Summer

My love of pasta is no secret, but I’m cutting back. An article in the New York Times covering the latest research about the benefit of low carbohydrate diets has me rethinking my noodle consumption. I won’t give them up completely but now and again I can see trying something different. Something like zucchini noodles.

For a long time I’ve wanted one of those spiralizer type tools. But they are rather expensive and I just wasn’t sure how much use I’d get out of them. There is actually an easy way to make “noodles” out of zucchini or other vegetables using a box grater. You just lay the grater on its side like a mandoline! But I’ve just recently tried out the Microplane spiral cutter and it’s an even better option. At $14.95 it’s a lot less expensive than some of the other tools and takes up very little space. It also has two sizes so you can shred larger or smaller vegetables.

Although we certainly are carnivores in my family, I love to eat meatless meals and try to eat about three dinners a week without any meat. For those interested in the health and environmental benefits of eating less meat, you can read books by Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan, who both still enjoy an occasional steak. On our weekly pizza night, I always fix a vegetarian pizza for myself (with maybe some good anchovies). I try to fix at least one or two seafood/fish dinners a week and I love to make meatless pasta dishes. But one of the best meals you can fix for dinner involves that super food: beans.

It's a high quality protein that is very cheap with no animal fat and lots of fiber. I get my beans these days mostly from Rancho Gordo, that wonderful farm out in Napa Valley run by Steve Sando. He grows the most high quality, fresh beans you will ever taste. You certainly can used canned beans and they are fine, but try buying some great quality dried beans sometime. They are still so much cheaper than buying meat. He has some wonderful varieties that you will never find in the grocery store. For this recipe, I used cellini. You really can use any bean you like.

A lot of people are confused about how to cook dried beans and are scared to try. It's so easy. You just soak and simmer. Sometimes I just throw the beans in a pot and cover with cold water to soak before I go to bed. If I don't do that, I just go ahead and throw them in some water in the morning and let them soak all day. There is no exact science to it. After they soak you just need to give yourself a couple of hours to cook them, depending on what kind of bean you have and how long they have soaked. I just put mine on to simmer with some aromatics and start tasting them after an hour and keep tasting them until they are the texture I like. That's it.

You meet the most interesting people. If you have a farm stand in your back yard, that is. The farm stand didn’t start out as close to the house as it is now, but there were a couple of little problems that forced our decision to move it down the driveway. On a positive note, now when people get out of their cars, they get a great view of the garden, and some even wander over to take a look at the chickens and Cocoa bunny. Also, since I am often outside working, I get to meet more of them now.

This past weekend I was chatting with a lady who’d just returned from a trip to Paris with her husband. She had her eye on our “pick your own mint” patch (which is actually mint planted in an old dresser drawer—very cute!), because she wanted to recreate a drink she had in Paris for her friends on the Vineyard. She told me it was a (non-alcoholic) combination of lime juice, apple juice, and mint, with lots of ice and a splash of soda. I didn’t get any more details, but the notion of making one of these stuck in my head because it sounded so refreshing, and I love any concoction that takes advantage of the lime-mint synchronicity.

I couldn’t possibly have known that the books I managed to read this summer, in some convoluted way, would all share a common thread: success.

In "The Hidden Staircase" by Carolyn Keene, Nancy Drew, using her wits and intuition, solves the mystery of the old stone mansion successfully.

Splat, from Rob Scotton’s "Splat the Cat", has an anxious but ultimately very successful first day of school.

Don Freeman’s "Corduroy", a department store bear missing a button who yearns to find a home, does.

Stephanie Plum, not surprisingly, figures out in the nick of time who decapitated the celebrity chef in Janet Evanovitch’s "Finger Lickin' Fifteen".