rebeccmeister | Cooked

Let's see here -

Friday night, I made a big ol' batch of vegetarian chili. It's the best method I've found so far for using up excess vegetarian soy-rizo (

scrottie and I freegan'd three packs of it from BNF about a month ago). Plus, it's a good vehicle for several of the most-abundant produce items I have lying around: onions, celery, carrots, tomatoes, corn, garlic, and peppers in multiple forms. Oh, and more of the chipotle peppers that S got for the purpose of making chipotle-ranch salad dressing. Thing is, I don't really eat salads at home when he isn't around, so the salad dressing making hasn't happened yet. Soon.

And when there's chili, there should be cornbread, amirite? Almost all of the cornmeal is gone, now, which is good.

So then, Saturday. What with the peach-buying and tomato-buying, it was time to do more cooking. First, some vanilla ice cream custard, so there would be ice cream to go with the peaches. Then, a pair of peach galettes:

I used the Smitten Kitchen nectarine galette filling, with a cornmeal pate brisee. Use up more of that cornmeal, eh, eh? However, I don't think I'll be adding this pate brisee recipe to my recipe collection - the cornmeal is too crunchy for my tastes. Otherwise, the galette is DELICIOUS. And almost all of the almond flour is used up.

After that, it was just about time to make dinner. It figures that the year I finally manage to plant zucchinis, our CSA is also giving us oodles and oodles of zucchinis and other summer squashes. There is nothing to be done but to pull out all the stops and phone it in and mix all the metaphors with all the zucchini recipes in the arsenal.

I'd been thinking, the week prior, of making some version of Three Sisters Rice, so it was time to put thoughts into action...with some modifications. I went ahead with some un-chicken broth (Better'n Bullion) and toasted wild rice, adding in as much chopped-up zucchini as I could stand to add. In a second pot, I sauteed together carrots, celery, onion, and garlic, and threw in a few chunks of tomato just because they were there and needed to be cooked up (after I chopped off the bad bits). I then added a cup of green lentils, to use them up, some more corn, and three cups of water, and simmered this mess, too. My friend DM says she often winds up making "swamp curry" when trying to cook things Indian-style, and it made me realize that what I wound up with in this case was basically "swamp lentils." They were tasty, filling, and vegan, so I had no complaints. I should have added even more zucchini. Or maybe part of that patty-pan squash. I still don't understand patty-pan squashes.

Tonight, I'll make ratatouille and more lentil-pecan pate. They and the galettes should feed the troop of hungry bicyclists on Monday evening. Plus the two kinds of cheese and some crackers, plus spaghetti to go with the ratatouille. And the ice cream.

Other than all that, I canned tomatoes.

Farmer's market tomatoes from Saturday

Garden tomatoes - this week's harvest (probably peak harvest)

Midway through the canning operation:

I was pleased with myself for coming up with the plan of freezing water in the bottom of the white bowl overnight. That minimized the hassle of the post-boil ice bath. I'm also still pleased with my tomato-chopping system - I work on a small cutting board angled down into a baking dish, which catches the juices as I work and helps prevent excess splatters.

Quart-size jars of tomatoes take 45 minutes in the canner. The only way it could ever be economically worthwhile to can tomatoes would be if there were a huge fire sale on tomatoes and they only cost like $1 a pound. On the other hand, I have a feeling that these tomatoes are going to taste amazing.