OLS Week 12: from my garden!

Most of the summer, I was quite certain that I wouldn't get any produce from the vegetables I planted. Between poor soil and hungry rabbits, my plants were all stunted. But, it turns out that even stunted plants will manage to put out some fruit. We have fairy tale eggplants and jalapeno peppers to harvest and I have high hopes for the bell peppers as well.

Today's lunch entree was a potato (Yukon Gold from our CSA) topped with the leftover side dish from a couple of nights ago -- grilled eggplant in salsa, which turned out to be essentially ratatouille with a Mexican accent. R grilled 5 baby eggplants from our garden while I made the salsa.

I started by roasting 4 roma tomatoes (CSA) and 2 jalapenos (our garden) in the toaster oven. I would skip this step if I were in a hurry or trying to turn 10 pounds of tomatoes into salsa for the freezer, but I do think that the roasting added a dark, richness to the salsa. When the vegetables had colored on two sides, I let them cool slightly while browning onions (CSA) and garlic (farmers market). I chopped the tomatoes coarsely and threw them in the sauce pot with the onions and garlic to stew for awhile. I waited for the jalapenos to cool and then cut them into tiny pieces and put them in with tomatoes to cook some more. I eventually added some cumin and salt an pepper.

When R brought in the eggplant, I removed about 2/3 of the salsa from the pan to use later and coarsely chopped the eggplant, then stirred it into the remaining salsa. Voila! A nice side dish with grilled chicken and cool potato salad. The coolness of the potato salad was especially important because this salsa is spicy! Apparently, my garden jalapenos are hotter than the ones I've been getting at the farmers markets recently.

So, for a quick lunch, I microwaved a potato, topped it with the leftover eggplant and salsa, and served it alongside the fruit I got from a sampler box at the Tower Grove Farmers Market this morning -- Asian pear and two kinds of plums. Some handy reading material cut the glare of the sunroom so that I could get my photo.