My coworker brought his lunch last week and let me try some of his homemade red onion pickles and sent me a link to this epicurious recipe. I made it today with a few slight modifications.

They had poblano peppers at the local farmer’s market today, so I substituded that for the habanero, and I added garlic for flavor, and tiny slices from the rat-tail ends of beets for color.

• 2 red onions, halved, sliced thinly
• 2 tablespoons minced poblano pepper
• beet tails, washed and thinly sliced
• 1 clove garlic, shaved
• oregano
• juice from 2 or 3 limes
• distilled white vinegar
• kosher salt

Mix everything in a vase, jar, or bowl. It’s best to use glass because these strong flavors will linger on any porous material. Use just enough vinegar to cover the vegetables, use a glass or a bowl to keep the onions all submerged if you need. For best flavor, let the whole thing soak overnight, but after just a few hours, the mixture will already be pretty tasty. Strain off the vinegar and these will keep for a week or so in the fridge.

UPDATE - These came out great, we had them as a garnish on a kale, cilantro and mushroom stir-fry. The vinegar turned an amazing shade of fuchsia which I saved for inclusion in a future salad dressing.

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.

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.

From a coworker who brought his lunch today. Amounts for all should be dictated by taste, saladhood being a highly subjective state of being. The version Ram made had a very high veggie to cottage cheese ratio, meaning it was mostly vegetables with the cottage cheese finely distributed throughout.

• Large curd cottage cheese
• Coarsely chopped tomatoes
• Coarsely chopped peeled cucumbers
• Coarsely chopped red onion
• Coarsely chopped green chiles
• Coarsely chopped fresh basil
• Coarsely chopped fresh mint
• Pinch oregano
• Pinch black pepper

Directions:

Mix everything together.