long silence through many meals

For so many nights in the last few weeks, I've been way too tired to update my account of what we've been eating. The farm has been extraordinarily productive and we've been keeping up, but barely. One week, I could barely carry my half share. In the last few weeks, we've had a lot of salads for dinner, often with cheese added in. We've been eating a moderate amount of delicious, organic corn.

One night, I suggested we go out and Mr. P jumped at the idea, saying that he could use a break from cucumbers. That's when I realized that I'd served a cucumber a night for the previous five nights (usually in a salad) and we still hadn't worked through our supply. So one week, when the farm gave us the choice of cucumbers or something else, I took something else.

We had the last of last year's pesto with pasta and steamed chard and garlic. We tried making Thoren (that coconut flake curry with green vegetables) with carrots, which came out very well. I made a reduced fresh tomato sauce, and one night we had greens with balsamic vinegar served over rice.

Last weekend, we went to four parties. We were specifically asked not to bring food to one of them (it turned out that many people there were either kosher, had food allergies, or both). But we made two gigantic vegetable salads and one huge fruit salad, all of which were quite popular.
Last night, because the oven was on, I roasted tomatoes, garlic, and chard for a future sauce.

Last night, we had guests for dinner. The request was all vegetarian (easy in this household), no beans, mint, or cilantro. One of the guests is pregnant, so though she eats dairy, she can't eat soft cheeses, goat cheese, or feta unless it's pasteurized or cooked. So I came up with a good menu, I thought.

We made a vegetable salad (and used up almost all the farm veggies in the process -- I actually had to buy some produce at the store), with no cheese. We served spanekopita (Greek spinach pie), which was a huge hit. And for dessert we served a big fruit salad (some of which was from the farm) and bakery-bought brownies and macaroons. (When you have a bakery this good close by, it seems pointless to make dessert.)

Oh, and our friends' two-year old got hummus and crackers. He ate a couple of crackers, dipped his cracker into the hummus and immediately asked his mother to wipe the hummus off. And he loves hummus. Go figure. Then for dessert, he announced he was getting ice cream. Fortunately, we had a tiny amount in the freezer. Phew.

Here's a tip for working with phyllo dough. It helps to have two people on hand.

Melt about 4T of butter, then add about the same amount of canola oil. (The original recipe calls for two sticks of butter. We had a bunch left over at the end.) Wipe down the counter. Prepare the fillo stuffing, then place the pan between the stuffing and a clean tea towel. Unfurl the defrosted fillo onto its own wrapping on top of the towel, and immediately place over it a piece of waxed paper and a wet, wringed tea towel.

Spread a thin layer of oil-butter on the bottom of the pan. Then one person lifts three sheets of fillo at a time (traditionally, you use one sheet at a time) into the pan and immediately covers the remaining fillo to keep it from drying out. The other person spreads a thin layer of oil-butter onto the top layer. I think we did something like 3 layers, oil, 3 layers, oil, half the filling, three layers, three layers, the other half of the filling, and then we went by 3s until we had used up all the fillo.

Dinner was really tasty and in between bouts of the child being a two-year old, I think our guests were happy with the results too.