuous greens you can find.  For me, it’s almost always chard straight from the garden but you can have what you like.  Just don’t buy the “prewashed” crap in the cellophane bags please, it’s all ‘prewashed’ in the same gigantic sink, effectively, and people get sick from it.  Also it is neither nice nor tender nor voluptuous and really, what is the point of eating any green vegetable that does not look up at you from the plate, flutter its undulating curves at you, and whisper “I’m lovely, I’m delicious, eat me”?   Anyway, wash and dry your greens and tear them into pieces of a comfortable size.  Make a nest of leaves on your plate.  Top with beans, cherry tomatoes or wedges of larger ones, seeded chunked cucumber, torn basil leaves, some good pitted olives, and, if you like, some kind of salty cheese like feta.  Dress with the best olive oil you can lay hands on, and either good wine or sherry vinegar or lemon juice.

5. The Essence of Fruit Crisp — Prepare and layer on a plate or in a shallow bowl bite-sized pieces of whatever sort of fruit appeals to you.  Stone fruits and berries work best, but you could do this with summer apples and with pears, too.  In a small frying pan, melt a tablespoon or three of salted butter (depending on how many people you plan to feed) and then cook, in the butter, three tablespoons of Grape Nuts to each tablespoon of butter.  As they start to get fragrant, sprinkle with brown sugar and maybe a little cinnamon.  Stir and keep cooking until the sugar is all melted, just a moment or so.  Drizzle the butter/sugar/Grape Nuts over the fruit.  Perfect for when just plain sliced fruit doesn’t seem desserty enough.  If you want to bump it up another notch, sprinkle a pinch of really good sea salt over the whole shebang.

6. Water Chestnuts with Coconut Milk and Shrimp — Use FRESH water chestnuts only for this, or in a pinch, jicama.  Peel and julienne the water chestnuts, keeping them submerged in cold water before and after cutting so they don’t discolor.  Roughly chop some shelled, deveined shrimp — cooked or raw, it’s up to you.  If you can get good raw ones, it’s nice that way.  Make a mixture of 4 parts lime juice, 3 parts coconut milk, and as much fresh minced chili and onion as you want.   Mix the lime/coconut mixture with the shrimp.  Drain the water chestnuts well and add.  Refrigerate for an hour.  Salt to taste.  Vegheads, just sub nice fresh firm tofu.

7.  Vietnamese rice-paper “salad” rolls, aka gai cuon — Oishii Eats will show you how, and her mom is hilarious.

8.  The Best Peanut Butter Sandwich Ever — You want some good, crusty French-style bread.  Baguette is great.  Slice a hank of it the long way like a sub sandwich roll, and remove some but not all of the crumb.  You can also do this on a really dense seedy wholegrain but try it with the French loaf first.  OK.  Get you some peanut butter, whatever kind you like.  A little sweet is OK.  Spread a thin — and I am not funning with you, I mean thin! — layer on both halves of the bread.  Next, you want a little chili paste.  Sambal oelek, the Indonesian spice paste, is fantastic and is what they use at Chicago’s Cafe Lula where they call this the tineka sandwich, but you know, it will work with many different kinds.  Sriracha, sweet chili-garlic paste, toban jian, what you got.  Schmear that right on up into  your peanut butter.  Then you wanna make a nice friendly haystack of shredded carrot, cucumber slices, sprouts, lettuce, definitely some tomato and a little bit of paper-thin sliced onion.  Drizzle just a snoodge of soy sauce on your veggies.  Sweet black soy if you have it.  The Indonesian kind is particularly choice in this, but the Chinese will do fine.  Slap the whole thing together and eat.

9.  Tuna Salad in a Tomato — So maybe the savory peanut butter-chili-veg bomb is too adventuresome for your palate.  That’s okay.  Get a fantastic tomato and slice off the top so you can scoop out the gooey bit in the middle (put the gooey bit in some water and let it infuse, you can pour it through a sieve later, and the water will taste wonderful).  Fill your tomato up with tuna salad instead.  Or egg salad.  Or chicken salad.  Or tofu salad.  Or… you get the idea.

10.  Banana Cream — Peel, then toss in a plastic bag and freeze, a few very ripe bananas.  Cut them into chunks, put them in the blender, and puree to a soft-serve ice cream  sort of texture. Add a little bit of vanilla extract.  Stir in chocolate chips if you like, or shredded sweetened coconut, or toasted nuts.

Here is a list of 20 things to make and eat when it is too hot to cook.

1. Balela — drain and rinse some canned cooked chickpeas and some black beans, mince half an onion or so and a couple cloves of garlic, roughly chop a big bunch of parsley, dice a few ripe tomatoes if you have them, combine all this in a large bowl with plenty of lemon juice/olive oil vinaigrette, salt and pepper to taste, and if you like it and have it, some za’atar.  Let stand in the fridge for an hour or two before serving.

2. Hummus — cooked chickpeas (skinned please) whirred in the food processor with tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and a small sufficiency of fresh raw garlic.  Should not be as thick as mashed potatoes… thin with some water or bean liquid so it just barely holds peaks.

3. Gazpacho — do it the Spanish way.  David Rosengarten tells you how.

4. Ceviche — impeccably fresh fish or crustaceans in a largish dice with a liberal amount of lemon/lime juice, some salt, some onion, and some hot chili.  Cilantro if you like it, or not.  Marinate an hour or so.  The fish will firm up and become opaque, the result of acid at work.  Be sure to drink a cup of the liquor, called leche de tigre — tiger’s milk — reportedly a great hangover cure, and powerful stuff regardless, good for what ails you.

5. Tabbouleh — cooking the bulgur is the only cooking you have to do and it’s nothing more than pouring boiling water into uncooked bulgur (2 parts boiling water to 1 part bulgur, by volume), stirring, and waiting until the water is absorbed.  Parsley parsley parsley forever.  Chopped tomato, perhaps diced cucumber, some minced garlic, maybe some minced onion.  Lemon juice and olive oil, salt and pepper.  C’est tout.

6. Cucumber-Cilantro Salad

7. Fruit and Herb Salad — You can improvise this depending on what you’ve got.  Blueberries, chiffonade of sage, apple, and pecans.  Watermelon, basil, tomato, and ricotta salata.  Peaches, diced prosciutto, lemon balm.  Canteloupe, thyme, fresh ginger juice, and soft fresh goat cheese.  You don’t need to dress these, but a little salt and black pepper go a long way.

8. Carrot-Jicama Slaw — Shred, combine with a dressing of plain yogurt loosened with a little olive oil and lemon juice.  Add some cumin, cardamom, ground coriander, black pepper, tart dried cherries or cranberries, pecans or walnuts, salt.  Stir it all up, let it stand an hour or so, eat.

9. Cold Spicy Celery and Smoked Tofu — slice celery on the bias as thinly as possible, toss with julienned smoked tofu, dress with lime juice, soy sauce, sesame oil, and a little bit of hot chili paste.  Marinate for a half hour or so before eating.

10. Fattoush — This is what you do with stale pita, or any storebought pita since it’s already stale.  Pita torn into bite-sized pieces, tossed with whatever summer veg you have, including leafy ones: purslane is excellent, so is romaine, but chard is nice too.  Tomatoes are de rigeur, and so are cukes and sweet peppers.  Some raw onion, a vinaigrette (red wine vinegar or lemon juice), a healthy sprinkle of za’atar.  Toss, salt/pepper, eat.

11. Caprese salad — dead ripe tomatoes, beautiful leaves of basil, fresh mozzarella, olive oil, salt, pepper, done.

12. Panzanella — Italian for “fattoush.”  Add some mozzarella or ricotta salata to your day-old-bread/veg/vinaigrette, or perhaps some drained oil-packed tuna.

13. Cold Stone Fruit Soup — peel and chunk up whatever kind of stone fruits are best.  Peaches, plums, cherries, apricots.  Puree in the blender with plain unsweetened yogurt.  Add some cream or buttermilk if you like.  Or prosecco, Champagne, Sauternes, or some other lightly sweet white wine.  A little cinnamon, cardamom, or nutmeg can be nice.  Or a little ginger juice.  Or freshly ground black pepper.  There are a billion variations.  Fold in whipped cream, if you’re nasty.

14. Cold Ginger-Carrot-Orange Soup — quick and dirty.  Carrot juice + orange juice, both fresh squeezed, in approximately equal parts.  A little salt, a little black pepper, and plenty of fresh ginger and its juice grated into the soup.  Let it stand a wee while for the flavors to marry.

15. Quick-pickled Daikon (with or without carrot)

16. Guacamole — Restrain your impulse to overthink this.  Avocado, lots of lime juice, a small amount of crushed garlic, salt.  Puree, eat, repeat.

17. Prosciutto and Fruit — Melon’s nice but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Plums, tart cherries, apricots, peaches?  Oh yeah.

18. Salsa — You have tomatoes, tomatilloes, peppers, cilantro, onion, garlic.  You know what to do.

19. Sweet Corn Salads — Cut the corn off the cob.  Combine with whatever sounds good.  Salsa, for instance.  Or chopped tomato, a little onion, some basil or parsley or both, and some feta.

20. Tofu — Perfect fresh soft tofu, in a dish, with a liberal splosh of the best soy sauce you can lay hands on.  Sprinkle on finely chopped green onion, fried shallot, dried shaved bonito, toasted sesame seeds, or whatever else piques your fancy.  Scoff if you like but I know what I know.

This is one of those dinners that is not for the kind of person who is afraid of mixing things on the plate.  I caramelized zucchini in a tablespoon of olive oil with whole cloves of garlic — a medium heat, with infrequent stirring and a good stout pan, will get it done in a reasonable amount of time — and then fried two eggs over easy in the residual oil left in the pan.  After breaking the yolks, I ate the garlic and zucchini with yolk and bits of eggwhite and some black pepper.  Sublime, especially because I made a nice cucumber salad to chase it with.  The salad is a riff on the cucumber salad from Friday last, only since I had no cilantro left I used some onions pickled in rice vinegar that were lingering in the back of the fridge.  Salt-fermented chiles add a little dimension and floral heat.  A fine contrast to rich eggyolk and unctuous-yet-nicely-crusted zucchini and garlic.

These tomato babies were hanging out in their fetching green hats, soaking up the sun when I went out in the garden a little while ago.

Ushi likes to watch over the garden and supervise me while I work.