making dinner

When I was little, I had visions of being a domestic goddess. Little House on the Prairie style. I couldn't wait to have my own house to clean, my own meals to make, my own garden to tend. I still fantasize sometimes about the garden. But the fact of the matter is, I'm not very good at being domestic. And I'm okay with that. Andrew and I share the cleaning chores, and we delegate the fresh-produce-growing to our local CSA, 180 Degree Farms. 

It's thanks to their hard work that we have fresh, seasonal, local produce every week from April to October. It takes some time to come up with recipes that use the unique ingredients, not to mention the time it takes to prepare meals from scratch. But Andrew's amazing at this. What takes me hours when I've tried, takes him 30 minutes tops and then he comes up with the most delicious, creative meals. He finds recipes and tweaks them to make use of what we have.

Last night's dinner was the best we've had in a while. The menu: burgers and pickles. With a twist, of course. 

(And sorry, I'm not a food blogger, in the sense of writing whole recipes and featuring professional-looking photos. If this dinner sounds good to you, follow the links to the original recipes and make your own variations!)

Last Saturday we got loads of eggplant and peppers from our farm, so Andrew found a recipe for baked eggplant burgers. I'm not sure exactly how he adapted the recipe from The Tolerant Vegan, since I was only his sous-chef, but we doubled the recipe and froze some of the extra patties so we could use up the big eggplants and most of the peppers. My jobs included chopping the onions & best of all squishing the patties. The burgers were a well-blended mix of roasted eggplant, white beans, red onion, peppers, parsley, pine nuts, garlic, and cumin. Amazing. Tucked between fresh lettuce and tomato, on a whole wheat kaiser roll spread with homemade hummus.

For the past few weeks, we've been getting loads of cucumbers, too, so last week he made these spicy refrigerator dill pickles. They were finally ready to eat yesterday, and we ate 'em with our burgers. Oh man, it does not get much better than cucumbers soaked in a garlicky, dilly brine.

So even though Andrew's better at planning and preparing meals than I am, we make a pretty good team in the kitchen. He doesn't mind that I'm not the domestic goddess I once aspired to be. I may not be able to easily plan meals and come up with inventive uses for ingredients. But what I can do is chop the onions for him, squish the patties, and then write about it.