Good friends of ours who have bought CSA (community-supported agriculture) shares just happen to be away for a month this summer. That means that we're getting their vegetables, shipped in from a nearby organic farm every Tuesday. Given that I'm at the local farmers' market every Sunday anyway, my kitchen is just filled with amazing produce, all of it organic, much of it heirloom: beautiful little fingerling potatoes, knobby white baby carrots, jewel-like golden beets, purple kohlrabi, fennel, green garlic, sorrel leaves, purslane (my new favorite salad green), Romanesque broccoli (as gorgeous to look at as it is to eat), and of course the ubiquitous zucchini and yellow squash.
Anyway, the best thing you can do with produce like this is not to mess around with it too much. That means, for me, no fancy sauces, no complicated cooking process. A little coarse sea salt, a few lashings of black pepper, a touch of lemon or sherry vinegar, the best olive oil you can afford, and heat--what else do you need?
The dishes I made this week aren't recipes so much as they are wonderful combinations of ingredients that I wanted to share: fingerling potato and purslane salad with knobs of ripened goat's cheese; baby golden beets, fingerling potatoes, and baby white and orange carrots roasted together with olive oil, pepper, and sea salt; spaghetti with sorrel pesto; a soup of Spanish lentils, sorrel, baby carrots, and green garlic; roasted beet, fennel, and goat's cheese salad; and finally, Romanesque broccoli soup with purple onions and green garlic, topped with a quenelle of goat's ricotta. So delicious.
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