Eggplant sauce

I made this sauce for dinner tonight, served over whole-grain pasta with a dollop of pesto (though terrible that I forgot to add ricotta, when I have some from Monforte in the fridge). Nice use of local eggplant and garden tomatoes.

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One-pot local pasta

I’ve gotten back into pasta again after discovering the yummy local stuff sold at the Green Barn Market – I buy the rotini, divide it into three zip-locs and throw it in the freezer for when I want a quick meal. But instead of doing anything fancy, I’ve been throwing together one-pot what’s-in-the-fridge meals. It’s quick and easy and all you really want in the summer.

Boiling isn’t my favourite way to cook vegetables because you lose nutrients in the water, but it’s worth the sacrifice for how easy this is.

Basically, decide on your ingredients and figure out how long each will take to cook, boil a pot of water and add ingredients from longest cooking time to shortest. Tonight, my dish consisted of (in cooking order):

• asparagus stems (Plan B)
• asparagus tips (they cook faster)
• pasta (Green Barn)
• frozen edamame (not local)
• beet greens (stems first, then leaves)*
• green onions (Plan B)

Once everything’s cooked, drain it and then mix in some sauce-like ingredients: pesto if you have it, or tomato sauce, or tonight I did a combo of cream, chevre (local, from Nancy’s Cheese), lemon juice and pepper. I topped the dish with pine nuts (also not local) and dinner was done in 10 minutes! Take that, Kraft Dinner.

* I have a ton of beets growing in the community garden – I went a little crazy planting them. I ate a couple of harvests of baby beet greens when I first thinned them, and while I was watering tonight I pulled out another beet to see how big they were getting. It was about the size of a ping-pong ball and I washed it and sliced it and ate it raw, then used the stems and leaves for dinner.

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