As the proud owner of a part of a CSA share — and thus the owner of 2 lbs of summer squash every week for the last month and a half –- my recent discovery of the “Recipes for Health” series in the New York Times’ Health section has been a real boon. Operating on the premise that cooking for yourself is the best way to eat healthily, Martha Rose Shulman offers recipes that use seasonal ingredients in, at least to my sometimes uninventive culinary mind, off-the-beaten-path ways. It helps that she’s not a skimper on eggs and cheese, but that’s perhaps for another post. Over six days about a week and a half ago, she printed five recipes that revolved around summer squash. A fan of things Spanish and eggy, I made the Pisto Manchego to bring in for lunch at work (but, sadly, ended up forgoing the eggs since they’re not transportable as prepared in the dish).  Below is my adaptation of the recipe. (My comments are added after the dashes where I made changes.)

Pisto de la Mancha

Recipe adapted from the New York Times

Serves 6
Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 pounds zucchini, or a combination of green and yellow summer squash, diced — I recommend not using zucchini if you can avoid it.  The funky yellow guys we’ve been getting at CSA have more taste and add more visual pop to your dish.
2 pounds tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped, or 1 (28-ounce) can, drained and chopped (see note below)
1/4 teaspoon sugar
Salt to taste (a generous amount, at least 1 teaspoon)
Lots of freshly ground black pepper — Lots and lots and lots!
6 eggs — As I mentioned above, I didn’t use any eggs since I prepared this the night before eating and I didn’t think our office microwave was up to the task of baking eggs (see Shulman’s note on advanced prep below).  Without eggs, this is more of a side dish.
I liberally added sage and fresh thyme to the mix to give it more flavor.

Note: When you seed the tomatoes, set a strainer over a bowl. Squeeze the seeds into the strainer, then press the pulp and juice through the strainer into the bowl. Discard the seeds and use the juice as described below.  — This is a really onerous process.  I ended up sort of smashing my tomatoes against the strainer, then picking them up and rinsing them under a gentle stream of water in the sink to remove the seeds.  Do this task first when you are prepping your ingredients, since it takes a while.

1. Heat the oil in a large, heavy, nonstick skillet over medium heat, then add the onion. Stir often, until just about tender — about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, for another minute or two until fragrant.

2. Stir in the squash and 1/2 teaspoon salt, and toss together for five minutes, until the squash is coated with oil and beginning to soften. Add the tomatoes and sugar, then salt to taste (3/4 to 1 teaspoon) and turn the heat to medium-high. Stir often for five to 10 minutes, until the tomatoes have slightly cooked down.

3. Add the juice from the tomatoes plus 1/4 cup water, stir together, and turn the heat back down to medium-low. Cook uncovered for 30 to 35 minutes, until the vegetables are soft and easy to mash. Stir often, and add water as necessary, every 10 minutes or so, until the mixture cooks down and begins to stick to the pan. From time to time, press on the squash with the back of your spoon so that it breaks down. Taste, adjust the salt, and add lots of pepper.

4. If you want to add eggs (I didn’t) then the instructions continue: Using the back of your spoon, make six wells in the vegetable mixture and break an egg into each well. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover the pan, and cook until the eggs have set, about six to eight minutes (the whites should be set, but the yolks should still be runny). Serve, using a spatula to dish out portions of pisto topped with an egg.

Advance preparation (for pisto with eggs): The pisto will be delicious for three or four days, but until you reheat it, don’t cook the eggs. To reheat the pisto, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Transfer the cooked pisto to a lightly oiled baking dish. Make six depressions in the top, and break an egg into each one. Salt and pepper lightly, and bake in the oven six to eight minutes or until the eggs set.

At my elementary school, we were often subjected to “glazed carrots,” which somehow combined the worst elements of candy and vegetables. Simultaneously tasteless and grossly sweet (even to eight year-olds), a lot of glazed carrots wound up in the dumpster behind Duncan Chapel Elementary.

Needless to say, I am wary of sweetened carrots. But, sick of roasting carrots, I tried a Deborah Madison recipe for glazed carrots. And guess what? It turns out that glazing good carrots with a SMALL amount of sugar actually yields edible results. Good results, in fact.

My favorite thing about this recipe is that it really doesn’t require anything you shouldn’t always have on hand. Aside from carrots that is.

Carroty goodness after the jump.

Start with about two pounds of carrots. Peel them if you like/think they need it. (As a general rule of thumb, if carrots are very fresh, they need only be scrubbed, but any carrots you buy that aren’t from a farm stand or don’t look fresh from the earth ought to be peeled.) Chop the carrots up any way you like. The pieces should be of roughly equal size, but you really don’t need to do anything fancy here.

In a large saucepan or small stockpot, heat 2 tablespoons of butter. When it’s hot, add the carrots. Cook for a couple of minutes until all the carrots are shiny and coated in butter. Add water to just barely cover the carrots along with salt and 1-2 tablespoons sugar to taste.

Bring water to a boil, reduce heat until the liquid is just simmering, and then cover these puppies up and go about your business.

And what are we doing now class? That’s right! Braising! You have been paying attention. Have a gold star. And a carrot.

Alright, check back on the carrots every five minutes or so. The water should be almost gone after about 20 minutes:

At this point raise the heat a little bit and cook off the last of the liquid. After the liquid is gone, you’re left with a thickish, carroty, sugary glaze. The longer you cook the carrots at this point, the thicker and more caramelized the glaze will become. So just keep cooking to taste, but be careful not to burn the glaze or reduce the carrots to absolute mush.

Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper. And that, as they say, is that.

Just a few other ideas for this dish:

1. Add fresh herbs just as the liquid is almost evaporated. Rosemary would be good. Dill. Ooh, maybe even cinnamon? Cayenne pepper? Mmm…

2. Use parsnips (a white carrot-like vegetable that is just delicious) along with the carrots.

3. Use honey or maple syrup instead of sugar in the braising liquid.

4. Package up a serving of carrots and FedEx them to the ancient cafeteria lady at your elementary school. Maybe she’ll take a hint.

I thought for years that “new potatoes” was just a silly name for a specific breed of potatoes. It’s not. “New potatoes” refers to any kind of freshly dug potato. Despite their image as the most seasonless of all vegetables, potatoes actually are available fresh during the summer and fall.

Fresh potatoes, which Claire used in her salad last week, are more tender and delicate than the storage potatoes that are available year-round. Unlike the suit of armor that you find on baking potatoes, new potatoes have a thin, tasty skin and should not be peeled. They take well to brief cooking and single, subtle flavors, generally butter and a fresh herb.

For these potatoes:

Gently scrub a pound or two of new potatoes. Generally speaking, the smaller the potatoes, the better the flavor, but don’t feel like you need to buy 5 dozen marble-sized potatoes. Believe me, you won’t want to wash them.

Strip some rosemary from its stems, and boil the stems in a pot of water. When the water is boiling, add the potatoes. Cooking time will vary, but should be around 15-20, and the potatoes are ready when they are fork tender. Drain the potatoes and then put them back in the pot over low heat with butter and the rosemary. Heat until the butter is melted and the remaining moisture from the boiling water has mostly evaporated. Serve.

If you’ve made more potatoes that you can handle (I did), these are great chopped up and fried in butter or olive oil and served with or without ketchup. The best damn home fries I’ve ever had.

As Claire pointed out to me yesterday, we’ve been on a pretty salad-focused kick here at Food Junta, a lot of said salads involving tomatoes, corn, warming, or some combination thereof. But this salad was so good, I had to share it. Repetitiveness be damned.

Though I’m pretty sure this is a common-ish dish out there in the world, this particular salad was totally unplanned and just a result of what I happened to have kicking around in my kitchen. I had had the corn in my crisper for a little too long (6 days or so) and needed to do something with it, I usually have a red onion or two around for salads, and I had the sungolds around because I love sungolds.

Sungolds are a delicious variety of cherry tomatoes. They are a generally a mix of bright orange and green, as these were. For some reason, my camera turned them a lot more red than they actually are. I love sungolds in salads, pastas, and just for eating. They’re like candy, and I mean that. I know I’ve done a lot of snitty “fruit is just like desssert” pieces lately, but sungolds are, like, gummy bear sweet. I promise

The recipe:

First, shuck the corn and take the kernels off the cob. There are fancy tools for doing this, but I think they are a waste of money. So just use a chef’s knife to carefully take the corn off. So long as you’re not hacking away wildly, you’ll get most of the kernels and keep most of your digits.

Next, saute the corn. I did it in butter for no particular reason. Olive oil would work just as well. You could also grill the corn on the cob and then cut the kernels off. Basically, you just need to expose the corn to a little heat so it softens and sweetens a bit. Use whaever cooking method floats your boat.

Take the corn off the heat and toss it in a large bowl to cool. Add a little salt while you’re at it. Meanwhile, thinly slice the onion and cut the tomatoes in half.

Here’s a place to experiment a little for you more adventurous readers out there. I let the corn cool down significantly before I added in the tomatoes and onion, but you could add them in right as you take the corn off the heat. This, I think, would make for some more cooked tomatoes and a more integral dish. My tomatoes were so good raw that I didn’t want them cooked at all. Just something to think about.

Regardless, add the tomatoes and onion. Add red wine vingar to taste and ground pepper if you feel like it. Whatever fat you use to cook the corn should mean you don’t need any extra olive oil, but go for it if you feel like it.

This salad was amazing, and it was just as good cold for lunch the next day, even if it did give me terrible onion breath. So, just be sure to take some gum.

I’ve been meaning to write about this delicious dessert for a while, and Kevin’s post yesterday about his discovery of the beauty of peaches is a good segue. A good friend of the Junta made this when I was in San Francisco, with glorious peaches, and glorious figs. But they were made all the more glorious by some time spent in the oven, bathed in honey and sweet wine. Because as much as I love eating a peach whole, juices dripping, on a hot afternoon, I also love eating a peach sliced up and caramelized to warm my tummy on a crisp summer San Francisco night.

Even mealy peaches — and most fruit and vegetables for that matter (as I wrote about with tomatoes) — can usually be redeemed by some roasting. The dish will be better, I imagine, if you start with good, fresh basic ingredients, but since roasting basically concentrates the flavor (and texture) of the item being roasted, it’s not the end of the world if it’s a little bland, and a little mushy.

The figs are a nice touch here. Many people, I think, are wary of figs. I’m not sure why, other than that figs are really hard to get perfectly ripe. Often they are pink/pale inside, and almost tough when you bite into them. They should be purplish, and oozing, and soft to the touch. The pink ones won’t do a ton when roasted (that’s too lost a cause), but even a halfway decent fig should become really wonderful when cooked. This recipe is, in fact, based on a recipe for roasted figs, not roasted peaches. So really, the peaches are the intruders here.

Stone fruits should stay in season for the next month at least, and now that the weather is cooling down (welcome fall!), this is actually a somewhat feasible recipe for an apartment not in San Francisco’s consistently brisk climate.

Oven Roasted Peaches with Figs and Honey

Adapted from the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook. Note: I wasn’t actually the one overseeing this, just slicing the fruit, so hopefully I have correctly replicated it here. It is pretty intuitive, though, just watch the fruit so it doesn’t overcook, which is hard to do in the first place.

Serves 4

4 peaches, pitted, and quartered
1 pint figs, stems trimmed, and halved lengthwise
1/3 cup honey, warmed
¼ cup sweet wine, such as vin santo or Sauternes
1 ½ tbsp. sugar

- Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Arrange peach quarters in a casserole or Pyrex baking dish, flat side down. Nestle fig halves in between peach quarters, so casserole is tightly filled.
- Mix warm honey with wine and ¼ cup of water. Drizzle over fruit. Sprinkle sugar over top.
- Bake fruit in the oven for 30-40 minutes, checking occasionally. Turn temperature down to 375 degrees F after about 10 minutes. Fruit should be tender and caramelized when done. Let cool slightly. Serve with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream for maximum deliciousness.

I had given up entirely on peaches. I had eaten hard ones, sour ones, bitter ones, ones with inedible skin, brown and mushy ones, and - every rare once and a while - an OK one.

Peaches do not travel well because they bruise very, very easily. Because of this, supermarket peaches are picked when they are extremely unripe. The hope is that they’ll be ripe just as they arrive in the stores. They won’t. Most will have been picked so early that they’ll never really ripen, they’ll just rot.

Peaches are one of those fruits like tomatoes that I think aren’t worth it unless they are local and in season. But unlike tomatoes, even great local peaches are hard to shop for. Here’s the trick for getting perfect peaches: Buy the underripe ones - not rock hard, but firm - and spread them out on a sheet of newspaper, far enough apart so that they aren’t touching one another. They’ll ripen nicely and make your whole kitchen smell like peaches.

I served the ones above as dessert at a recent dinner party. There was a brief rolling of eyes as everyone saw that I was about to make a big point about how much better local produce is. Then they ate the peaches. That shut them right up.

—-

A poll: Am I just being a crank here or have you all had the same experience? Until this summer at the farmer’s market, I hadn’t had a peach worth a damn in years. I think they are really one of the worst victims of agribusiness. Thoughts?

I love potato salad, but not that gross, mayonnaise-laden stuff that typically passes for potato salad around these parts (the U.S. being these parts). Sometimes that mayonnaise-y stuff can be really good, but more often than not, it’s basically disgusting. Tastes disgusting, looks disgusting, IS disgusting, as Coolio might say.

Enter in the vinegar-based potato salad. It’s still the same basic idea (boiled new potatoes), but with none of the weight of the mayo. This particular version is an entirely farmers’ market inspired creation. I knew I was making dinner with a friend that night, I knew that I didn’t want it to be a labor-intensive ordeal. I saw a pint of teeny tiny new potatoes — smaller than I’d ever seen them before — and felt the need to buy them. Which led me to the idea of potato salad. But this potato salad was going to be the star of the show, not an accompaniment. So it needed more.

The basil smelled especially fragrant, so that went in next. Next, some corn, inspired by a dinner with a friend a few weeks ago in which he sautéed the kernels to perfection. The spring onions were beautiful, and any potato salad needs onion of some sort (those are the only two necessary components, really — potato and onion). And lastly, because when does it ever hurt, I bought some bacon.

Originally, I was going to fry the bacon, boil the potatoes, and sauté the corn, and then mix them altogether with fresh basil sprinkled on top. But after frying the bacon and boiling the potatoes, inspiration hit, in the form of lots of leftover bacon grease that I didn’t want to go to waste. I fried up the potatoes, lightly (you don’t want home fries here, just some browning). Then added in the corn and bacon, torn up. And then, and here was the real beauty, added in a good handful or two of basil leaves, making basil an actual component of the dish, rather than just a garnish. I let the basil wilt a bit, and took the whole thing off the heat. A generous addition of white wine vinegar, salt, and pepper, and it’s done (the bacon grease is enough fat that you don’t need to add additional olive oil or anything).

In the end, I’m not sure that this officially counts as a salad, but I like to think of it as such. Respect your potatoes!

Warm Basil, Corn, and New Potato Salad

Serves 2-4, depending on how hungry you are, and what you’re serving alongside

Ingredients:

- 1 pint new potatoes (red-skin potatoes)
- 2 ears corn, husked, kernels cut off
- 1-2 handfuls fresh basil leaves
- 4 slices bacon
- 1 large spring onion (can substitute a regular yellow onion), chopped
- white wine vinegar, to taste (several tablespoons)
- salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Bring a pot of salted water to boil. Add potatoes, boil until tender (about 10 minutes). Drain. When cool enough to handle, slice potatoes in half.
2. Meanwhile, fry bacon in a medium-size skillet over medium-heat. When cooked through, remove bacon and place on a plate lined with papertowels to drain. Pour out bacon grease into a heatproof container, reserving 3-4 tablespoons in the pan.
3. Add onion to bacon grease. Cook, stirring occasionally, until tender. Add potatoes to pan. Cook, turning occasionally, until slightly brown. Add corn. Cook until corn is tender, probably only one or two more minutes. Tear up bacon into medium-sized chunks; add to pan. Add basil leaves, stir to incorporate into vegetables. Cook for one or two more minutes, until basil is slightly wilted. Remove from heat and pour contents out into a large serving bowl.
4. Add 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar to salad and toss to incorporate. Add more vinegar tablespoon by tablespoon, tasting after each, until salad has reached the level of acidity you want. Season generously with salt and pepper.

I am probably much more pleased with myself for this than I deserve to be, but what is a food blog good for if not self-aggrandizement? Nothing as far as I’m concerned.

So here’s the story: I made too much ratatouille. Much too much ratatouille. My dinner guests ate ratatouille. I ate ratatouille. I ate more ratatouille. I got really, really sick of ratatouille.

Then it struck me, like a blow to the head with a basil-wrapped brick (props to Douglas Adams on that one): ratatouille is essentially an especially chunky pasta sauce. A pound of pasta, a little olive oil, a little reserved pasta water, leftover ratatouille, and some salt and I was on my way.

I used my new favorite pasta shape, chiocciole, which, as it happens, is italian for “snails.” I bet you can crack that case yourself. My only regret is that I didn’t have any ricotta salata lying around. It’s semi-soft version of ricotta, I think it would make the perfect addition to this. (And, in fact, pasta alla norma, a sicilian staple, combines eggplant and ricotta salata.)

So this certainly isn’t revolutionary, but I want you to take a point from it: Don’t ever feel bound by cookbooks or recipes or, god forbid, tradition. If two things seem like they would go well together, they probably will. So put them together. And then eat them.

You don’t need to serve your special egg, brie, and beet pie to guests, but there’s not reason not to try making it on your own. Well, except that that particular one sounds pretty gross. You weirdo.

Ratatouille (or Tian of Vegetables, as it is also known) is the very fancy-sounding name for a very rustic Provencal dish. It is, in essence, a bunch of summer vegetables stewed together in the oven.

Ratatouille is a great dish for entertaining because it can be prepared ahead of time in vast quantities and simply slapped in the oven when your guests arrive or it can even be cooked in advance and served at room temperature. Sitting for a day actually concentrates the flavors and improves the ratatouille, and you can drink wine and hang out at your party instead of sweating in the kitchen while your friends eat all your cheese.

So go make some ratatouille, and stay tuned for a pretty clever plan for some of the leftovers, if I do say so myself, and I do. Recipe after the jump.

Ratatouille (Tian of Vegetables) - Adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything

2 large-ish eggplants (salted as I did with the squash a few weeks ago,if you have time or they’ve been sitting in the fridge)

4 bell peppers (2 red, 2 yellow)

4 large fresh tomatoes or two 16 oz. cans

2 large onions

a colossal amount of garlic

Fresh herbs (I used parsley and rosemary, bu basil, chervil, purslane, thyme would all be good choices)

1. Basically, cut everything up and throw it in a pan, but if you are feeling fancy, slice all the vegetables thinly and stack in layers. This level of fussiness is not for me, but if that’s your kind of thing, go for it.

2. Whether you go the fancy route or not, I recommend studding the garlic cloves in whole and unpeeled throughout. People can eat them or not as they choose.

3. Either way, mix in fresh herbs and salt and pepper in each layer.

4. Bake at 350 for about an hour or until all the vegetables are tender.

5. Serve to friends and ask them kindly not to mention the damn movie. It’s a very good movie, but you’ve heard that joke before, thank you very much.

This may be the most brilliant thing I’ve ever made. And one of the easiest. And now that I know how brilliant and easy it is, one of the most destructive, as I will now be eating it on a really regular basis, and it might be best saved as an occasional treat. But no matter, it is so good, and so easy, and I think I might have come in contact with a divine force during my first bite.

I never was particularly interested in BLTs — they seem empty to me, vapid, naked, and unsubstantial. But a BLT with avocado and egg? Now we’re talking.

There’s not a lot to say here, other than you will benefit from using the best products possible. My other main problem with BLTs is that I can hardly ever taste the bacon, which should be the star of the show. Here, thick-cut bacon is a must. Then, everything else should be the best quality, but picked to highlight the bacon, not compete with it. I just used normal whole-wheat bread, toasted just the way I like it, and spread thick with good unsalted butter, a touch I normally skip in sandwiches. I used butter lettuce, which is a nice, delicate lettuce, whose flavor and texture doesn’t distract from the bacon. The real kicker in this BLT (and A&E), though, is the tomato: a green heirloom tomato fresh from the farmers’ market. Now, I am well aware that this is an extra-special tomato, and one neither you nor I will be able to get on a regular basis, but while it’s summer, you really should take advantage of the heirlooms, if you can get them. This is a perfect use, showing off the milder, less fruity, slightly tangier taste of a green tomato, as opposed to a red, and also it’s firmer texture, which makes it almost a meat substitute in this sandwich, and adds even more body to it.

Regardless, get the best ingredients you can, and treat them with care, and this sandwich will reward you. It is best served with a bowl of soup or chili (semi-homemade, and dressed up with some grated cheddar) and an episode of “The Wire,” after a day spent lounging in the sun in the park.

The Ultimate B.L.T. (and A & E)

Makes 1 sandwich

Ingredients:

- 2 slices sandwich bread of your choosing (I used whole-wheat), toasted and top slice spread thick with good quality unsalted butter
- 2 slices thick-cut, good quality bacon
- 2 lettuce leaves (I used butter lettuce)
- 2 thick slices tomato, preferably a green or yellow heirloom
- 1 egg
- 1/3 avocado, sliced
- salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Fry bacon, removing to a plate lined with paper towels to drain. Discard bacon fat, and immediately fry egg sunny-side up in the same hot pan, still coated with fat.
2. Assemble sandwich, in this order: Piece of bread, strips of bacon (torn in half to fit bread), tomato slices, avocado slices, salt and freshly ground pepper to taste, lettuce leaves (folded), fried egg (carefully slid on top so yolk remains whole). Add top slice of bread. And here’s the second-most beautiful part (after the first bite): Press down top piece of bread, breaking the yolk and letting it ooze out of the sandwich. So satisfying!
3. Slice in half. Devour.