A housefull of home folks, Sunday dinner.

Had a wonderful, wonderful trip back home over the weekend, and a couple of fine meals, as well.

The above would be a view which covers maybe half the people who were eating dinner following the Homecoming service at Liberty United Methodist Church in Camden, TN, on Sunday.  The fellowship hall, maybe a 40 x 80 room, did not have an empty seat; some folks scattered out to the Sunday School classrooms.

Back in the center back of this photo, you can see two of my kids’ heads. But you can see us all better in this one, taken after dinner.

From left, Child C, AGC2, Self, AGC3, AGC1, Child B, Child A. A fine-looking crew, if I do say so myownself.

Amazing Grandchild 3, who was somewhat underwhelmed with the whole thing, was snoozin’. AGC 1 was her general whirlwind self, and managed at one time to color on a pew and the sanctuary door with a marker before we snagged her. AGC 2 ate. A lot. And smiled. A lot.

And I had a marvelous time, and got to see a lot of old friends and kinfolk.

The food was as plentiful as I remember. There’s a counter separating the kitchen from the seating area, about four feet wide, and every square inch of it was packed with food. Fried chicken. Baked ham. Meat loaf. Barbecue. Casseroles of every description. Green beans. Creamed corn. Sweet potatoes. Potato salad. Cole slaw. Salads, both fruit and green. Cornbread. Rolls. Biscuits. I touch only a tiny portion of the abundance that was there.

Desserts and drinks took up four 10-foot folding tables of their own, elsewhere around the room.

It certainly did not matter to be the last in line. They were NOT going to run out of food. Except for deviled eggs. I hated that. Guess I’ll have to make me some this afternoon, being I have a gracious plenty of eggs. Oh, and they ran out of the cherry cream cheese pie, which was always one of my favorites (cream cheese, condensed milk, cherry pie filling, among other things), so I contented myself with two kinds of fruit salad.

One of the fruit salads was the indestructible “green stuff” — as a child, I discovered early you could divide all congealed salads into “green stuff” and “pink stuff,” depending on what kind of Jell-O you used. The green stuff had lime Jell-o, Cool Whip, crushed pineapple, and mini-marshmallows. The other salad was fruit cocktail with the addition of bananas and strawberries, with a dressing made of the juice from the fruit cocktail, a can of cherry pie filling, and a box of vanilla instant pudding.

I have probably not had either dessert in 10 years. It will probably be 10 years before I have, or want, either one of them again. And they were wonderful.

We, with our grass-fed beef and our locavore culture and our bent toward natural food, mostly disdain the 50s and 60s food with which we grew up. I suspect Campbells sells, by an order of magnitude, many fewer cans of cream of mushroom soup, for example, than it ever used to. (And by the way, for a stroll down memory lane of some of that “retro food,” check out this link my friend Terre shared with me. It’s a hoot. But one of those salads bears a marked resemblance to the “green stuff.”

My roast pork and baked beans and German potato salad went over well. There were about two servings each of them left; with silent apologies to my mother, I chunked them. I’d already transported ‘em 300 miles to serve ‘em; I wasn’t about to transport ‘em 300 miles back.

AGC 1 supervises flag-raising.

After lunch, a few of us gathered back in the sanctuary for the dedication service for the new flagpole that’s recently been erected in the cemetery, to honor the 58 veterans who are buried there (including my father). It did my heart good to see Mr. Fred Hudson, a dear friend of my father’s (in fact, back in the day, he pitched for the church baseball team, while my daddy caught. Daddy always contended he had as hard a fast ball as any he’d ever caught.) raise the American flag from that pole for the first time.

AGC1 at Great-Grandpa’s grave.

AGC 1 “met” her great-grandpa for the first time. She seemed quite entranced by the flag at his grave. Then she took off at a dead run among the gravestones, her mother in hot pursuit, and for a minute I was 8 again, chasing lightning bugs amid the headstones at dusk.

Yeah, you can go home again. You might not could stay…but you can visit. I highly recommend you ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em do that.

Yum. Pure veggie goodness.

Everything on this plate came from the Farmers’ Market.

I love spring.

I took a notion I wanted to roast the carrots and beets I’d picked up almost two weeks ago at the market, and when I grabbed them from the fridge to prep, there were the radishes.

H’mmm. I never cooked a radish before. Why not?

All pretty and ready for the oven.

So I promptly prepared this pan of veggies for the oven. The beets and carrots got tossed in olive oil first; the radishes, in truffle oil. The beets got a sprinkle of coriander and cardamon because, well, I just thought coriander and cardamon would go well on them. The carrots got a sprinkle of cumin, because I KNOW carrots go well with cumin. The radishes went nekkid into the oven but for the truffle oil, on the basis I thought the peppery taste of the truffle oil would go nicely with the peppery taste of the radishes.

The larger beets got cut in half, so everyone could cook for about the same length of time. Everybody gathered on this pan and went into the oven for about 45 minutes at 350.

The finished product.

And they came out looking like this. And tasting like roasted spring.

The carrots, of which I ate two raw, had a combination of sweet and peppery taste to them that the cumin just complemented perfectly. The radishes were good, but I’ll not do that again; they’re better when they’re fresh and crunchy. But the taste of the radishes did, in fact, marry nicely with that of the truffle oil, so I had that right.

The beets, now. The beets were show stoppers.

I have never had a beet I liked. I don’t like ‘em pickled, I don’t like ‘em boiled. (I do like them in borscht, but that’s different, somehow.) However, roasting does something….I don’t know, just else to them. The natural sugars caramelized during the roasting, so they were impossibly sweet, with the cut surfaces that were on the pan caramelizing into almost a glazed finish. Next time — and there will be a next time, oh, yes, there will — I will use more coriander and cardamon; they weren’t assertive enough against the sweetness. And I’ll add a sprinkle of kosher salt. The carrots would’ve done well with the addition of a bit of salt, too.

It’s a different kind of treatment for fresh veggies, and it was most excellent. And best of all, there’s enough left for another dinner.

Lucy ate everything I left on my plate — two radishes, three carrots and one half of a beet, as well as the single bite of tomato I couldn’t finish off. I figure veggies can’t be bad for her, right?

Plus, earlier today, I finished off the half-and-half in my fridge and discovered, hiding behind it, the asparagus that’s been in the fridge for 10 days. Thanks to standing up in a plastic beer mug, in an inch of water, and covered loosely by a plastic bag, it’s still wonderfully fresh. That’s dinner tomorrow. I’m thinking I’ll splurge on some proscuitto and wrap about half of it and bake it, and steam the other half and make some hollandaise. Don’t know that I need anything else for dinner. Unless you ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em want to come eat, in which case, I’ll add something else to the mix.

Dinner here. Sunday. Y’all come.

You may have perhaps noticed a dearth of posts of late. I’ve been in a blue funk all week, in large part due to a tragedy suffered by a dear friend, who lost her 20-month-old granddaughter in a house fire on Saturday. After a funeral yesterday, there’s a sad road trip today to Central Pennsylvania to lay the little angel to rest in the family plot where her ancestors can watch over her.

Which put me in mind of my own upcoming road trip to visit the family church, and the graves of my parents, this weekend. It’s Memorial Day.

Not Memorial Day the holiday created to honor the war dead across the centuries; Memorial Day to honor the ancestors who built the church in which I grew up, which is always the third Sunday in May, which was noteworthy when I was a kid because there was no Sunday School so I got to sleep late, and there was Dinner on the Ground.

(N.B. I’ve never been sure if it’s “dinner on the ground,” or “dinner on the grounds,” as in, the property. If anyone knows, please enlighten me.)

It was never, literally, on the “ground.” It was originally on big folding tables, augmented by sheets of plywood on sawhorses, out back of the church, in the shade of the trees, long tables stretching the width of the church, groaning under the weight of casseroles and fresh vegetables and ham and fried chicken and homemade desserts and plates after plates of sliced tomatoes and deviled eggs and every other delectable thing you can even begin to imagine. The old folks and the women would generally eat inside, in the fellowship hall. The men would generally eat on the tailgates of pickup trucks. Us kids would betake ourselves to the cemetery, where tombstones would serve as both seat and table.

I always went for Mrs. Audrey Farrar’s baked beans with hamburger in them, and Mrs. Ruth Milliken’s pecan pie. (That woman made a pecan pie that would charm birds out of trees; I have never had a better one, anywhere, any time. Though the Little Rock Club comes close.) All else was optional, though I did always opt for the deviled eggs that had paprika on top, as opposed to the olive slice. In those days, I didn’t like olives. I was a kinda dumb kid about some things.

Now, there’s a big new Fellowship Hall, and we can all eat indoors, in air-conditioned comfort, sans flies and ants. Progress is a Grand Thing.

So. We’re going home for Memorial Day this Sunday. Child A and I (if she gets over her attack of shingles, which are giving her fits) will leave East Arkansas early Sunday morning, to get there in plenty of time for the 11 a.m. service. We’ll be met by Children B and C, and Amazing Grandchildren 1 through 3, who’ll drive down from Nashville, where Child B and AG 2 will have gone the day before. We’ll go to church, we’ll eat dinner, we’ll see everyone, and we’ll head home.

Time was, I could gather up the children, head up there, and not worry about cooking, as my Mama would handle that for us. However, Mama is not there to do the cooking any more. My stepmother may well go, and if she does, she’ll cook, but as the resident adult in the Atchison clan, cooking falls to me.

OK. Let’s look at the logistics of this. I need to go from Hot Springs to East Arkansas, a three-hour drive, on Saturday, so Child A and I can go to Camden, another 3-hour drive on Sunday, and get there in time to visit and put the food in the kitchen before the 11 a.m. service. That means I need to cook, well, tomorrow, or at the latest, Saturday morning. And it has to be something that will hold for 48 hours, and travel.

H’mmm.

Now, bear this in mind. At a basic pot luck, one brings one dish. This has never been the case for Memorial Day. It’s expected that lots of people will come from off somewhere back to the “home place,” if you will, for the day, and for many of them, it won’t be practical to bring dinner. (N.B. 2: It’s in the middle of the day. But it’s dinner. Deal with it, those of you who are not Southerners and used to the usage.) Some will pick up buckets of chicken or trays of barbecue, or bring cups and plates and napkins, or chips, and all such.

I feel relatively certain you could see the movement of earth in the adjoining cemetery that  would be my mother turning over in her grave if I showed up with a bucket of chicken and a couple of plastic containers of store-bought salads. She would be ashamed, and so would I.

So, while I’ve been in my blue funk this week, a piece of my mind has been pondering on what I’ll make to take to Memorial Day. And I’ve about settled on my menu.

I have thawing at this moment a five-pound Boston butt pork roast, which before the night’s out I’m going to coat in Who Dat’s Cajun seasoning and stash in the fridge to marinate overnight. I’ll roast it tomorrow, basting it periodically with Tony Chachere’s Cajun marinade. Cajun roast pork. That can be stashed in an aluminum tray and warmed in the oven at church Sunday morning.

I’m going to make baked beans. I make good ones, and though they start with the canned variety, they’re not recognizable as canned when I get through with ‘em. And I can make a gracious plenty, and they’ll hold for the trip up there without refrigeration.

And I’m going to make potato salad, German potato salad, so I don’t have to worry about food-poisoning anyone with mayo that’s set out way too long, and that will hold just fine for 48 hours and travel well, too.

Regretfully, I’m not going to make deviled eggs. I have an overabundance of eggs, and I’d love to do that, but I don’t have one of those handy-dandy Tupperware egg-takers (come to think of it, I don’t even think I have a deviled egg serving platter!), and there’s just no way to transport those slippery little buggers. Plus, the mayo thing. Plus, the 48 hour thing.

As much as I’d like to make my Mama’s coconut cake, that requires too much room in the fridge. I think I’ll make the triple chocolate Bundt cake that everyone seems to love except me, and that’s OK, because there’ll be lots of other desserts there I can eat.

And I’m going to pack it all up in Mama’s old picnic basket, and off to church we’ll go. And if you ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em show up, we’ll see you there. (Doesn’t matter if it’s not your church; they’ve always been great at welcoming, and feeding, anyone who shows up.)

Welcome, basil. Glad to have you here.

Yes, it is officially spring. I have planted the basil.

Normally, I would not have waited until mid-May to plant basil, but this spring weather has been so screwy — the heater on? in MAY? — that I was afraid to do so. Everyone else out there can handle a chilly night or two, long as it’s not a hard frost, but basil — it gets much below 50, and that stuff is gone.

Surely it will not get below 50 now that it is May 11.

She said, hopefully.

I continue to be amazed at how all my alleged annual herbs, with the exception of basil, reseed themselves and come back, year after year. My tarragon has just leapt back up, as have my chives. My thyme behaves like a perennial, and may well be; same with my sage.  My bay tree is climbing taller and taller. My thyme has, in fact, very nearly choked out the oregano with which it once shared a pot.   I may need to plant myself a new pot of oregano, but I’ll wait to do that until I get moved — wherever I wind up moving.

I’m just figuring I can get a harvest or two of basil before that, being it ought to be at least a month, and possibly six weeks. And then I’ll have to figure out how I’m going to move the little darlings, which will have a great deal to do with where I’m going to go with them. Ah, well. We shall see.

Wherever I wind up, perhaps it will be somewhere with a lawn that doesn’t contain significant gravel, and perhaps I can have myself a tiny garden spot. Nothing huge — a half a dozen 4 x 4 raised beds would be marvelous — but I’d love to have some tomatoes and some asparagus and some cucumbers and a squash vine or two.

We have not cooked today at Chez Brockwell. We went to the Farmers Market this morning, and bought nothing but some Italian sausage, a fried pie, and the basil plants. We’ve been to Sam’s and the once-a-quarter or so trip to the dreaded WalMart. And since I braved WalMart — I needed rawhide chewies for the critter, potting soil, and the only groceries I needed were milk and half-and-half and Cheerios, and even WalMart has OK milk and half-and-half and Cheerios, I went ahead and got two jars of the best commercially jarred salsa in the world, i.e., the Great Value Black Bean and Corn salsa. Which I promptly got home, dumped one of the jars into a plastic thingy, and added to it four ounces of grated sharp cheddar cheese,  which is what I had for dinner. To be followed in a minute by strawberries and creme fraiche. Because I can.

I believe I shall cook tomorrow, though. Not real sure what. But I am hankering to leap off the gluten free wagon with a good breakfast that involves biscuits, bacon, eggs, and such. You ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em come on by, and I’ll cook some extra.

Similar to above illustration. Fried rice looks like fried rice.

I don’t have photos of last night’s dinner. It was one of those that had a lot of prep work but the dishes mostly came together at the last minute, and then it was time to eat, not take pictures. Sorry. It was good, and it was relatively attractive, too.

I’d invited a couple of friends, one of whom is engaged in a huge renovation/construction/business opening project at the same time as the other is preparing to stage a 10-day music festival (Oh! to be young again and have that kind of energy!) over for dinner. I’d thought about German food, as they’re both beer connoisseurs, but it had gotten warm, and, well, I hadn’t had any good Asian food in a while. So I hit three countries with a dinner that featured okonomiyaki, fried rice and bahn mi lettuce wraps, and added a side of steamed snow peas in sesame sauce, for good measure, before finishing up by a return to the South with strawberry shortcake.

The bahn mi is a recipe I pulled from the New York Times a couple of years ago; it can be found here. It’s not complex, it’s quite easy and quick to make, and it’s awfully damn good. (I may have gone a tad overboard on the fish sauce, or it may be that my fish sauce is aged to the point it’s quite potent…) I replaced the daikon with regular radishes, and sliced the whole concoction of veggies in the food processor. A sprinkle with rice vinegar and sugar took care of them. I opted to use lettuce leaves instead of bread because (a) I had them, and (b) if I used them, I could get them out of my sadly overcrowded fridge. I picked up cilantro at the grocery, and harvested mint from the back yard, to garnish, and set out a bowl of lime wedges. Worked.

They require leaning over one’s plate to eat, as they have a tendency to tear (cabbage leaves might perhaps have been better, but I’d shredded all those up for the okonomiyaki). But they certainly leave you less stuffed than the baguettes. And they leave room for another carb, namely the fried rice.

I will always be grateful to Mark Bittman, whose How To Cook Everything enlightened me as to how to make good fried rice. Bittman advises to make the rice a couple of days early and let it dry out in the fridge to make proper fried rice, vs. a gelatinous mass. I didn’t have that luxury. So I took brown rice, rinsed it thoroughly, chilled it uncovered for four hours or so, and it worked well enough. Could’ve been a bit more dried out, but it worked. So bear in mind to rinse the rice well if you’re compressing the time. I stuck with veggie fried rice, as I had protein in the bahn mi and the okonomiyaki. I used the standard onions, carrots and English peas, and added the kernels from an ear of corn, then threw in two eggs. Good stuff. Recipe, really more of a technique, is in my recipe index, or the original Bittman, here.

The okonomiyaki are simple, delicious little crunchy pancakes, bursting with cabbage and scallions and shrimp. I ran across the recipe on Food 52, which is a great site for wonderful, wonderful recipes, and have made them a dozen times since. They’re easy, quick, healthy, tasty, cheap. What more do you want? Recipe here. A tip — Kroger, and I suppose most other groceries, has little four-ounce bags of “salad shrimp,” cooked and peeled baby shrimp, that are a perfect portion for this. And that sriracha mayo? Sweet Baby Jesus!

The snow peas I just steamed, tossed with some sesame oil and mirin, and sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. Hard to beat. The strawberry shortcake was heavy on berries, short on the cake, with creme fraiche. My guests brought two bottles of a most excellent Villa Pozzi Sicilian pinot grigio, which we pretty much decimated. Between that and an episode of vertigo brought on by clogged sinuses, I was pretty much worse for the wear by the time I wended my way to bed.

Do this. You’ll thank me.

One of the culinary marvels of Arkansas is the Arkansas strawberry (there are two quarts of them, macerating in sugar and balsamic vinegar, in my fridge right now. Whether you eat it with creme fraiche (my preferred treatment), with whipped cream, in a strawberry pie, in a fruit bowl, covered with chocolate, whatever — for these few brief weeks in the spring, there is just not much that’s any better.

And every Arkansan, indeed every Southerner, grew up with a version of strawberry shortcake, the dessert so ubiquitous it spawned its own, very cheesy, doll. The shortcakes differ from region to region, cook to cook.

I grew up with the sponge cake style of strawberry shortcake. You bought the package of six or eight four-inch cakes, concave on top, essentially the same thing as a Twinkie, minus the cream. You piled the strawberries, which you’d capped, cut in half or sliced, and sprinkled with sugar, so they created a luscious sweet juice, into the the concavity. You topped it with a scoop of Cool Whip or a squirt of whipped topping.

I upgraded that, when I commenced enjoying the finer things in my culinary life, to strawberries over slabs of pound cake, topped with home-whipped cream or sweetened creme fraiche. And I learned you could top the strawberries with a dollop of sour cream and a healthy sprinkle of brown sugar, and that wasn’t half bad, either. I’ve had shortcake which was something like a biscuit, but sweet. I’ve had berries and cream ladled over a circle of baked pie crust. I’ve had them on angel food cake.

I wouldn’t throw any of ‘em out.

And then I went to the Bulldog Restaurant, in the thriving metropolis of Bald Knob, Arkansas, to which I have referred of late. And I discovered the Bulldog Drive In’s strawberry shortcake.

I had occasion to revisit the Bulldog yesterday. I’d mentioned the Big Bayou market, one of BK’s other culinary gems, to a friend here in the Spa City. “How far is it?” she asked. “M’mmm, maybe a two-hour drive,” I replied. “And we can have lunch at the Bulldog while we’re there.”

So yesterday, equipped with ice-filled cooler in the back seat, we set out on a road trip northeastward across Arkansas. It was a great day for a drive and conversation. I directed her off the expressway, and around the turn that led to the Bulldog. “There it is,” I said.

“My God,” she said. “Everyone in the world is here.”

Well, yes. It’s noon, and it’s strawberry season. The Bulldog parking lot is full most any noontime, but particularly so during strawberry season.

We went to the counter, ordered, got our number, and grabbed the last empty table. My friend made a pilgrimage to the restroom to wash up, came back, and sat down. “This is really a happy place,” she observed. “It feels like home.”

She’s from Texas. I think that’s a compliment.

Shortly, our dinner arrived — barbecued chicken plate for me, country-fried steak fingers for her. We finished those off in short order, and I bore our receipt back to the counter to retrieve our shortcakes.

Have mercy. Sweet Baby Jesus. Exercise other superlatives as they occur to you.

They began with ice cream, in the bottom of a foam bowl. They ladled the fresh, sliced, sugared strawberries over the top, They stuck four business-card-sized wafers of true shortbread — think rectangular Girl Scout Trefoil cookies, but a tad sweeter — around the edges. They topped it with a healthy squirt of whipped topping.

Our eyes rolled back in our heads.

There are no words to do this confection justice. So I won’t try. You ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em get in your car and go, right now, to Bald Knob, Arkansas, to the Bulldog, and get you a strawberry shortcake. Quick, before the season’s over.

If you don’t like green, this would be a good time to click on past.

First, there was garlic chive aioli. An aioli, if you don’t know, is a mayonnaise you made yourself, and put stuff in. In this instance, garlic chives, which look like nothing so much as young Johnson grass (if any of you are Southern country folk, you know from Johnson grass). But they have a lovely slightly garlicky, slightly chive-y flavor.

You take an egg and crack it in a blender. You add about a tablespoon of lemon juice, a turn or two or three of your pepper mill, a bit of salt, and about an ounce of chopped up garlic chives. And you pulse that smooth. Then you take the little center thingy out of the blender lid, and slowly, with the blender running, pour in a half-cup of olive oil. It’ll emulsify up into a rather thin sauce that’ll set up a bit when you chill it in the fridge, though it won’t be as firm as regular mayo.

It will go wonderfully on some of the Mennonite tomatoes, with some bacon and avocado, on a lettuce leaf or two. Damn the bread, anyway.

With the added advantage of repelling vampires.

Then there was the green garlic pesto. Now, green garlic is a whole ‘nother thing from the regular dried garlic you mince up and use almost daily, if you are me. Green garlic, available for only a few weeks in the spring and early summer, looks a lot like green onions, with the heads starting to form. It smells very, very garlicky, but it doesn’t taste nearly as strong as it smells.

Lop off all but about four or five inches of the bunch of garlic (my bunch was five bulbs and stalks. Save another four inches or so of the leaves of one of the stalks. Toss a cup of nuts (canonically, you should use pine nuts,  but those babies are significantly pricy, and I used walnuts) in your FoPro and chop them fine, but not into a paste. Yet. Roughly chop up the garlic and toss it in; add the rest of the juice from the lemon you used when you made the aioli (maybe two tablespoons), some salt and pepper, and about 1/3 cup olive oil. Process for a while, stop it and scrape down the sides, add oil if it’s too thick, and process until it’s as smooth as you want.

There are a ton of things you can do with this stuff. You can spread it thinly on toasted baguette slices and top with chopped tomatos, or whatever else you wish, for some awesome bruschetta. You can put a spoonful in with your bacon and bacon drippings when you’re preparing to make carbonara. You can mix it with butter and make the best garlic bread you ever ate. You can use it to flavor an alfredo sauce, or a tomato sauce. You can use it anywhere you’d use regular pesto, although I like it better when it’s slightly cooked in some preparation, as opposed to raw. Your mileage may vary. I tend to go to the dollar store and get little quarter-cup plastic thingies and freeze it in them.

Arugula, pre-roasting.

Still on my green kick, I made arugula chips. Not much to ‘em. Wash your arugula — I had an eight-ounce bag, and it made two cookie sheets full — and toss it in the colander. Shake out all the water you can, then dump it out on the table on a bath towel to dry while you do other stuff.

Arugula, after 25 minutes in the oven.

In a big mixing bowl, whisk 2 tablespoons of olive oil, a teaspoon of smoked pimenton, a sprinkle of garlic powder, and a pinch of salt. Add half the arugula and toss, and then spread it out on a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for about 25 minutes, or until it looks fairly dried out. Let it dry and crisp up on the parchment, and then move it to a rack to let it completely cook before you put it in plastic. Nice crunchy, spicy little snack. If you want to up the spice value, add a pinch of cayenne or a shake or two of your favorite hot sauce.

There’s a little more room in my fridge, but it’s still packed. Tomorrow — pickled veggies, for bahn mi lettuce wraps! You ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em come on over and enjoy!

Strawberries and creme fraiche.

Breakfast.

Caprese, with Amish tomatoes.

Lunch.

A blissful day so far at my house. You ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em will have to wait and see what dinner holds, because I haven’t decided, either.

Too much? Surely not! It’s spring!

Errr. Ummm.

It may be — just MAY be, mind you — that I overdid it just a tad at the Farmer’s Market yesterday.

My refrigerator is groaning with the burden of holding all the goodies, along with yesterday’s co-op goodies, along with all the stuff I normally have in there.

I live alone. I need to keep reminding myself of that. Or invite lots of friends over for dinner.

But….but….but….I got there in time for tomatoes! Stutzmans’ hoop-house, honest-to-God vine ripened tasting, tomatoes! Two pounds is not excessive! (Really, it’s not!) And I got there in time for asparagus! Snagged two of the four bundles still there at 7:45 in the morning. Never mind I have leftover cooked asparagus in the fridge from the other night. This is fresh, local stuff!

And I bought snow peas. And new baby carrots. Red lettuce. And green onions. And beets.

Beets? I don’t even the hell LIKE beets! But then, I didn’t like turnips, either, until I roasted some, and I decided they were pretty exceptional, so I figured, for three bucks, I’ll see if beets work the same way. Maybe with a mini-meat loaf.  I must confess, though, I cut off and pitched the beet greens, which are supposed to be quite good to eat. There’s sustainable, and there’s overfilling the fridge.

So sometime this week, I’m going to roast beets and carrots and sweet potatoes (from last week’s market). Later tonight or tomorrow, I’m going to make garlic chive aioli, garlic pesto, and arugula chips. The pesto will go in the fridge, the aioli with bacon and sliced tomatoes and lettuce and a cut-up avocado (a sammich sans bread).

So it was 42 degrees when I got out this morning, and I’ve had my heat on all day until just now, because I worked up a sweat cleaning house. I’m eating from the garden — well, someone’s garden — all week. Life’s good. And I’ve got plenty — you ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em come on over!

Screwiest weather I believe I’ve ever seen in a spring. Last year this time it was 90-plus. And of course, it brings all the idjits out of the woodwork pooh-poohing global warming. (Folks, for your Science Friday assignment, learn the difference between Weather, which is what it’s doing today/this week/this month/this year, and Climate, which is the long-term trend that has the polar ice caps melting at an alarming rate.)

Anyway. I shall break out the fleece and the gloves and the hiking boots and betake myself down there, because the publicity allows that at least one vendor will have snow peas — can sugar snaps be far behind? — and the Stutzmans, the Amish farmers, will have tomatoes if I get there early enough. I plan to get there early enough. Then it’s back home to clean the house because they’re showing it tomorrow afternoon, when Lucy and I need to betake ourselves somewhere to get out of their hair.

Then I’m going to come home and do some significant cooking. There was no cooking today, as it was volunteer day at the market co-op, from whence I brought home green garlic and garlic chives and eggs and strawberries and arugula, that being a gift from one of the vendors who had some extra and bagged it up for us volunteers. Not being a huge fan of arugula in salads, I’m going to make some arugula chips, where you toss the arugula with olive oil, salt, smoked paprika and hot sauce and bake it in the oven.

The green garlic will make pesto, which should do double duty as vampire repellent. The garlic chives will make aioli, which will in turn be used on the fish cakes I plan to make tomorrow evening. Stand by for reports on all the above, including my first Arkansas strawberries, for which I need to bestir myself off my lazy arse and make some creme fraiche to go with them, because? There will also be Arkansas strawberries at the market tomorrow, and I plan to buy some more, because when I got my quart container of them today, I surely wished I had gotten two. The Arkansas berry season is short, and every opportunity for the luscious little darlings should be snatched up. I may even cover some in chocolate.

Glad I didn’t buy basil plants last weekend like I’d thought of doing. They don’t like cold nights. Can’t say that I blame ‘em.

You ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em stay warm, and stand by for good food this weekend.