Tantre Farm Share, week 8

Grrrrr....the camera is missing again! Probably buried in the sty that is my boy-critter's room.

So I can't (yet) show you the pile of 8, yes 8, cucumbers that were a part of this week's share. Question: what enjoyes the 105 degree heat index days we're having? Answer: cucumbers.

Today's day of summer fun with the critters will involve the three of us cleaning all the horizontal surfaces in the house. In most rooms this involves desks/tables/shelves. But in the boy critter's it involves the entire damn floor. Good thing he has a small room.

Isn't summer fun? (Yesterday I took the critters and two of their friends to the water park for the whole day so you know what? They owe me. I am not a nice enough mom to do that without considering the future targeted use of guilt in the negotiation process when they inevitably gripe about cleaning the house all day today. But wait! We'll take a couple of fun breaks to go get their annual physicals from the pediatrician and to get the boy critter a hair cut! Whoopee!)

Sigh.

If I unearth the camera from the crap I'll post a picture here. Meanwhile, here's a list of what was in the box: beets and greens, rainbow chard, new potatoes, basil, green and wax beans, two heads of lettuce, a big onion, head of garlic, cilantro, cabbage, 4 summer squash and yes, 8 cucumbers.

And here's my plan:

• summer squash, beans, garlic and basil will go into one of my favorite dishes: (pretty much any vegetable) topped with sauce vert.
• cabbage, onion and cilantro will go into Alice Water's coleslaw.
• some more of the beans (there are a lot of beans) and some basil will go into one of my favorite stinking-hot-day lunchtime salads: green beans and tofu with nuoc cham.
• All those cukes call for regular evening consumption of the Vietnamese beer snack with an ice cold homebrew.
• If we don't eat all the cucumbers that way, I'll make a batch of tarragon bread and butter refrigerator pickles (unlike the kind of bread and butter pickles that I make and can, these are good with regular rather than kirby cukes). Excellent with a turkey burger and some corn on the cob.
• I'll make some lemon-dill potato salad with the new potatoes and some of the sweet onion. (No real recipe for that: lots of lemon juice and dill, sliced raw onion, salt and pepper and olive oil tossed with the cooked and cooled new potatoes.)
• I'm looking for something new and interesting to do with the chard and beet greens.  I'm not turning on the oven with the weather being what it is, so baked gratin and quiche-like preparations are out. Simply Recipes has a stove top preparations that sounds promising: Sauteed Swiss Chard with mustard seeds that also uses some shallots. I just so happen to have harvested a load of shallots from my garden and was looking for something to do with them other than my regular use of mincing one small shallot to put in a bottle of vinaigrette. So I'm thinking the chard dish will trigger an Indian dinner with raita (using another of those bountiful cukes), some daal and rice. So far that's my plan but drop me a line if you have a great chard recipe.