35 new salads to make

Now that your garden and your local farmers' market are overflowing with with fruits and vegetables, you have a perfect way to eat the bounty in salads. Mark Bittman, in his New York Times Minimalist column, has written 101 "recipes" of just 2 or 3 lines describing inventive combinations of ingredients and dressings. Many of them are vegan and most are vegetarian.

The first one combines cubed watermelon with tomato chunks with basil and vinaigrette. The second features wedges of tomatoes, peaches, slivers of red onion, crushed red pepper, and cilantro with an oil and citrus dressing.

There are 33 that I want to make! This could be half of my menu planning for the rest of the summer and beyond.

What is your favorite?

Farmers' Markets

Last Fall's Selection

The top reasons to visit a farmers' market near you

1. You help grow the local economy. Money spent locally tends to remain in the local community.

2. You support small farmers who are committed to providing you with fresh, high quality food.

3. You get to personally know the people who grew the food, baked the bread, and knit the sweater.

4. You take home fresh and probably healthier produce and products.

5. You will have fun.

6. You don't need a shopping list. Just take home the freshest and the best and plan meals around your purchases.

7. If you are lucky enough to be in the Albany NY area, you can visit the Capital District Market at 381 Broadway in Menands.

The Menands market is open to the public on Saturdays from May through October from 8 AM to 1 PM. In addition to Schoharie Valley Farms (The Carrot Barn), other vendors include an Amish baker, several crafts vendors, a bread baker, and other fruit and vegetable vendors. Saturday, July 25 will be the Corn Festival, but every weekend there are wonderful reasons to visit.

At the Schoharie Valley Farms booth, in addition to the vegetables, Stony Brook Farm sells pasture-raised and grass-fed pork, lamb and chicken. And the handsome young farmer who raises the animals is my son, so say hello from The Quilted Cook.

Two summers pass

Over one year and two summers have passed since my last post. During that time, I have cooked and cooked without blogging. Many new recipes came into my life during that time, both from my own kitchen and from the efforts of many fine cookbook authors.

My biggest discovery was using a pressure cooker, lead to overcome my fears of it by the Veggie Queen's blog. My first attempt, a fabulous butternut squash soup, made me a convert. The speed of cooking and the depth of flavor were amazing.

I have experimented with raw foods, increasingly chosen organic fruits and vegetables, and become much fussier about what chemicals and preservatives I am willing to eat. Not many! And in fact, I prefer none.

I spent some time with my son, a farmer with a blog of his own. There is always work to do on a farm or related to the farm. One of my tasks was to help prepare garlic to sell at the market. That was a lovely few minutes I spent with my son sitting on a bench under a huge pine tree in front of his house. It was a cool day with bright sunshine, and we sat with Monk, the dog, cleaning and trimming the garlic and being together. I also thoroughly enjoyed spending time with him selling his farm products at the Capital District Farmers' Market in Menands on a few Saturday mornings.

As much as I like having a photo of each dish to go along with the recipe, I think that was the reason I stopped writing this blog. It is just too much work to plan menus, cook, record the recipe, and photograph the food, serve it and eat it. That is why I have decided to try posting recipes with very few photographs.

New recipes any day now. Meanwhile, I suggest trying the Vegetable Barley Soup as a nearly complete meal by itself.

Pasta with Baked Tomatoes and Peppers

I have been cooking and reading, but not blogging. The Palm Beach County Public Library West Atlantic Branch has seen me just about daily the past few weeks. At this time of the year with so many snowbirds up north, the library shelves are overflowing with both new and old books. I can't resist! So with each visit, I return 2 books and borrow 6 more.

After seeing a fabulous photo of Deborah Madison's version of this dish in her book Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmer's Markets, I couldn't get to The Boys Market fast enough to purchase the ingredients. Visit your local public library or a bookstore and take a look at this excellent cookbook. I changed Deborah's recipe very slightly by removing most of the fat and serving it hot over pasta and rewriting the directions for that. You will see no photo here because the one in the book is just too perfect.

Pasta with Baked Peppers and Tomatoes

4 large bell peppers, red, orange and yellow
1 large tomato
2 medium yellow tomatoes
6 sprigs parsley
1 clove garlic, pressed
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
2 tablespoons capers, rinsed
12 pitted Kalamata olives, halved
1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
3/4 pound whole wheat rigatoni or sedoni pasta

Cut the tops off of the peppers, slice into quarters, and removed the seeds and veins. Brush or spray a baking pan lightly with olive oil and place the peppers skin side up on a baking sheet. Bake at 400 for about 20 minutes until the skins are very wrinkled. Place the peppers into a brown paper bag for about 15 minutes to steam for easy removal of the skin which should then slip off easily. Cut the slices of peppers in half horizontally and set aside.

Cook the pasta according to package directions, drain and set aside.

Brush or spray a small baking dish with olive oil to keep the vegetables from sticking and set aside.

Using only the leaves of the parsley, gently buzz them in a chopper with the garlic and remaining olive oil. In a small bowl, combine the marjoram, capers and olives. Add the parsley mixture to the olives and stir.

Combine the tomatoes, peppers, and the parsley mixture in the oiled dish using your hands or a spoon. Cover and bake for 30 minutes*.

Season with crushed red pepper and serve over the cooked pasta.

Serves 4 as a pasta course.

*The vegetables can be kept covered in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours before baking.

Alanna Kellogg, author of the blog Veggie Venture, encourages all of us to seek out fresh produce from our hometown farmers markets. She commissioned an icon to help showcase fresh vegetables and fruits and invites fellow bloggers to adopt the icon, too. So you will see the icon here in my posts and in other places that feature fresh produce and other farmers market finds.

That is as soon as I can go to a farmers market.

Ever since reading Barbara Kinsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life, I have been wanting to get closer to the source of the food that we eat. But here in Flala land, that happens on a different schedule from the rest of you. Old habits die slowly and after five decades living in Central New York, the arrival of June meant the arrival of fresh produce. Some years we had vegetable gardens, but always we could go to the regional farmers market and to farmers' stands right on their own land. And, of course, Wegmans filled their spectacular produce department with locally grown fruits and vegetables for all of the growing months. I was spoiled and never knew it.

We do have excellent fresh produce here at Whole Foods and at The Boys' Market. We even have a CSA nearby. ( A CSA is community supported agriculture. Basically that is a farm supported by individual contracts with members of the local community to purchase produce on a pre-established basis for the duration of the growing season.) We do have farmers markets in Delray Beach and in Boca Raton that are close enough for me to shop there.

What we don't have is a growing season that puts produce in the CSA or the farmers markets now. The CSA begins supplying produce in October and the farmers' markets start up again in October. So if you live in Miami or Orlando or Syracuse and can go to the local farmers market, go there and buy the freshest, local produce in season that you can find. Even though most of the fruits and vegetables do not say organic, produce grown on smaller, local farms likely contain fewer pesticides than the ones that have been trucked a few thousand miles to get to you. And then take your treasures home and cook them with the least effort you can manage after you have washed it. Eat it raw, steam it, or quickly boil it. Leave out the butter, cream, and oil and you will be leaving out the cholesterol and fat calories. Serve a plate of them with a fresh loaf of bread and you will have a fat-free vegan meal. And then enjoy it because you are really lucky to have it.

ps If you have a vegetable that you don't know how to prepare, post a comment and I will find at least one recipe for you.