Some Italian goodies -- garden to kitchen

Our July, the weather historians tell us, was the coldest July since 1958. The tomatoes have been slow to grow, fruit, and ripen, as a result of the cool weather. But now we are getting some some wonderful varieties, and we're making the most of them.

Here we have a cocozelle squash, an Italian variety zucchino that is fleshier, with very few seeds. It marinates wonderfully into a salad, grills, or sautes. Delicious.

The tomatoes, picked today, include the varieties Black from Tula (down the center); Flamme, Moonglow, Sunset's Red Horizon, and Super Marmande (top to bottom on the left); and Sun Gold, Dagmar's Perfection, Hawaiian Pineapple, Pineapple, and Marmande (top to bottom on the right). We'll have some wonderful taste-test comparisons in our caprese salads over the next few days.

Meanwhile, the first San Marzano Redortas have been sliced, layered, and baked into Bella's special lasagna!

Garden tomatoes at last!

To celebrate the arrival of the first summer tomatoes (at the end of July!), we made a nice green salad with orange Moonglow heirlooms and yellow Hartman's Yellow Gooseberry heirlooms. (We've got our first batch of San Marzanos and their little cousin Principe Borghese, also.) We threw in a sliced cucumber from the garden to give the salad a little more crunch.

We accompanied the salad with a dish of sliced cocozelle (one of the Italian varieties of zucchini), chopped basil, toasted pine nuts, and shaved parmesan...tossed with a seasoned dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, and red pepper flakes.

And oh, of course, 6 pizzas...shown here in their pre-rolled, precooked state! Those doughballs were about to become two sausage pizzas, two four-cheese pizzas, and two mushroom pizzas (with a medley of three types of forest mushrooms).

Wonderful!

Lunch with Friends in the Garden

The dahlias are blooming now. They make a lovely view during lunch under the grape arbor -- here with our friends Carol and Art and their daughter Diana.

First beets

Last Saturday night, we had a nice family Italian dinner, with all of Aaron, Nora, and Nathan attending. Our antipasti comprised three types of bruschetta and, on the right, the first garden beets of the season--two types of golden beets.

The last tomato plants

'Tis a sad sad thing to have to discard any of the tomato sproutlings that have been nurtured so assiduously all spring...but we have run out of room to plant. We culled the last 30 plants (~20 varieties) from the remaining sproutlings, and we're looking for a good home for them. The word has gone out to family and a few friends: Would you like some heirlooms for your garden?

And the remaining 100 or so sproutlings that didn't make the cut? Into the compost pile with you!

Greens

May has been a particularly cool month, so we're still enjoying the winter and early-spring greens from the garden. Almost every day we have a lettuce salad with scallions from the garden. Every week we cook up some escarole with pine nuts and golden raisins for a nice Italian side dish, or make some escarole and white bean soup. As we finish off the escarole and spinach from the garden, we're putting in French Emerite pole beans and French Rolande bush beans...which will be thin, delicate, and delicious.

A particularly wonderful product of the garden this year is the never-ending supply of shelling peas (now competing for bed space with the budding dahlias!). While we've grown several varieties, our favorite by far are the French petit pois...tiny pods of tiny peas nestled in close to one another. We eat them in pasta, as a side dish, raw out of the pods, and in a variety of fresh spring pea soups. We've experimented with a variety of recipes, all using homemade chicken stock and either creme fraiche or cream, and liked them all. Our favorite has creme fraiche, and a sprinkling of garden chives and mint sprigs, shown here. Perry's not sure that any of them, however, have achieved the transporting intensity of the little spring pea soup amuse bouche that he had in New York at Picholine many years ago.

Tomatoes, potatoes, and Tess--all growing!

We've now got about 150 tomato plants, representing about 50 different varieties, in the ground and doing well. The potatoes are also flourishing, have been hilled twice, and are just about ready to have some "new" potatoes plucked gingerly from the soil.

Tess, five months and always growing, still likes hanging out in the garden with us. She'll munch a peapod or two, or some escarole leaves, when she gets the chance. She particularly likes the kitchen compost pile next to the potato bed, but Perry keeps trying to keep her out of it by adding more and more fencing. But Tess, being a Border Collie and therefore smarter than both us put together, always finds a way in...when she's motivated to do so!