Tacos de calabacitas

After yesterday's haywire contortions, it's nice to return to something simpler, earthier. This recipe takes the best of your summer garden, tomatoes, zucchini, summer squash, and transforms them into fresh, rich, delectable vegetarian tacos. They're simple enough for an everyday dinner and special enough for company. This one is headed straight for our summer menu rotation.

Tacos de calabacitas
Adapted from a recipe by Julian Medina, chef and owner of Tolache in Manhattan, and printed in the June 21, 2010 issue of The New York Times
Yield 4 servings
Time 30 minutes

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons minced onion
1/2 cup diced yellow summer squash
1/2 cup diced zucchini
1/2 cup corn kernels, preferably fresh (we used frozen)
1 jalapeño, stemmed, seeded and finely chopped
1/2 cup diced tomato or quartered cherry tomatoes
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
dash cumin
salt
1/2 cup Monterey Jack cheese, grated
8 corn tortillas
1 tablespoon minced cilantro (optional)

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, heat the oil until shimmering. Add onion and sauté until translucent, about 2 minutes. Add squash, zucchini, corn kernels and jalapeno. Sauté until squash and zucchini are lightly browned, about 3 minutes. Add tomatoes, oregano, cumin, and salt to taste.

Cover, reduce heat to medium-low, and cook, stirring once or twice, until squash, zucchini and tomatoes release their juices and begin to blend, 5 to 7 minutes. Uncover, and adjust salt as needed. Sprinkle with cheese, cover, and cook until cheese is melted, about 1 minute. Remove from heat and keep warm.

Preheat a griddle or large heavy skillet over medium heat. Working in batches, warm the tortillas on the griddle, about one minute a side. Place the warmed tortillas on a platter and cover with foil to keep warm.

Arrange two warm tortillas on each of four plates. Place equal portions of filling in the center of each tortilla. Garnish with a sprinkling of cilantro, and serve.

Scrambled eggs with chive flowers

This week's CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box had another generous bundle of flowering chives. Finally! A chance to taste them.

I sautéed them in a little salted butter and sprinkled them on scrambled eggs. They were absolutely delicious, tasting delicately of chives. I'd steeled myself for bitterness, but to my surprise, they were not bitter. Unfortunately, the sautéing process softened the blossoms and rendered them not-so-photogenic. Next time I think I'll try the flowers raw or maybe sauté them very lightly. That would make a much prettier presentation.

So be brave and try your chive flowers! In the immortal words of Willy Wonka, "Everything inside is eatable. I mean edible. I mean you can eat everything!" (By the way, these were just regular old chives and not Chinese or garlic chives which have white flowers.)

Squirrel!

Squirrel!

The girls and I enjoyed a lazy evening tonight, watching Up. That movie never fails to bring me to tears. I'm such a sap.

These slow, unscheduled moments have been precious and few at our house. And from listening to friends and reading blogs, rare at others' households as well.

Like this industrious little critter I caught on camera this morning, we've been scurrying about with our fall activities. Raking fallen leaves and pine needles. Many, many bags of leaves. Last weekend, Will planted 130 tulip bulbs. As he dug into the earth, he discovered a little cache of buried acorns. Poor squirrel. A few meals lost.

We're hoping that we won't be providing a lavish bulb banquet for our neighborhood critters. So we're trying a tip I'd heard. Plant the tulip bulbs as usual. Add a layer of dirt. Then place chicken wire over the planted bulbs. Add a little more dirt and mulch. The chicken wire should hinder the squirrels from digging up the bulbs. Last spring, we had a pitiful tulip showing. A few scattered flowers here and there, the remnants of larger plantings. If the chicken wire works, I hope to have some lovely swathes of flowers. We'll see.

...and you've got a margarita.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend casually dropped that it was time to seed the lawn and add lime.

To which I almost replied, "Add tequila and Cointreau, and you've got a margarita."

I managed to bite my tongue in time. Because, you know, ditzy Texan party mom is not an image I have to try to cultivate. Sometimes it comes just a little too naturally.

Later, a very nice man at Needham Garden Center set me straight on the lime business. It has nothing to do with citrus at all. New England soils are acidic and are made even more so by precipitation, decomposing leaves, grasses, etc. Lawn grasses lose their appetite in acidic soils, turning puny and starved and thin. Very much like the ragtag survivors in my lawn. So to add alkalinity to the soil and restore the pH to something more neutral, lime is added.

Ironic, isn't it? In Austin, limestone was everywhere. It lay underground under a thin scraping of soil. It was heavily used as a native building material. The Austin soil was so alkaline that one couldn't grow azaleas without peat moss-swathed contortions. Now, I've moved to a place where the soil is so acidic, I have to add lime every year or so. Just so the grass can grow.

Austin and Boston. As different as chalk and cheese. I've literally moved from chalk to cheese.

Why all the lawn angst? I've just realized that our reel mower no longer cuts well. It's no fault of the mower. It's because we no longer have grass. We have sedge...and violets...and some densely matted, low groundcover with tiny flowers. I'm no suburban green grass fanatic, but I don't think the haunted, abandoned house look carries over past Halloween.

So this is my task before leaves fall. (And they're already turning so I'd better hurry). Seed and fertilize my blighted lawn. Add lime in two weeks.

(P.S. After all this lawn work, I may need a margarita. Here's my recipe. It's yummy.)

One potato, two potato, three potato, four...

Did I tell you about our Yukon Gold potato? The one I lost in the depths of the pantry this past spring? By the time I rediscovered it, it had begun to sprout. Pretzel Boy insisted that we plant it. So we did.

We cut the potato into pieces. Each piece had one shoot. Will planted the pieces about two inches deep. The plants took a while to grow. We thought they'd died. But grow, they did. And look what we got from just two of the plants.

Talk about accidental gardening at its best!

For dinner tonight, we roasted the potatoes with garlic. They were moist with lovely, slightly crisp edges. Agatha did a wonderful job. Yum.

Roast potatoes with garlic
2 lbs potatoes
5 cloves garlic
3 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat oven to 425F. Chop potatoes into 1/2" thick pieces. Slice garlic cloves about 1/8" thick. Toss potatoes and garlic with olive oil in a baking pan. Salt and pepper to taste. Bake for around 30 minutes, stirring potatoes once or twice.

Garlic-lime halibut

Market day today. Everything on this plate was either grown in our garden or purchased at the farmers market, including amazingly fresh halibut steaks. As we learn to cook without our kitchen, I find that we're eating healthier. Grilled meats and vegetables. Little added oil or butter. Lots of leafy greens.

Produce at the farmers market can be expensive. It's a real factor for people who're working with a tight budget, and sadly, sometimes the emptiest calories are the cheapest. However, I've found that our food bills haven't gone up as I've begun to purchase more from farmers markets. I wonder if it's because the food is more flavorful and therefore more satisfying. We're also eating more vegetables and smaller portions of meat which reduces cost. Growing one's own vegetables is another option. I know a couple of families who have thriving vegetable gardens in their front yards. Attractive landscaping doesn't have to be all shrubs, annuals, and water-guzzling lawn grasses.

And speaking of growing vegetables, does anyone know where I can get mustard seed and dill seed? I'm planning to make refrigerator dill pickles with our cucumbers, and can't find these at my usual haunts.

Garlic-lime halibut
1 and 1/4 lbs halibut steak
juice of 2 limes
2 large cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt
pepper

In a small bowl, mix lime juice, minced garlic, and 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste.

Preheat grill to medium heat. Spoon marinade onto both sides of halibut. Place on grill. Cook approximately 5 minutes per side, until firm and flaky.

Delicious and so easy.

Blustery day for butterfly bush

I've wanted to take photos of our butterfly bush for weeks now.

It sprawls overgrown, arcing at shoulder-height over the path to our front door, nudging visitors onto the grass. It thrums with life...bees of various sizes, a spectacular butterfly, and tiny, nondescript, energetic butterflies.

This morning, I finally had a few spare minutes. Today was a blustery day. Branches dipped and swooped in the gusts. It was a difficult day to shoot. As soon as I'd have a subject in focus, the entire branch would drop out of frame.

It was as difficult for the insects. The elegant butterfly flattened its wings against the wind.

And as the branch bucked and swayed, the butterfly tacked its wings against the gusts. Angling. Reacting. Riding the tossing blossoms.

I've been feeling a bit like that lately. Like an insect hanging onto a wildly bucking branch on a gusty day. But like the bees, I'm blown off, correct course, and I try again. Nervewracking, but at least I'm surrounded by flowers.

Photoedibles

I wandered out amongst our gardens this afternoon. With the weekend rains, the plants have edged past luxuriant into Audrey II-wanna-be territory. Actually "gardens" is too manicured a term for the motley sprawl of greenery and blooms in our backyard. We'd popped the vegetables into any available empty bed space. This lack of planning shows in the riotous disorder of flowers, foliage, and edibles. A landscape designer would wince. A cook, however, might be intrigued.

Between the kitchen demo and the persistent little tummy bug raging through the whole family, we haven't had a chance to enjoy as much garden produce as we'd like. We just harvested huge bags of fresh lettuce, mustard greens, and basil. Along with the tomatoes, corn, and squash from the farmers market, they'll make delicious foundations for meals in the next few days.

First harvest

Our first harvest from our gardens. Mixed leaf lettuce. Beautiful. And they made a delish salad. Really fresh produce seems to have an intensity of flavor that's unmatched by its grocery store counterparts.

It feels odd that lettuce is a summer crop here. It's a late fall/winter crop in Texas. Disorienting. Unlike summer crops in Austin that you have to water lavishly, the lettuces have been almost carefree. I think we've watered them three times and weeded once. Even I (with the brownish thumb) can't mess that up.

I also learned something new today. You harvest the outer lettuce leaves, leaving the inner leaves to grow. Obviously, we never succeeded with lettuce in Austin (the whole brownish thumb thing).

Our vegetables are thriving (other than the unfortunate mustard greens that were devoured by something or lots of somethings). Did you know that Yukon Golds set fruit more readily than most potatoes? And that its fruit is poisonous? We didn't. We're getting a bumper crop of Yukon Golds, all from one potato that had been left sprouting and neglected in the pantry. Will plucked the Yukon Gold fruit today. They look a lot like baby tomatoes, and we didn't want the little girls to use the poisonous fruits for their mud stews.

'Mater

Our first tomato of the season.

Our plant markers were soon erased by rain, sun, whatever. So this is our mystery 'mater. I have high hopes for it. Caprese? Mmmm...

Our cucumbers are flowering and so are the bell peppers. Though we've already mysteriously lost one tiny bell.

I have a confession. I'm not even sure what these plants are. Is that tall one possibly corn? We did plant popcorn though I don't know what we'd do with the harvest. I'm a reluctant gardener at best, but I love the end product. The fresh flowers. The greenery. The edibles. So I try. In a week or so, the farmers market here will be in full swing. Maybe our vegetable garden will be as well.

Locavore in Beantown

Sounds like a low-budget creature flick on a cable channel, doesn't it? Plot summary: mutant locavores escape their lab and run amuck in Harvard Square. Despite its predatory sound, "locavore" just refers to someone who tries to eat foods that are locally sourced. And it was the Oxford American Dictionary's 2007 Word of the Year. Fantastic the things you can learn while Googling.

Inspired by a friend's bountiful vegetable garden last summer, I thought it would be fun to grow some veggies this season. What's more locally sourced than one's own yard? A couple of days ago, my enthusiastic helpers and I bought the beginnings of a vegetable garden at Russo's. Heirloom tomatoes (Pink Girl and Green Zebra) and strawberries and bell peppers and basil and cucumbers and romaine. Even a pumpkin seedling! (We're getting mighty ambitious). Will they grow well here? Beats me, but we're going to try.



We're also planning to attend the Newton Community Farm's seedling sale which runs this Sunday, May 16, from noon to four. I'm so excited about more seedlings for our garden. Think of the perfect summer tomato salad with basil and mozzarella...tomato and basil still warm from the sun. Okay. Considering my brownish thumb, that may be a fantasy. There's always farmers markets and pick-your-own farms.

If you're at the sale, say "hi." I'll be the one looking befuddled with three kidlings romping about.


Room for something full sun and sprawling?