Monday, August 19, 2013

After Wednesday Market Dinner

This isn't so much a recipe, per se, as it is a list of ingredients, borne out of what I had on hand.







We try to go to the new Weyerbacher Wednesday market at the Easton Farmers' Market, which takes place from 4-8pm every, you guessed it, Wednesday. There are some great vendors there who sell good dinnertime fare, such as Switchback Pizza and V-Lish Vegan Soup Company. Purple Cow/aka Bank Street Creamery is also there with inspired ice cream flavors, too. Invariably we end up with a couple of the little pizzas from Switchback, but the kids (and us, too) typically need something else to eat when we get home. And that's what happened last week. I was still hungry, but it was almost 7pm and I was not interested in cooking because I had been doing that all day already. I wanted quick assembly but lots of taste.  I threw this together quickly. It started with an investigation into what was in the fridge. Here's a glimpse of my internal monologue......

Oh! There's a leftover cooked ear of corn on the cob.
(I scraped the kernels off.)

Well, if I have corn, what else is in here? Jimmy Nardello red peppers
(These are so sweet you can and should just eat them raw. Two of those, from Salvaterra's, washed, sliced thin, extra seeds removed, went in.)

Well, if you have peppers and corn, you need tomatoes, too.....
(In went a couple of roughly chopped heirlooms from Scholl's.)

Wait a minute. I think I still have a white cucumber!
(How overjoyed I was to find someone was growing these in the Lehigh Valley, because I didn't this year. Thanks, Firelight Farms! No need to peel locally and naturally grown cucumbers. Washed and sliced thin, and then cut in half. Done.)

From there, I went to the backyard, grabbed a half dozen leaves of basil from the garden, and added a little bit of feta cheese. Admittedly, the latter was not a market purchase but if you bought a tangy cheese from Klein Farms, BaD Farm or Cranberry Creek, you're one step ahead of me. Or you could leave it out. I just wanted a sharp counterpoint to the veggies. Add a good glug or two of your best extra virgin olive oil--you'll want something with a fruity or otherwise assertive taste--and you're good to go.

See what I mean? This is less a recipe than a list of ingredients. I could have kept going, and added zucchini, but I stopped there.

But here's a simple rule of thumb for cooking, and maybe even for life. Go with what you got. Go with what feels right. Go with what tastes good together. It's hard to mess up during the height of the season. We are supposed to be eating many of these veggies together. It just makes sense. I find I can't eat this stuff fast enough, to keep up with production, during August and into September. 

If you make this, or make a variation, please share details!

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