A timely post

This week I made the Calabacitas that Halla brought to our most recent Gluttony Fest and I must report that it is a fabulous way to use up a whole LOT of summer squash in a very pleasant, easy dish.

It drives me batty when (this time of year) magazines or newspapers publish articles on how to diminish the overload of zucchini and summer squash and then include recipes that call for, say, 1/2 of a grated zucchini. People, we got squash coming out our ears this time of year! We need recipes that deal with quantity (quality too, of course). This one fits the bill deliciously.Patience is the secret to this squash tasting so good. Don't cook the onions or the squash over high heat--keep the heat on the low to medium side and let the vegetables become meltingly tender. There is no butter in this dish (ok, there is a sizeable quantity of cheese) but the squash tastes buttery when cooked slowly. I'm sure zucchini would taste just as good, but I'd miss the sunny glow of the summer squash since zucchini can get a bit muddy colored when cooked.

I took Halla's advice and made the effort to roast a couple of poblano chiles which were really great, just a mild background heat. The rest of the dish is so absurdly easy that roasting the chiles didn't even seem like much of an effort, despite the little bits of singed skin that are all over the stove now.

We ate this as a side dish tonight (with Pork and Hominy Stew) but it could make a nice light, vegetarian supper when accompanied by a salad and bread or quesadillas.

Calabacitas (Skillet Squash)

5 cubed small summer squash
1 diced large onion
2 roasted peeled diced poblano chiles or about 1 small can diced green chile
1 tablespoon neutral oil
3/4 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Saute onion in oil over medium heat until soft--do not brown. Add squash and keep the heat medium low, stirring once in a while until the squash is tender (not tender crisp). Add chiles; simmer briefly. Sprinkle on cheese and stir until melted.

Pear Greed

My greed overcame me on Sunday when I went out to Ami and John's house. I brought over a raspberry buckle and came home with a cubic foot of pears. Lest you think I am exaggerating I show the proof:
These were all windfalls from Ami and John's trees--and there are plenty more pears up there that have not let gravity get the best of them (yet). For a free-fruit-freak like me, this is a wonderful way to start a week.

So now I am accumulating pear recipes to manage the bounty--so far I have a pear sorbet recipe and three different pear tarts to attempt (I'll post recipes or links if any of them turns out decent). I'm also planning on a pear/walnut/blue cheese salad. Suggestions for other favorite pear recipes I should try would be gratefully accepted at this time.

Excellent news for the caffeinated among us

If you are a coffee-loving Ann Arborite, there's good news to be had! Amazing Beans, the local coffee roaster who delivered your coffee to your doorstep the next day, has re-opened for business under the new name Mighty Good Coffee Roasting Company.

The former owner/roaster Johann Lee sold the business to two of his customers and today I received the following letter that I thought I'd share:

Dear Amazing Beans Customer,

I am writing to you for two reasons. First, I'd like to thank you for supporting Amazing Beans when it was in operation. I started Amazing Beans because I thought that Ann Arbor deserved and could support a local business that provided freshly roasted coffee using the best beans money could buy. I was, and remain, passionate about coffee, and I am grateful to you for your past support. I closed Amazing Beans because I could not make it work while working full time in another demanding professional job. I was simply unwilling to compromise on the quality of my product, and so I closed up the roaster. I am now headed to a new job out of state.

The second reason I write is to give you some good news. Fortunately for all of us, two of my former customers have bought the operation and will shortly resume roasting. Ann Arbor will again have access to the highest quality freshly roasted coffee delivered to your door. I have been working closely with the new owners. We have been roasting a lot of coffee together and I am convinced that they share my passion for delivering the best possible coffee. They will be buying their beans from the same sources I used. They will be using the same roaster and equipment I used. They will even be using the same roast profiles I used so you can again buy just what I was selling. While I'’m sure that there will be some changes, one thing won't change, a commitment to providing the best coffee you can buy anywhere.

I decided I was too fond of the name Amazing Beans to sell that too. The new business will be run under a name the new owners chose: Mighty Good Coffee. Their web site is simply MightyGoodCoffee.com. I hope you'’ll support Mighty Good Coffee. I plan to be drinking it myself, and I'’ll be working with the new owners over the next several months as Mighty Good Coffee starts showing up at your doorstep.

Best wishes,
Johann Lee

As soon as I'm finished with the current bag of Peet's I'll be placing my order!

Where I been

Two weeks ago, my husband announced "Honey, I pulled a cottage out of my ass!" After recoiling in horror that such a structure was to be found up his colon, I realized that he was telling me that we were going on a last-minute vacation.

I spent the last week at a cottage called Snug Haven up at Georgian Bay, just north of Parry Sound.

It was just gorgeous; see, here is my kid looking poetic instead of frenetic:
We canoed or kayaked almost every day:
The last time I was there was when my now-six-year-old son was one. Brian and I took him on his first canoe camping trip out to Franklin Island and we visited the place again, this time for a picnic and a little skinny dipping.
It is a most excellent thing to be the one with the camera when skinny dipping.

The landscape is so beautiful it is hard to take in--there is a lot of mica in the pinkish granite rocks and this means that everything sparkles. You stick your hand into the shallow water and stir up a little sand and it looks like someone just dumped in a container of glitter. And thanks to the glaciers, there are the coolest chains of islands to explore--I found this image on Flickr that gives you a sense of all the little bays and inlets there are to poke around in a canoe. And much of the area is Crown Land so you can pull your boat out of the water and explore the islands and let your kids run around like little mountain goats without fear of trespassing.

The cottage itself was pretty nice--incredibly clean and spacious enough for me to enjoy a week with husband, kids and my mother-in-law (yes, we brought Brian's ma with us and didn't abuse the built-in-babysitter feature too much). However--you knew there had to be a "however" in there somewhere, right?--the kitchen supplies were woefully inadequate. I adjusted to the electric stove quickly enough and it wasn't an evil one like our old "inferno". But I can't understand how anyone is expected to make a sandwich, much less a meal, with one crappy 3 inch serrated knife.

Note to self: things to bring to supplement otherwise-perfectly-satisfactory-rental-cottage:

• your own chef, paring and bread knife
• a decent sized cutting board
• your cast iron skillet
• a pot wide and deep enough to cook 5 ears of corn on the cob (for one meal I had three tiny pots of water boiling each of which fit 3 halves of a cob of corn)
  
• a salad spinner

I did remember to bring my little red Melita coffee cone and filters so I didn't have a replay of my disastrous encounter with an unknown coffee maker from last October.

So I spent last week cooking a lot of food on the grill (to get around the absence of reasonable sized pots), canoeing, kayaking, reading three terrific books--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Mary and O'Neil, and Small Island (reviews to come shortly)
and mostly managing to stop obsessing about the start of a new school year and whether Ian's new teacher will "get" him or not.