In the best of all possible worlds …

I’d be reveling in that brief, magical season when tomatoes, sweet corn and peaches are all ripe, abundant and cheap.

But this isn’t that year, it seems, at least in this part of the Willamette Valley.

The peach crop has been sparse, thanks to bad weather when the trees were in bloom. Some varieties haven’t been seen at the market at all; others are small, buggy or expensive.

Sweet corn is around, but not by the usual truckloads, and not at the usual prices. I’m seeing corn priced at 5 ears for a dollar, double what it was last summer.

And tomatoes? Sloooooooow to ripen, both in back-yard gardens and, evidently, on the farms. The six tomato plants in my own garden, all different heirloom varieties, are loaded with fruit, but only one of them – a Black Plum – has produced any ripe tomatoes yet. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping they’ll ripen in the next couple of weeks, before the rain starts up or the nights get frosty.

But woudn’t you know it: today’s Albany market finally had a great selection of tomatoes, including lots of big, ripe heirloom varieties – and I was in no position to buy, because I’m heading out of town for a nine-day vacation in Seattle. Now’s the time to eat the produce on hand, not stock up on more.

Besides, a friend whose wife has better gardening prowess than I do dropped off a bag of mixed cherry tomatoes last night, and they need to be eaten before I leave town on Monday.

At this time of year I crave tomato sandwiches. Bread, tomatoes, mayonnaise, maybe a little black pepper or a bit of minced basil = heaven. As much as I like a good cherry tomato, you can’t make a decent sandwich from them, because the little suckers keep squirting out from between the slices of bread.

So I settled for the next-best thing: A BLT salad.

I don’t know why you’d need a recipe for this, but here’s one, anyway.

BLT Salad

Per serving:

• 1 thick slice of slightly stale artisan bread, cut or torn into bite-sized pieces. (I used a some leftover roasted garlic bread from Big River restaurant in Corvallis that a friend had brought to my Labor Day barbecue.)*
• Olive oil
• Lettuce, torn in bite-sized pieces*
• Cherry tomatoes. Small ones can stay whole; if they’re more than a mouthful, slice them in half.*
• 2 slices of bacon, fried and crumbled*
• Real mayonnaise. Helman’s/Best Foods is canonical. Make your own if you’re feeling adventurous
• 3-4 leaves of fresh basil, minced*
• Black pepper

Toss the bread in a little olive oil. Wrap it in foil and put it in a 350F oven while you cook the bacon (10-15 minutes).

On a plate, layer lettuce, toasted bread, tomatoes and bacon. Top with a spoonful of mayonnaise, scatter basil over the top and finish with a generous grinding of black pepper.

* Locally grown or made ingredients

Substantial summer salads

Tuscan Bread Salad

Wouldn’t you know it: The mood for salad struck this week, just as the hot spell finally broke and we got some rain? Where were my salad cravings when it was 100 degrees in my kitchen? As wilted as the greens in my refrigerator, I guess.

No matter. The salads I’m interested in this week are more than just greens-and-crunchy-stuff, they’re salad-as-a-meal, complex and flavorful but not the least bit difficult to make. And they use a lot of the same ingredients, but with quite different results. One brings back memories of my daughter-of-a-Southern-mother childhood; the other is a tradition from an entirely different part of the world. They’re both delicious – and they both benefit from an overnight stay in the refrigerator to let the flavors meld.

Tuscan Bread Salad

Ingredients

• 2 cups hearty bread*, cut or torn into bite-sided cubes. You want bread of substance for this, and you want it a little stale; I used the heel end of a round sourdough loaf I bought at the farmers’ market last weekend; whole-grain bread is also wonderful.
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 small cucumber, or a couple of lemon cucumbers*, scrubbed, peeled (if the peel is tough, otherwise don’t bother) and cut in chunks
• 2 medium ripe tomatoes*, cut in chunks, or several little tomatoes, halved. I used small BlackPlums from my garden
• 1/2 small onion, chopped*
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1/8 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1 tsp capers (optional)
• 2-3 Tbsp fresh basil*, coarsely chopped and then rubbed between your hands to release the aromas
• salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
• Fresh greens*
• Pecorino romano cheese

Method:

Preheat oven to 350F. Toss the bread with 1 Tbsp olive oil, lay it out in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes, turning once, until the bread is toasty brown and fairly hard. Cool.

In a medium bowl, combine the bread, tomatoes, cucumbers and onion. In a small bowl, whisk together olive oil, vinegar, capers and basil. Pour over the bread mixture and toss well to coat. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight to let the bread soak most of the liquid.

Before serving, correct seasoning if necessary. Dress plates with a bed of washed, torn greens, top with a generous portion of bread salad and use a vegetable peeler to shave a few curls of Pecorino romano cheese on top.

Serves two, generously (or one, with plenty left for the next day’s lunch). If you’re the sort of person who insists on protein at every meal, this is also very good with drained albacore tuna mixed in just before serving.

Black-eyed Pea Salad

Black-Eyed Pea Salad with Roast Pork

I know, I know: People who didn’t grow up with black-eyed peas sometimes find them a little off-putting. An ex of mine once sampled my traditional mom’s-recipe New Year’s Eve black-eyed peas, grimaced and muttered, “Tastes like dirt.” I can’t argue with that – but to my mouth, that’s “earthy,” and it’s a great flavor, especially when the beans are cooked from scratch instead of dumped out of a can. Now, normally, I automatically throw a chunk of salt pork or (when I can find it) ham hock in with black-eyed peas. This salad is so flavorful, though, it can do without (vegetarians take note). And while I’m having it as a dinner side dish tonight, I plan to eat it again for lunch tomorrow, all by itself, and quite possibly dinner tomorrow night, too. It’s that good.

Ingredients

• 4 cups cooked black-eyed peas (or 2 cans, if you must, or an equivalent amount of frozen black-eyed peas.)
• 2 large tomatoes* (or an equivalent in smaller ones), chopped
• 1 large cucumber* (or 2-3 lemon cucumbers), peeled if necessary and chopped
• 1/2 medium onion*, finely chopped
• A fistful of fresh Italian parsley*, coarsely chopped
• 2 Tbsp fresh basil*, finely chopped
• 1 tsp fresh thyme*, chopped
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1-2 small hot peppers*, seeded and diced (I dipped into my endless supply of little red chiles of unknown provenance, provided by a friend who grows them in vast quantities)
• 3/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup cider vinegar
• 1 tsp sugar
• salt and black pepper to taste

Method

Cool and drain the cooked beans; if you’re using canned ones, rinse them to get rid of the liquid from the can, which is kind of nasty. If frozen, thaw them in the microwave, rinse and cool.

In a large bowl, combine the beans, tomatoes, cucumber and onions. Add the herbs and toss thoroughly to mix.

In a small bowl, combine garlic, peppers, olive oil, vinegar and sugar and whisk well to blend. Pour over the bean mixture, and toss until the beans are well-coated with dressing. Taste; add salt and pepper if necessary. Cover and chill for several hours or overnight. Serve with cornbread for a complete-protein vegetarian meal, or as an accompaniment to roasted pork tenderloin (rub a small, lean tenderloin with olive oil, pat on a mixture of paprika, dry mustard powder, cayenne and a little salt, and roast at 450F for about 20 minutes, until a meat thermometer registers 150 degrees. Remove from oven, cover with foil and let sit for 10 minutes or so to firm up before slicing on the diagonal into medallion.)

Makes 4-6 servings, and it’s a great potluck dish, too!

* Local ingredients, from the Albany farmers’ market or my garden

Beets and carrots and herbs, oh my

Roasted beet and carrot salad

Friends in warmer climates are telling me about their home-grown tomatoes. I put my fingers in my ears and console myself with the thought that our tomatoes will be along in their own good time – and that, meanwhile, there’s plenty of other flavorful produce showing up at the market.

This week I steered clear of the berries (well, almost. One pint of blueberries doesn’t count, does it?) in favor of vegetables: Carrots, shelling peas, cucumber, zucchini and a big bunch of mixed beets, red and golden and a pretty stripey red-and-white stripe variety.

I love root vegetables, and beets and carrots are never better than when they’re young and tender, full of sweet, earthy flavor. I love to roast them together, and just a little extra effort can make the difference between a nice mess of roasted vegetables and a terrific dish that highlights the subtle differences in the two vegetables flavors.

Beets, even young ones, take longer to roast than carrots. So why not take advantage of that fact and treat each vegetable a little differently, even when you roast them in the same pan?

Roasted beets and carrots with herbs

Ingredients:

• A mixture of red and golden beets (I used six medium-sized beets), scribbed, trimmed and cut in half
• 1 Tbsp Olive oil
• Sea salt
• Fresh thyme, finely minced
• 4-5 medium-sized carrots, scrubbed, trimmed and cut in roughly equal-sized pieces
• 1 tsp balsamic vinegar
• 1 tsp maple syrup
• 1 tsp cumin seeds

Method:

Preheat oven to 400F.

In a bowl, toss beets with olive oil. Spoon them out, leaving excess oil in the bowl. Place in one layer at one end of a roasting pan and sprinkle lightly with salt; scatter a few sprigs of thyme among them. Place roasting pan in oven. 15 minutes into cooking, use a slotted spoon to turn the beets.

Meanwhile, add carrots, vinegar, maple syrup and cumin to the bowl and toss well.

When the beets have been in the oven 30 minutes, add the carrots at the other end of the pan. Continue roasting for 15-20 minutes more, stirring once to turn, until tender and lightly caramelized.

Remove from oven and allow to cool slightly so you can slip the skins off the beets without burning yourself. Serve warm as a side dish, or, as I did, allow the vegetables to cool to room temperature, slice them into bite-sized pieces and serve them on a bed of lettuce with a little blue cheese, some toasted hazlenuts and a light vinaigrette incorporating a touch more thyme.

If you don’t have the time or energy to bother with roasting them, young beets and carrots are also splendid raw, grated or sliced paper-thin, and added to a salad or slaw – or just tossed with a little Meyer lemon juice, sprinkled lightly with salt and heaped on a plate as a crunchy, vivid savory.

Keeping it local in the larder

I was out of town last weekend and missed the farmers’ market: How was I going to meet my weekly Eat Local Challenge goal? All I had left from the previous week’s market were a couple of bulbs of kohlrabi (a good keeper, fortunately), and that didn’t sound like much of a dinner.

Luckily, my pantry (and the big old freezer in my basement) usually contains a good supply of canned, bottled, frozen and dried foods of local origin. Jams and jellies, of course (but a person can only eat so much apple butter, as tasty as it is), but also dried fruits and wild mushrooms, frozen meat, locally produced sausages – and seafood.

OK, the coast is an hour and a half’s drive away, but I still consider it local, especially at the height of the fishing season. There’s no fish fresher than the fish you can buy right off the docks in Newport, for instance, headed and gutted (and if you sweet-talk the fisherman, sliced into filets or steaks) and packed in a cooler full of ice for the drive home.

But thanks to a growing number of entrepreneurial fisherfolk, some seasonal seafood is also available canned: Pacific albacore, brined or smoked, salmon (yes, even with this season’s harvest restrictions, some varieties of Pacific salmon are available) – and Dungeness crab.

Last winter, I splurged on a case of crab canned by my friend and former Oregon Sea Grant colleague Ginny Goblirsch and her fisherman husband Herb under their Oregon’s Choice label, which they sell on line and from select Newport markets. One of the things I appreciate about Herb and Ginny is that they’re committed to sustainable fishing practices; their albacore is caught with hook-and-line, a method certified as eco-friendly by the Marine Stewardship Council. The other seafood they can is caught by similarly sustainable methods, and when they decided to begin canning their own products, they worked closely with OSU seafood specialists to come up with production methods that follow “best practices” for both quality and safety.

The big canneries that used to dot the Oregon coast are pretty much history, but the boutique seafood canners who’ve emerged in recent years represent a real, local-food treasure. While much of their output gets sold in gift shops or shipped outside the region, there’s nothing to keep us from trying it, too, if we can get hold of it before the tourists do. The price may be premium, but so is the quality.

Most of that case of crab got used up last winter, in crab bisques, crab dip for holiday pot-lucks and crab salad. But I still have a few cans left, and when I happened on them tonight while foraging for dinner ideas, crab cakes came to mind.

Crab cakes can be an iffy thing; I’ve had way too many that were all cake and not much crab, like greasy wads of vaguely crab-flavored fried dough. Through trial and error – and tips from a couple of excellent restaurant chefs – I came up with a recipe that’s both easy and light, crisp, moist and very, very crab-by. They’re astonishingly good when made with fresh crab meat, but between you and me, when Dungeness crabs are in season I rarely bother making anything elaborate from them – I just boil them and eat them, armed with a nutcracker, a bowl of melted butter and a lot of napkins. Picking crabs to produce enough meat for a recipe is just too darned time-consuming when you could be eating crab.

So I let people like Ginny and Herb do the hard work, and I get to enjoy the results. And boy, did I enjoy tonight’s crab cakes, served with an improvised Asian-style slaw of kohlrabi I’d bought at the market the week before.

Light and Crispy Crab Cakes

(This recipe uses one can of crab to make four modest crab cakes – more than enough for one person, or a light meal or appetizer for two. You can easily scale it up to make more).

Ingredients:

• 1 Tbsp minced fresh Italian parsley; other fresh herbs, added sparingly, can be lovely, too.
• 1/2 tsp dry mustard
• 1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 large egg, beaten
• 1 Tbsp real mayonnaise (do not, under pain of banishment from my blog, tell me that you used Miracle Whip or “lite” mayonnaise. Seriously.)
• 1 tsp fresh lemon juice
• 1 6 oz. can Dungeness crab meat
• 1/4 cup Panko (Japanese bread crumbs), or other light, dry bread crumbs, plus extra for coating
• Salt and pepper if you want it. I never do.
• Equal parts butter and oil (I use canola) for frying

Method:

In a bowl, combine parsley, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, egg, mayonnaise and lemon juice and stir until well-blended. Lightly fold in the crab meat and bread crumbs until just mixed – try not to break up the crab too much.

Heat butter and oil in a skillet until fragrant and sizzling.

Spread extra bread crumbs on a plate. Using a large spoon, scoop up a fourth of the crab mixture (it will be quite wet) and press first one side, then the other into the crumbs. Transfer to hot skillet, flattening a bit to shape. Repeat to make four cakes.

Sautee until golden brown, turning once (3-4 minutes per side). Drain on paper towels and serve while still hot. No condiments required, although a dollop of mayonnaise with prepared wasabi mixed in can be tasty if you like that sort of thing.

Asian-style Kohlrabi slaw

(I don’t actually measure the ingredients for salad dressings – I work by the proportions-and-glugs method. This is my best estimation; feel free to taste and experiment)

• 1-2 kohlrabi, peeled, sliced and coarsely julienned
• Pickled sushi ginger, minced
• 1 Tbsp rice vinegar. If you have seasoned sushi vinegar, use that and omit the following two ingredients)
• 1 tsp Mirin (sweet Japanese cooking wine) OR 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp sesame oil
• Black sesame seeds

Method:

Mix the kohlrabi and pickled ginger. Whisk together the vinegar, Mirin (or sugar), salt and sesame oil and toss with the vegetables. Sprinkle with black sesame seeds. This is even better when it’s sat overnight in the refrigerator.

Same ingredients, different meals

I live alone, which means I mostly cook for one. Sometimes that means making big batches of something-or-other, parceling it out into meal-sized containers and freezing it for later. Other times – say, when I succumb to an eyes-bigger-than-stomach moment at the farmers’ market – that means coming up with several ways to use the Big Bags of Stuff ™ I bring home before they go bad.

Last weekend it was spinach: A big bag of dark green, big-but-tender leaves that whispered “choose me, choose me!” when I passed by the Salad Farm stand. Never mind that I was still finishing off the mixed lettuces I’d bought the week before; this was spinach

, and I love fresh spinach with a passion equal to the loathing I had as a child for the slimy green variety that came out of a can.

I also brought home more nice brown eggs from Turpen Farm, and a package of thick-sliced, smoked bacon from Wood Family Farm. So right there I had the makings of two very different, but equally delicious meals: A traditional, Southern-style wilted-bacon and spinach salad, and a fantastic spinach-and-bacon quiche.

This might be the place to explain to new readers that, I am not a “health food” cook, nor am I even slightly interested in losing weight. If you’re looking for fat-free recipes, I fear you’ve come to the wrong place. I come by my middle-aged figure honestly, from a hearty appetite and the Kight family gene poole; old photos of my great-aunts show them built just as I am, in the shape that used to be called “matronly,” and they all lived well into their 90s. Those genes have also served me well in other ways: My blood pressure and cholesterol levels are low-normal, to my doctor’s occasional chagrin. So, yes, I eat bacon and eggs, butter and cream and full-fat yogurt – not daily, but when I feel like it – without the slightest food-guilt.

And while I do believe that fresh, local food is better for me than most of what I find in the supermarket, that’s not my main reason for eating it. Plain and simple: It tastes better.

But I digress. On to the recipes, with a minor caveat: These are things I make from memory. I eyeballed the measurements in the kitchen this evening. Fortunately, they aren’t critical – you can add a bit here, subtract a bit there, substitute as you like, and (except as noted) it won’t affect the outcome in any unpleasant ways.

Wilted Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing

Ingredients (per serving):

• Fresh spinach, rinsed and torn in bite-sized pieces
• Crisp-fried bacon (2 slices per person) broken in pieces
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar OR
• 1 tablespoon red-wine vinegar plus 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 tablespoon hot bacon grease (pour the rest off and keep it in the skillet in which you cooked the bacon)
• One egg, hardboiled and coarsely chopped
• A few shavings of aged parmesan or peccorino romano cheese
• Freshly ground pepper to taste (no need for salt; the bacon provides that)

Method

Arrange the greens on a large plate. Scatter bacon pieces on top.Whisk the vinegar and sugar (if used) into the hot bacon grease in the skillet; while still hot, pour over the salad. Sprinkle hard-cooked egg and cheese on top, and season with a little pepper. Eat. Enjoy.

Spinach and Bacon Quiche

Ingredients:

• Crust for one pie*
• 1/4 pound thick-sliced bacon, fried till just shy of crisp
• One leek, sliced into thin rounds and sauteed until just soft. Or mild onion, if you don’t have leeks.
• 1/2 cup aged Swiss cheese, cut in 1/2 inch cubes
• About two cups of raw spinach, rinsed, dried and coarsely chopped
• 3 whole eggs
• 2 cups of milk or cream.


I use cream, because it produces a silky, luxurious quiche. Feel free to use milk if cream is too rich for your tastes, but at least make it whole milk; low-fat milk results in a watery, unappetizing custard. You can also use half milk and half yogurt or sour cream, but use the real, nothing-but-cultured-milk variety that doesn’t contain gelatin or agar.

• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, preferably freshly grated.
• Ground pepper to taste

Method:

Preheat oven toi 375F. Line a pie plate with prepared crust (you’ll want something deeper than a standard aluminum pie pan for this; I use a deep pyrex plate handed down from my mother).

Arrange bacon, cheese and sauteed leeks in the bottom of the crust, reserving some bacon for the top. Top with spinach. Whisk together eggs, cream nutmeg and pepper until completely blended, then carefully pour over the fillings. Scatter some bacon and parmesan on top, and crimp the edges of the crust as you please.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until the filling is set and the top is browned (to test the filling, give the edge of the pie plate a slight nudge; the custard should jiggle just slightly, but not in a liquid fashion.)

Remove the quiche from oven and let it cool for 5-10 minutes for ease of cutting, or chill and serve cold (I actually prefer cold quiche, and it makes fantastic second-day leftovers.) If I’m serving quiche to guests, I like to accompany it with good, fresh fruit; when no fruit is in season, home-made applesauce or barely sweetened stewed fruit makes a nice foil to the richness of the bacon-and-egg custard.

* While I’m perfectly capable of making a good pie crust, I tend to save them for guests and special occasions. The rest of the time I keep a package of frozen, pre-made pie crusts – the kind that come ready to unroll into your pie plate – in the freezer. They’re easy, less messy, time-saving and even store-brand versions produce perfectly acceptable results.

Improbable combinations

I managed to gobble up nearly half the big bag of lettuce I brought home from the market yesterday, dressed with nothing more than a splash of vinegar and a little salt – a clear sign that I haven’t been getting enough springtime in my diet.

Then my friend Kathy Walton, having noticed my other market purchases, pointed me to this wonderful and easy recipe for Salade Lyonnaise, a traditional French salad involving nothing more complicated than greens – and bacon, and a single poached egg.

At first glance that may sound a little odd to the American palate – but why not? Greens and bacon go beautifully together (think BLTs, or wilted-spinach and bacon salad, one of the canonical Salads Of My People), and hard-cooked egg is a standard topping for lots of composed salads.

Besides, it was an excuse for me to dig out the teeny lidded pan I somehow acquired ages ago and use it for its intended purpose: Poaching a single egg.

It wasn’t a perfect poached egg, appearance-wise; that takes practice, and I haven’t poached an egg in a dog’s age. But the white didn’t unravel as they sometimes do, and it was perfectly done, to my taste: the white firm all the way through, but the rich, orange-yellow farm egg yolk still oozy enough to melt down into the salad and become one with the dressing.

My adjustments: I didn’t have any shallots on hand, but I did have garlic from the market; I minced a clove and added it to the butter I used to toast the croutons. And I had chives from the supermarket, so I used some of those to top the egg.

Pretty,no? Pretty good eating, too!