A conscious effort to eat more fruit has turned into a strategy for eating more baked goods. Our well-intentioned banana purchase sits around for days until they start to wilt and the time comes to mash them up with some butter and molasses, hooray!

• 2-3 large mashed bananas (or 3-5 small)
• 1.5 cups flour
• .3 cups butter, melted
• 1 egg
• 1 cup sugar
• .5 cup molasses
• .5 tablespoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• .5 teaspoon nutmeg
• pinch salt

1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
2. Grease a oven-safe glass loaf pan with butter.
3. Sift together flour, soda and salt into a large mixing bowl.
4. Mix together remaining ingredients in a medium sized bowl.
5. Fold wet ingredients in with the dry ingredients, stirring until lumps are gone.
6. Spread mixture into greased loaf pan.
7. Bake at 350° F on a high rack for 40-50 minutes, or until a toothpick stuck into the center of the loaf comes out clean.

The heat broke a few days back and there’s enough energy at the end of the day for some food prep, but not so much full-on cooking. Here’s an all raw recipe that is better the second day. It even puts up in the freezer pretty well. It looks like mostly all corn in the picture, but we got orange tomatoes from a farm stand, so it looks more uniformly yellow than if we’d used red tomatoes.

• tomatoes, minced
• corn, off the cob
• green peppers, minced
• cilantro, finely chopped
• red onion, minced
• green onion, coarsely chopped
• garlic, minced
• red onion, minced
• lemon or lime juice
• tequila
• salt

Mix everything to taste, adding the salt last. Citrus can make food taste more salty than it actually is.

These glorified plant racks would likely be made of heavy gauge steel wire or some other material that would make them sturdy but lightweight while packed full of potted plants. A few pipe segments welded to one edgeof the rack would fit over paired posts secured to the edge of a window frame, making a hinge. Once full of plants, the whole thing can be swung to cover the window for privacy or opened to enjoy the view. The plants get the benefit of maximum sunlight available to a room and the humans get a oxygenating herb farm and privacy screen.

The trick here is getting the ‘rope’ material right. It has to be strong and durable but also the right balance of transparent and cloudy. Transparent enough to let light pass evenly along the length of it, but cloudy enough to refract light outward so that the effect is nice and bright.

The simple matter of putting a bright LED in each handle shouldn’t be too challenging. Maybe a few strobe/color settings for the deluxe model.

Cleaning out my freezer, this concoction presented itself. Jeanie had hers over rice and egg with the addition of mushrooms (naturally) while i just slapped a pat of butter over it. Color-wise, fat wedges of red onion would add greatly to the presentation of this one. Next time.

• 2 cups frozen peas
• 2 cups frozen artichoke hearts
• 2 cups lotus root slices
• soy sauce or tamari
• dill
• thyme

Fry slices of lotus root in oil until golden brown. This can take 15-20 minutes, and adding a little soy sauce not only adds flavor but makes them look browner quicker. Do exercise caution when adding soy sauce to the hot oil. Add small amounts at a time because the oil will spatter. Microwave frozen vegetables with an inch of water in a covered container until hot. Drain oil from the lotus and water from the frozen veggies and combine in a bowl with herbs to taste.

Last month I brought my friend Nick to a local Italian deli for one of their amazing roasted marinated vegetable heroes after talking the place up for an hour. We’re both vegetarian and we had some difficulty conveying our sandwich orders to the guy behind the counter because they ended up having a grilled chicken breast stuffed into each one. We saved the chicken and fed it to the cat but the need arose to trump the local deli. Nick is now back in his home country, but here it is anyway. I think it’d be worth trying again in the fall and roasting the vegetables, because turning on the oven in the summer is a bad idea in our tiny place with few windows.

• 1 good sized eggplant, sliced into strips
• 10 large leaves of swiss chard, sliced into strips
• 1 pound of mushrooms, sliced into chunks
• 2 large onions, sliced into strips
• 2 tomatoes, sliced
• fresh mozzarella cheese, sliced
• 5 cloves of garlic, minced
• olive oil
• basil
• oregano
• thyme
• red wine
• salt
• 10 inch flour tortillas

Saute all the vegetables, oil and spices until soft and caramelized. I had to break the eggplant into two waves and the chard and mushrooms each into their own waves dividing the onion and garlic evenly between them all because my skillet wasn’t big enough to hold it all at once. You may choose to saute the tomatoes or leave them fresh. Start the pan at a medium temperature and then add the wine towards the end and crank the heat up to reduce all the juices together with the wine. If you’re concerned about all the salt, you can leave it out of everything but the eggplant waves, the salt helps draw the moisture out of the eggplant making it less slimy in the end.

In a different skillet, heat up the tortillas and melt the sliced mozzarella on one side. Lay the sliced tomatoes in and wrap them up tightly. Slice into four equal pieces and arrange edgewise on a plate like sushi.