This morning I went downtown for a routine dental procedure that went horribly amiss. It started out badly with my doctor not taking his eyes off of his iPhone for a second to answer the nurse's questions about what he needed to proceed to put me into pain. After a moment he looked up and asked me what procedure he was supposed to be doing. Feeling extremely uneasy I answered him. He nodded and then went about asking the nurse to run in and out of the room about a dozen times to retrieve scalpels of varying lengths. It wasn't until just before the procedure that he mentioned he only asked about the procedure because it was hospital policy to make sure they had the right patient. This made me feel slightly more at ease.

After the procedure he decided to bring up that I should avoid solid foods for the next four days. Excellent. This would have been information that would have vastly changed the grocery shopping I did yesterday. However, since I lack the ability to turn back time I was forced to slightly alter dinner plans for this evening.

I stopped by the grocery store on my way home and stocked up on pudding, keffir, and smooth peanut butter.



For the first course I made this zucchini ribbon salad with thinly sliced zucchini, garlic scape, lemon, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I let it marinate for about an hour then served it over mixed greens. Jen tells me that this tasted good. I have to take her word for it.



I had no intention of making soup this evening, however, with an injured mouth I was forced to make something for dinner that was not pudding or peanut butter.

I browned some whole cloves of garlic and shopped onion then tossed in some peeled and cubed kohlrabi. I cooked it with chicken stock then pureed it with some milk and curry powder. I garnished it with a fried wonton. Sure it may look like a leftover fried tortilla from the other night but I assure you that is merely a coincidence.



The main course (the one I am most upset about not getting to eat) was this beautiful sushi grade tuna that I seared with a sesame crust. The crust was a little light on sesame seeds (because I ran out) so I also added a little wasabi powder as well.

I also made a lemon shallot vinaigrette which I drizzled over some mache greens and I made a wasabi mashed potato to accompany it. I wasn't sure about simply mashing the potatoes by hand. I contemplated putting them through a food processor but by the time 8:00PM rolled around I was tired of this whole liquid diet nonsense.



While we didn't have it for dessert I also made a cherry preserve out of the cherries which were mere hours away from becoming unusable. I'm a little worried I made the jam too loose to use for sandwiches but we'll see how it goes.

I have no lack of options for dessert with puddings and ice cream I purchased this afternoon. Jen and I even bandied about the idea of going to the ice cream truck for some soft serve. Soft serve ice cream: perfect for the wounded mouth.

I wonder if the Mr. Softee truck gives receipts. Maybe I'll mail it to my insurance company to see if they'll up the tab.

I'll let you know how that goes.

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I heard a rumor that only people who follow our blog love us! What a shame if you think you love us only to find out that you actually don't because you're not following the blog.

That would be the most epically tragic tale I've ever heard.

I had a lot of elaborate plans for dinner rolling through my head all day but when I finally got home from work, spent 45 minutes driving around looking for a parking spot, did an ungodly amount of dishes and took a shower I had about 15 minutes to make dinner before Jen got home.

This is the sad meal that resulted:



You know what wasn't tragic? Tonight's salad! Well, it was a little tragic. I used some of the leftover strawberry dijon dressing in the fridge with some leftover blueberries, greens, and sliced almonds.



I got these wonderful lamb tenderloins that I seasoned up with salt, black pepper, garlic, paprika, rosemary, mint, and thyme. After roasting some shallots, celery, leftover potato wedges, and squash from the farm I tossed them into the pan for a couple of minutes then served them up with the roasted vegetables.

Tomorrow I may do something halfway inventive with the farm vegetables that are left. It will be my last dinner for a while as there will be a number of late nights and holidays lined up for me this weekend. So making something inventive will use up the vegetables before they spoil and will keep me sane after making such a boring meal tonight. Still, tonight's meal is the definition of extravagance compared to the three consecutive nights I will have a plain turkey sandwich for dinner at work.

My culinary adventures always cease at the opening of a brown paper bag.

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When I arrived at the pickup location today I noticed a distinct lack of fruits and vegetables. What I was greeted with instead was an ample supply of crunchy looking hippies looking annoyed. Some of them were sitting down against the wall to the church and looking like they were suffering organic, sustainable produce withdrawal.

After waiting twenty-five minutes or so I got bored and went home. When I got home I found an email from farmer Ted explaining that the driver was running quite late. Just as I decided to leave a tremendous thunderstorm started which drenched me over the course of the twenty minute round trip walk.



After taking some pretty great pictures of the share my flash memory card on my camera just completely died. I lost all the pictures on the card. Luckily the only pictures that were not backed up on the computer were the several pictures of the farm share haul from this week. Unluckily I have no pictures yet which I why I posted this iPhone picture of the rain-soaked hippies picking up their vegetables.

For the rest of the pictures I had to dust off my trust old (kinda broken) Kodak.

This week we were supposed to get a bag of snow peas but I apparently forgot to get them while trying to hold my umbrella and collect the rest of my vegetables. The things I actually did get: Swiss chard, collard greens, radishes, cucumbers, squash, garlic scapes, purple and green kohlrabi, and some cherries which had tiny bits of disintegrated blue-green container melted in the rain.



For a salad I used the remainder of last week's red romaine with some mixed baby greens. I sliced up the radishes and cucumbers, marinated them with some rice wine vinegar, garlic scapes, olive oil and dill. Jen thought it was a great salad. I thought it was only all right, mostly because of the cucumbers. I am an expert at eating around cucumbers. In fact I delight in not eating them and then throwing them in the garbage.



I hate cucumbers.



We had some archaic sourdough bread around so I sliced it up and toasted it up with some shredded Bergfex and garlic scapes.



For the main course I took some boneless pork loin chops, butterflied them, and stuffed them with the remaining salmon burger mix from Sunday night. I also boiled the kohlrabi and tossed it with sour cream, horseradish, and dill. I also tossed the Swiss chard in the pan after the pork came out of the oven and wilted it with some additional garlic scape.



For dessert I served up some cherries, leftover shortcake, and very loose whipped cream. These cherries were actually leftover from the picnic we had on Saturday. The ones we got form the farm are pretty much past their prime so I decided that I'd have to turn them into something else, maybe preserves, if I intend to use them in any way.



In other culinary news my sim recently got promoted to line cook. His boss assigned him the task of learning how to make ratatouille and he learned it in a little under 24 hours. His boss was so impressed with this incredibly minor feat that he gave my sim a huge bonus, a promotion, and a pay raise. My sim now makes §149 an hour and works the extra sweet schedule of 3:00PM to 8:30PM, five days a week.

If this was how the restaurant industry was in real life I would never have left.

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There are two things that last night's dinner left us with an abundance of: dirty dishes and leftovers. I was glad Jen had done the laundry on Sunday as I spent the bulk of my afternoon doing four extraordinarily large batches of dishes.

While I generally make it a rule to keep things new and interesting for dinner with the amount of leftovers, odds and ends, and various scraps in the fridge and pantry I made it my mission to utilize all of these items in a way that would almost fool us into thinking none of these items were old, previously used, or in any other way not intended for tonight's dinner.



The leftover seviche was tossed with some cubed watermelon and served over some mixed greens from Maine's Locally Known farm. Certainly this farm 304 miles away is not terribly local, however it beats the standard Earthbound Farms which is 2,545 from our doorstep. As a bridge for the gap until we get our next batch of greens from the farm tomorrow these greens are actually much crisper and tastier than those I've had from Earthbound. Perhaps the 2,241 less miles traveled affect the quality positively.

Who would have guessed?



For a main course I blindly reached into the fridge and pulled out one ingredient after another to assemble these odd little pizzas. For the first pizza I pulled out some ricotta, some of Thursday night's chicken, tomato, avocado, Bergfex, and cilantro.



For the second pizza I used some of the olives leftover from Saturday's picnic lunch, some more ricotta and Bergfex, anchovies, some sliced potato wedges from last night, and basil from the farm.

The leftover bread from last night's dinner served as the base for both pizzas.

With my parents' gift to Jen being The Sims 3 there was really very little time for worrying about dinner this evening. My sim, Tarkus Filibuster, is hard at work on his eighth book, a fantasy novel titled The Wand of a Thousand Tomorrows. My sim has also recently achieved level eight skill in cooking.

Why waste my time cooking in real life when I can watch my sim make simulated tri-tip steak?

Real cooking is such a waste of time. I can't wait until they come out with the first expansion pack: The Sims: Community Supported Agriculture.

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Yesterday was Jen's birthday and we spent the day doing some of her favorite activities.



We met our friend Joe in Prospect park and had some delicious radish sandwiches with dill and Ronnybrook Farms butter on bread from Bread Alone.



We cruised about the Brooklyn Botanical Garden . . .



. . . which had shockingly good coffee!

We then hit Brooklyn Heights to attempt dinner at Grimaldi's Pizzeria. The people at the front of the line were kind enough to tell us about their two hour trip to their present location so we opted to go around the corner to a restaurant that may have existed exclusively for the impatient guests fleeing the Grimaldi's line. This place may not have been quite as good but in the end we had dinner before midnight. Sure they were "out of medium-sized pizza" thus giving away the freshness of their dough, but all told it was some decent pizza.

* * *

Tonight presented a culinary challenge: preparing seafood for someone who has only recently rejected his former vegetarian ways. Matt and Jocelyn were our dinner guests and I did my best to make an entry level seafood dinner which was tasty but did not beat the diner over the head with the fact that they were eating something which once swam in the ocean.



It was a very warm day so I started off with this watermelon salad over arugula with goat cheese. I made a vinaigrette out of the leftover farm strawberries, some dijon mustard, and a little olive oil.



For the second course: a "seviche" out of more local sea scallops and gulf shrimp. I used a little lime juice, orange juice, scallions, red onions, olive oil, garlic scapes, and cilantro to marinate the shellfish. It wasn't a true seviche in that I'd already poached them with a little lemon, bay, black pepper, chili, and lime. I then sliced up some avocado over the top and served with a lime wedge and some tortillas that I'd pan fried.



The main course was a salmon burger made with dill, scallion, garlic scape, lemon, panko, salt, pepper, whole grain mustard, and a touch of olive oil. I pan fried them in the same pan from the tortilla chips and finished them in an oven. I also sliced and roasted some Idaho potato wedges to serve as an accompaniment. The two condiments I made were a chipotle ketchup and a whole grain mustard mayonnaise.



The final course was a berry shortcake with some strawberries from the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket and more of the Jersey blueberries. There was a slight mishap with the shortcake dough in that the baking powder was omitted, however, the final result was delightful. Flat, but delightful.

So, after a three-peat of the local Jersey scallops it may be time to move on for the remainder of the summer. Perhaps it is time to explore more beef and pork options in the coming months. Yet, the scallops are so delicious I may just keep making them three nights a week until they are harvested into extinction.

One must make hay while the sun shines!

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