Here comes the summer (squash).

You should have seen how happy I got when I saw the summer squash at the market yesterday. Actually, I saw golden zucchini first and got excited because I thought it was summer squash, and even after noticing it wasn't, I still bought a bunch of it, cause who doesn't love golden zucchini? Then, on down the line a few tables, there was the real summer squash. Got some of that as well. At this point in the summer, I can fry this stuff in thin slices and eat it like candy. I don't get sick of it until at least late July. I found green zucchini at Milk and Honey last week, got a couple of those and threw some slices in with my vegetable roasts, along with shiitake mushrooms. Delicious. Last night, Mark made us a stir-fry, to be detailed below.

Saturday Shopping List

5 summer squash
5 golden zucchini
4 large sweet potatoes
1 lb. chickpeas
5 tomatoes
1 quart strawberries
23-oz jar of home-made apple sauce
1 pint shiitake mushrooms
1 large portobello cap
1 head buttercrisp lettuce
1 head green leaf lettuce
1 bunch curly kale
2 bulbs garlic
1/2 loaf sourdough banana bread
1 loaf multi-grain bread

Total: $36 and change

I'm happy about all the fruit I got. Strawberries are expensive; most people have them for $4 a pint or $7.50 a quart. One of my favorite vendors yesterday had them for $5.50 a quart, so I bought a quart from her. It's an indulgence I just decided I would indulge in. You can only get fresh local strawberries for so long (which doesn't make sense, because it seems like you could grow them in a green house pretty easily - am I wrong? Does anyone know?). Over the winter, I crave fresh berries, think about them, dream about them. When it's summer, I intend to eat as many fresh, Pennsylvania strawberries as I possibly can. Just wait until the blackberries and raspberries come in. And cherries. And blueberries. I'll buy them all.

Now, about this stir-fry that Mark made. It was asparagus, zucchini, squash, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, onion, garlic and red beans. I never think of putting beans in a stir-fry, but it's great. It's a great way to eat beans if you're tired of beans, and it's a great way to make a stir-fry more substantial. It's like you can feel the iron fortifying your body as you eat the red beans. Plus, it's delicious. We had it with multi-grain toast with jelly on the side.

The best dollar-fifty I ever spent: A pint of tomatillos

Imagine the taste of a raw green pepper mixed with a strawberry. That's how a raw tomatillo tastes.

I removed the skins of these three (save the skins for your soup stock), cut them in quarters and threw them into the skillet for the last two minutes to heat with my curried blue and white potatoes. Start by cooking the potatoes thoroughly with olive oil, onion, and salt. At the end, add the curry powder (don't be shy about it), and I added a little rosemary as well.

Then add the tomatillos. They taste so good raw, it nearly breaks your heart to cook them, so only add them at the end, give them a little heat and toss them around to coat them with the other flavors, but they've got plenty of flavor inside, so don't lose that.

We're going to have these with a breakfast sandwich. Most of the time, we don't have things like soy sausage (or any fake "meats") or tofu in the house. We do eat tofu hoagies from Fu-Wah probably at least once a week, but as a general rule, the kitchen is stocked with vegetables, grains, beans, and fruit, not manufactured nonsense. However. I've been craving these soy sausage on English muffin sandwiches like crazy lately.

We bought fennel seeds at the market today, so I embedded some of those into the Gimme Lean soy sausage patty. I also cooked some thin, thin slivers of portabella mushroom. This is all cooked in the olive oil with the leftover tastes from the curry potatoes and tomatillos.

We're going to slice a tomato to top this with and put it on a toasted white-wheat English muffin. As these are cooking, you've got the potatoes setting aside. When you take the soy sausage and mushrooms off the heat, throw the potatoes back on for a minute or two to reheat while you put the sandwich together.


I have to be someplace tomorrow at 9 am and I have to be there all day. So I'm going to bring some raw tomatillos for snacks (remember, they're high in Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, so they're nice and filling), along with some raw carrots, maroon, orange, and white.

Right now, I've got a butternut squash and three apples baking in the oven with olive oil, cinnamon, and brown sugar. They're not for tonight. I'm going to make fried apples pies in the morning to take with me, and wrap the squash (stuffed with apple) in foil and bring that as well. I'm moving up in the world, I now have big, re-usable aluminum pans to bake in, rather than folded aluminum foil. One day, I'll own a casserole dish. I will.

Nor'easter weekend baked butternut with apple.

It looks a little like certain varieties of dulcimer. I could call it an Apple Dulcimer. At the end, I mush it up, though.

This is a butternut squash from the market this morning, stuffed with apple (I don't know if the apple is an Autumn Crisp or an Empire, I didn't keep them separated).

I cut it (carefully) in half, with my tiny knife. I need to buy a larger knife for baked squash season. Cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds and pulp.

This pretty butternut squash is a good source of calcium and various vitamins. It doesn't even seem to know that, the dear little thing. It smells like a pumpkin.

After you scoop out the seeds and pulp, you're going to fill the empty bowls with apple, drizzle with olive oil & molasses and sprinkle with cinnamon & brown sugar.

You've been pre-heating the oven to 375 degrees. You're going to cover the two squash halves with aluminum foil or something and bake them for about an hour. Do something else while they bake, they'll remind you they're baking by filling your home with a wonderful, pumpkin-pie smell.


That's the squash before it goes into the oven. When a fork slides into it like it's butter, the squash is finished baking.

I added a little more molasses and brown sugar to mine, mashed up the squash and mixed the apple in with it. You could also eat it as shown at the top of this post, as a baked squash with a side of baked apple. Mine tasted like pumpkin pie with hints of apple pie.

Squash, potatoes, apples, leeks, and a long walk to the park.

Another rainy market day, but this time cold as well. And our trip to the farmers market (four blocks from our home) took two and a half hours.

That's the fault of Philadelphia Federal Credit Union. That is due to the check-cashing policies of Philadelphia Federal Credit Union, especially those policies involving payroll checks, which do not seem like good policies to me. They can't cash payroll checks. I opened a checking account with them back in May, and I have yet to begin successfully using them as my primary banking institution. I'm trying to leave Wachovia and stay with something locally owned and more secure that doesn't keep getting sold. Unfortunately, PFCU, in my five months with them, has done things like: giving the wrong digits to the company that printed my checks, causing a loan payment to bounce and throwing off my finances for the better part of a month; failing to issue a debit card for my new account until after two phone calls, a branch visit, and an email; and now they tell me they can't cash my payroll check and would have to hold it for two business days before I could access the funds, even though I have an account there and it is a payroll check. So after standing in line at PFCU for a long time, we were given the above news, which caused us to walk to 36th & Chestnut (about 15 blocks), me in uncomfortable rubber boots, hungry, to stand in line at Wachovia and cash the check, then walk back to the farmers market and shop, before dragging ourselves home.

We were met at the door by hungry cats. We should have been to Center City and back with their food by now. It's after 2 p.m. Usually, we're home from the market before 11 a.m. Today, we left after 11, because of the downpour this morning, but we should have been home well before noon and then back out to run our errands after a quick meal. This whole day is off.

Anyway, here's the grocery list:

2 butternut squash
1 acorn squash
12 apples - Autumn Crisp and Empire
1 head of cauliflower
about 3 lbs of blue and red small potatoes
a big basket of yellow potatoes for soup
4 sweet potatoes
3 huge "candy" onions
2 huge leeks (huge... one leek will make a whole pot of soup)
4 ears of sweet corn
4 big tomatoes
1 portabella cap
1 loaf sourdough bread
1 loaf multi-grain bread

Total: $44.36

Less than $50! Less than $45, even! We were still good on greens and carrots (we didn't juice, all week, I just snacked on the carrots, and the cooler bag in the fridge keeps them crisp and perfect). The people with the fresh Lima beans weren't there. The lady with the spices wasn't there, which is too bad, because we need some spices. (Maybe these folks were there this morning... who can say? We weren't there. We were in line.) We still have plenty of dry beans, which we stocked up on some time ago.

I got those dozen apples so that I can make lots of the delicious fried apple pies I 've been making. I bake the apples in the oven with oil, molasses, cinnamon, and brown sugar, and then fill pastry wraps with them and fry them. I can make up a bunch of apples and keep them in the fridge, then fry up the pies for a perfect, quick breakfast on work mornings. The next step will be actually to bake a pie. A real, whole pie. I think it will happen sometime before this winter is over.

Have you ever seen one of those annoying commercials where the voice-over tells you what you'll be able to do "with all the money you'll save" by buying their product or using their service? I always hated those, because the point of something being cheap is that you don't have any more money than that. You don't have stores of extra money that you'll now be able to use for a cruise to Costa Rica if you just order from the dollar menu or rent a cheaper carpet cleaner.

You know what, though? That line of faulty reasoning makes a great excuse.

With the money we saved by only spending $44 on groceries for the week, we called in an order to Lee's Deli, the greasy spoon/corner store at 47th & Baltimore. We both had greasy veggie burgers and fries for breakfast. Ew. Mmm. I think we earned it.

Progressive Pumpkin Baked Squash

Ambercup Squash. Is what this is called, as I understand it.

So that no one else falls prey to not knowing about the Ambercup Squash (or pumpkin-like squash, as I've come to call it), here is a little guide to squash, which I found helpful. If you scroll down and look on the right, you'll see a picture of the little darling you see here to the left.

What we've done with it is we've cut it in two, with a puny little knife, which is what we have right now, so it looks a little hacked, but that shows the texture off better in a later picture, so that's OK. Cut it with a big, sharp knife if you have one (don't hurt yourself, for crying out loud), because it was really hard cutting it with the little one. Anyway. You don't put the apples in right away.

Just set those apples aside for now. You're going to fill the bowl of the squash with a little olive oil, molasses, and cinnamon (brown sugar, if you have that, I'm delaying going to the grocery store, so I am currently out).

Save the seeds and pulpy stuff. You can boil them down for stock for a light, squash-flavored soup (good with quinoa or rice, and corn). Nope. Seemed like a good idea, but it didn't work. We tried boiling these down as soup stock, it started stinking to high heaven, I thought the sink drain was backed up. I have no idea why that would happen. I'll have to look into this. (update, 10/8/09, 11:20 p.m.)


Cover each half with aluminum foil and bake at 350 for about half an hour. Then you're going to take it out, fill the bowls with the diced apples, drizzle with a bit more oil, molasses, sprinkle with whatever you like, whatever you have, cover it back up and bake for about another 30-40 minutes.


When a fork goes in smoothly and easily, it's done, eat it.

You've probably noticed that I talk about molasses a lot. That's because a.) it's a smoky sweet acquired taste that I have soundly acquired and b.) two tablespoons of it contains 20% of my "recommended daily value" of iron, of calcium, and of vitamin A. I don't even know what vitamin A does, but I'll take it. I know what iron and calcium do, those are good, at least plant-sources of them are good.

Keeping your bones strong depends more on preventing the loss of calcium from your body than on boosting your calcium intake.

Some cultures consume few or no dairy products and typically ingest fewer than 500 milligrams of calcium per day. However, these people generally have low rates of osteoporosis. Many scientists believe that exercise and other factors have more to do with osteoporosis than calcium intake does.

Use molasses liberally. (Progressively, even.)

making vegetable stock

We made our own vegetable stock. First try, first time. We're saving scraps for the next batch. Here's what happened.

Earlier this week, we were going to make this potato-leek soup:

INGREDIENTS

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 leeks, white and light green parts washed and sliced into 1/4-inch slices
2 cups chopped yellow onion
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 large Yukon Gold potatoes (about 1 pound), peeled and cubed into 1/2-inch cubes
4 cups vegetable stock
2-3 teaspoons fresh rosemary leaves

1. Heat a 4-quart soup pot over medium heat and add the oil.

2. Add the leeks, onion, and sea salt and saute for about 5 minutes, stirring often, until the onion begins to turn translucent.

3. Add the garlic and stir well. Cook for 1 minute more.

4. Add the potatoes and vegetable stock, cover, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to simmer. Cook 20 minutes.

5. Remove the soup from the heat and use an immersion/stick blender to blend the soup in the pot or ladle the soup into a blender, 1 cup at a time. Blend the soup with the fresh rosemary leaves until smooth and free of chunks. Pour smooth soup into a heat-proof bowl and continue until all of the soup has been blended.

6. Transfer the blended soup back to the original soup pot and warm over low heat until heated through. Serve hot.

Serves 4 - 6.

Adapted from The Great American Detox Diet, by Alex Jamieson (Rodale Press, 2005).

It would not really serve six. Not six people. We got four servings out of it.

The interesting part is the vegetable stock. The day before we made the soup, we made our own vegetable stock for the first time.

All of the vegetables or vegetable parts you don't necessarily want to use for anything else, set them aside in a container in the fridge. Onion skins, the ends of zucchini, garlic peel, corn husks, rubber carrots, greens past their prime, squash that's gone soft.

Put it all in a big pot, season it however you want, pour water on it, bring it to a boil and simmer it down for an hour or so.



After it simmers for about an hour, strain out the vegetables and vegetable parts and save the liquid in the fridge.

The nutrient-rich, flavorful stock from the exact vegetables shown in the pictures made the four-serving potato-leek soup and, like, a two-dozen-serving stew with two kinds of beans, tomatoes, corn, carrots and general goodness. Both dishes were very hearty. I brought them for lunch, I was full for the whole afternoon.