Activity update: Special Procrastination edition

The last few weeks, I've been making the mistake of not tracking my activity at least every other day. If I wait longer to track it in my little notebook, I have to wrack my brains to remember what I did for the last week or so. But, to the best of my recollection...

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It's 85 degrees - why is that woman cooking soup?

So, it's cool today, but I somehow managed to be cooking soup on several of the hottest days we had in August. This is largely because I need to use up the farm share we're getting plus my bumper crop of tomatoes.

I've created a few rules when confronted with veggies that are new to me:

1) If you're not sure how to cook a veggie, most do fine if you steam or blanch and then toss with butter, salt and pepper. Or, alternately, you can toss with olive oil and chopped garlic and roast them.

2) Veggies that aren't amenable to cooking (like cucumbers) can be put into salads or quick pickled. I've been enjoying quick-pickle cucumbers and quick-pickled beets, and we've been eating a lot of cole slaw (homemade is so much better than restaurant cole slaw!).

I'm also discovering that a good way to use up lots of veggies is to make soup.

Some recent things I've made lately have included:
-Omelets with veggies & cheese & herbs from my garden
-Lots of salads
-Vegetarian "reubens" made with garden burger in place of corned beef and cole slaw in place of sauer kraut. This was my first time trying this, and J. and I both really liked it. I'll have to put that in the regular rotation!
-Lots of pasta and veggie dishes to use up my tomatoes and the farm share eggplant
-Variations on homemade salsa

I've also actually been exploring new recipes to figure out how to eat up some things I've had an overabundance of. My mother gave me a recipe for summer squash casserole. You can use crookneck or zucchini or a bunch of other kinds of summer squash. It's not too different than making homemade macaroni and cheese only with using slices of squash in place of noodles and then sprinkling with bread crumbs and baking. I liked it a lot and it helped use up some of my squash.

I also made chile relleno for the first time. My batter tasted right but didn't really stick to the pepper, and I don't think I roasted the pepper long enough, because it was a little tough when I tried to cut it into pieces. But the homemade ranchero sauce turned out well and it was tasty overall. I used this recipe as a starting point and adapted it a little bit, with some ideas from this recipe.

I enjoyed quick-pickle beets but wanted to try something different, so I also made a version of vegetarian borscht in the crockpot. This seemed to be a hit. I used this recipe with a few variations. It also helped with using up all the cabbage we've been getting in a way that that didn't involve making cole slaw.

I also used up a bunch of my tomatoes and a shit-ton of peppers and corn I got from the farm share in veggie chili in the crockpot. Chili is always a hit at our house, usually paired with quesadillas. The variation this time was adding some chopped summer squash to it, just to use the darn squash up. It was pretty good!

After receiving yet more squash last week, I was getting desperate for ways to use it up. J. suggested soup. Most recipes I've run across for squash soup call for winter squash, but I found an interesting recipe that used summer squash and which also called for a bunch of fresh basil. My basil plants are doing well this year, so it seemed like a winner. I used this recipe, almost verbatim, except I used onion powder instead of fresh onion. It didn't thicken up as much as I was expecting, but it was quite good. You'd think with that much basil it'd be overpowering, but it's actually pretty subtle. I think the key to this soup is using a stock you really like, and I LOVE the vegetarian version of "Better than Bullion." I think it has added excellent flavor to every soup I've used it in.