Shannon Phillips

This week in our veggie box we got a pint of figs, a big bag of small red grapes, a pint of cherry tomatoes, three yellow summer squash and two very leetle zucchinis, four medium-sized heirloom tomatoes, four nectarines, a whole bunch of red gypsy peppers, and also what I think are a few smaller chili peppers—although it’s hard to be entirely sure: they could just be very small sweet peppers.

I haven’t made one of these posts in a few weeks, but the box content has been mostly the same, except that we’ve been getting eggplant for the past several weeks, and sometimes pears instead of the figs or peaches. I’ve mostly been making ratatouille or caponata, and one week I made a beautiful vegetable torta—which I took a picture of—but I lost it along with my camera. Instead you can see the lovely whole wheat bread I made to go with the caponata a few weeks ago (I got the picture off my camera before I lost it):

Tonight we’re having halibut baked in foil with squash, zucchini and tomatoes; they had locally-fished halibut at the fish counter, so I got it even though it was more expensive than I usually buy. You’d think that living on the coast we’d get plenty of fresh local fish, but the environmental regulations are so strict around here that you can almost never get local fish. I think it’s short-sighted: shipping our fish in from halfway around the world has a deleterious effect on the global environment, after all. So, I sprang for the local halibut just to be supportive.

Tomorrow I’ll make pasta with cherry tomatoes, arugula, and goat cheese; Friday, I’ll put all of the peppers (sweet or hot as they may be) into a beef chili. I might make cornbread to go alongside. And that will take care of the veggies, so I’m not going to plan out any further than that.

As for the fruit, the nectarines and grapes will be eaten raw, but I found a nice recipe for fresh fig bars that I think I’ll use again this week. For that recipe I get to use the honey that Sam’s father harvests from his own backyard bees! It’s wonderful, wonderful stuff, and Pappy always seems to have another big mason jar full of it waiting for us whenever we run out. You might say that I married into honey. Hee hee hee.