Dear John,

Meals, so often, don’t actually turn out the way I expect them to. Inspiration and actualization shift during the week. Different things come in from the garden, or the farmers market. Or time constraints get realized. Or what we’re in the mood for shifts with the weather and moods.

Last Wednesday, I took my sister to the garden plot to show off the dahlias. (After all, she gave us the tubers.) I was getting the shears to harvest some basil when another gardener approached with a veritable handful of basil (no space in hands for any more!) and asked if we could use it. Sure, here’s my bag. Oh, yeah, I can take your scrawny green peppers. Yes please, I’ll use your tiny eggplant nubs. Why not take your green tomatoes too? I sent them home with dahlias and best wishes for their international move two days later.

So I made green tomato chutney with green bell peppers from not our plot and Kung Pao peppers from my sister’s plot. We all ate omelettes with fresh basil as the greens and chevre that tasted of decadence. The honeynut squash pizzas were made with pesto (the squash was mostly there for color, turns out basil is strong when you use a lot of it). And there’s basil frozen in olive oil for some summer brightness (fall color?) in the depths of winter.

It took until last night for us to make the radicchio beet cranberry salad. I know why we didn’t make it when we had company, but if we wouldn’t serve it to my sister I’m not sure who we’ll break out this experiment of a meal for. Eating it, I remembered my impression from the first time, that this was my fanciest salad. The thing that I have cooked most likely to end up on a restaurant menu. Because who’s serving radicchio and cranberries at home on a Tuesday night? And at a (pretentious) farm to table place, because that is where you get the beets and hazelnuts and chèvre on a salad. It’s so good. Maybe next time we’ll share with company. (Or maybe we’ll eat it all ourselves.)

Just us meals for a justice week

• More radicchio salad!
• I wanted to swap the kale for the celery because 1) we’ve had a lot of kale already and 2) the apple, celery, date, and parm salad sounded so good in my mind. Adapt from Six Seasons.
• While Six Seasons is out, flip over to cauliflower. Let’s try the cauliflower steaks with provolone and pickled peppers please.
• Debating about the broccoli. I recently remembered Friday nights 15 years ago, cooking up Mollie Katzen’s peanut-butter molasses broccoli tofu stirfry (Enchanted Broccoli Forest), and am craving it. But we made that with frozen broccoli and this looks so good for the roasting. Maybe in a soup?
• Seeing the eggplant has me craving eggplant with soba noodles. You can’t eat soba noodles. This should be my lunch on the day you go to the office.
• The internet says stripetti is a cross between spaghetti squash and delicata squash. I vote we use it the same as we would spaghetti squash and bake them as bowls.

Love you,

Sarah