Morning kitchen still-life with produce, some of which I did not grow (the label on the apple is maybe a giveaway, as is the fact that it is not apple season). The striped bowl contains dried cayenne peppers from last year, which I'm still cutting up into everything that calls for red-pepper flakes.
My three grape-tomato vines have begun to produce:
Most of these are yellow tomatoes --- still ripening, yes, but not actually as green as they might appear. By tomorrow they'll probably be ready for me to use them in some kind of baked vegetable dish. The yellow ones are very beautiful when they're really ripe, and I love the milder, lower-acidic taste. One of my favorite easy vegetable bakes is grape tomatoes + artichoke hearts (jarred, always on my shelf) + black olives + whole garlic cloves + crumbles of feta or goat cheese. You just spread all this in a layer (you don't want it deep) in a baking dish or pie dish and cook until the tomatoes are soft and collapsed, the garlic is thoroughly roasted, and the cheese is browned on top.
On today:
*dog walk before it gets too hot (high again of about 95F, which is warmer than initially predicted)
*Work on my second essay for next week --- fortunately a retread of a selection from the archive
*a little light housework
*attention to my own writing
*pub night
What we've been eating for dinner this week:
Monday: Rainbow trout pan-fried with butter, salt, pepper, and dill, with side salad (spring mix, carrots and grape tomatoes from the garden, goat cheese, dressed with basic white wine vinegar and olive oil, with salt, pepper, and more fried dill weed)
Tuesday: Egg roll in a bowl --- this idea, but all I did was brown ground chicken with garlic powder, ginger paste, salt, pepper, soy sauce/aminos, and a dash of sesame oil, then fold a bag of tri-color coleslaw mix into the meat and cook until the cabbage was soft, adding a little more soy sauce, a little more ginger, and another dash of sesame oil as it cooked. No rice in ours. We drizzled a little sriracha on our bowls and enjoyed. This is an easy, basic, delicious dinner. It could of course be done with crumbled pre-frozen/thawed tofu in place of the ground meat (freezing the tofu gives it the right consistency for this kind of thing), and you could have it over rice, or cauli rice, or glass noodles, or rice noodles. Anyway, this dinner is a consistent favorite, and although it's warm, it's still good and light for summertime.
Wednesday: Southwestern-ish salad with ground beef. I browned the beef with salt, pepper, a little garlic powder (I'm out of fresh garlic at the moment and don't have any quite ready in the garden), chili powder, and cumin. I assembled a green salad: spring mix, lots of sliced grape tomatoes, and about half a squash, diced really fine so that . . . diners, shall we say . . . would not detect the overt presence of raw yellow squash in their salad. I made a dressing of plain Greek yogurt, lime, and chipotle powder to drizzle over. When we were ready to sit down, I tossed the cooled meat with the salad, added the dressing, and topped with a little fresh cilantro from the garden. Again, this kind of thing could easily be done with cold black beans instead of meat, or with more crumbled pre-frozen tofu, marinated in and sauteed with maybe lime juice, chili powder, and cilantro. Some smoked paprika might also give it a little more flavor.
This has been a good menu for the hot weather. Tomorrow night I think I'll do baked vegetables with feta, with maybe some kind of protein/frozen-fruit smoothie for dessert, so that we get more protein with our meal. Tonight, however, the food is coming to me!
LATER
Post-dog-walk, post-early-lunch (leftover beef salad from last night scrambled with two eggs), here's what I'm wearing today, with my still-wet hair:
*Secondhand Not Perfect Linen Leila dress (S/M) in Cinnamon Rose, bought December 2023, last worn June 1. Wears in 2025: 8
*Secondhand Xero Z-Trek sandals, year 1 of wear, obviously now my default shoe
I tend to think of this as a special-occasion dress, but there's no particular reason why it should be relegated to Sundays and holidays. Not that it isn't perfect for Sundays and holidays, but it's also perfect for any old day, with a pair of sandals and bare shoulders in the sunshine. Easy, breezy, and a magical color that I really should be enjoying often, especially in this season when I don't have to layer it up. It is a perfect year-round dress: surprisingly so, in fact. One secondhand item I have my eye out for for the fall/winter is a soft (as in soft-colored) blue wool cardigan that I can wear with it. I love my minty green Connemara cardigan with this color, but I think a sort of washed-indigo color in a similar cardigan would be the absolute bee's knees.
But that's a long way off. Today it's going to be 95F --- though it was still fairly pleasant when I walked the dog about an hour ago --- and I am not wearing anything heavy. It's just me, my aging-but-still-vigorous body, and this lovely swingy linen dress, here to find delight in the day.
EVENING UPDATE
Finished off my second essay for next week early in the day, so did a crossword puzzle and played some online Mah Jongg, my new obsession, in the sun while Dora toasted herself on the back walk. Read some in the three novels I have going currently --- finding two of them rather hard going in various ways (and not because they're excitingly challenging . . . they're just hard going in various ways), but am savoring Virginia Woolf's The Waves.
The skies have opened up, and I'm sitting by the study window watching the rain plummet onto the driveway. I guess the question of whether we're walking or driving to the pub has answered itself. Costa Rican food truck tonight, so that'll be fun.
Outfit tweak for date night (wait for it . . . you'll never guess . . .):
Why, yes, friends, she did pull back the front of her hair in a claw clip and put on a jean jacket. I'll wait for you to recover from the shock.
I wasn't actually going to take a jacket at all, it being hot and all, but now that it's raining the air conditioning in the pub won't feel quite so nice. And it is fun to be getting continual wear out of this thrifted jacket, which I have had for so long. Another well-spent $8, this.
Just waiting for the resident gymbro to shower and be ready to go. One lovely thing about summer is not having to wait until 6:30 or 7 in the evening to begin a move toward dinner. And it's nice to go early, when things are quiet.
Meanwhile, the garden is getting a good watering, and the dog is tucked away in her crate with her Thundershirt on.