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!