augustine
how to successfully eat chips for dinner, plus more peaches and zucchini
Hi friends. Are you exhausted with summer, or are you feeling wistful that August is almost over? I’m kind of in both camps this week as I default to meals I’ve made half a dozen times before out of lethargy and worry about how much squash I’m about to have to make use of, while at the same time regret that I have not been swimming once and Labour Day weekend is already almost cresting the horizon. I haven’t even completed my usual summer tradition of watching all the Lord of the Rings extended editions when it’s too hot to be outside! But the tomatoes are tasting good and there’s plenty of stuff to grill, so I’m making the best of things, and I hope you are too.
No newsletter next week because Jeff and I are going away to the interior to visit his dad for the first time in several years (thanks to covid and forest fires), and then will be celebrating our fourth wedding anniversary as well as fourteen years of being together! I’ll be back in your inbox on the 2nd of September with a few details to share from our trip, and hopefully some meals made with things that might be ready to eat from the garden by then.
Over the weekend, our fridge was especially bare: the produce drawer held only a small green cabbage and a single carrot. So Jeff picked up some Cajun fried chicken at Cream Pony on his way back from the grocery store, while I made some slaw to go with it. I don’t often make slaw except as a topping for tacos, so I felt a bit out of my element. The dressing I put together was similar to what I use for vegan potato salad: vegan mayo, olive oil, some vinegar and grainy mustard, and instead of the dill and pickle pieces I’d put in a potato salad, a bit of celery salt and some sunflower seeds.
It was unexpectedly tasty (I went in hoping for “palatable”): having a slightly creamy, tangy contrast to the spice and crunch of the chicken was very nice. And in my opinion the sides you get with fried chicken at the take-out spots are rarely as good as the chicken, so why not save a few bucks by making your own?
We had pineapple juice leftover from a can of pineapple we opened for pizza, and Jeff made us pineapple mojitos (he loves an excuse to use the vintage ice crusher) with pineapple mint from our garden. The mint really does have a pineapple-y scent to it and it’s delightful! White rum is usually used for mojitos, but with the sweetness of the pineapple juice I think amber rum works here. These were super refreshing on a hot Sunday afternoon.
As promised, I made a second peach baked good to use the other half of the peaches I bought: this peach poundcake, which I’ve made once before and really liked. It uses chopped peaches throughout the cake, and purée in both the cake batter and the glaze, so the rich colour and taste are really appealing here. This recipe calls for melted butter, and often when recipes do this I just use oil instead since it’s already a liquid, but this time I decided to brown the butter. The change in flavour was subtle but noticeable, a really nice complement to the peach taste.
A couple of friends stopped by the night I made it to make a swap, since one of them had just made a huge cheesecake with berry compote and needed to not be responsible for the whole thing. Just saying, anytime you feel like trading baked goods, I am down for that.
When it’s too hot to feel enthusiastic about making anything, there are thankfully many creative ways to eat chips for dinner. I made a black bean and corn salad loosely inspired by street corn, adding a few grape tomatoes, a chopped red pepper, and crumbled goat feta as a stand-in for cotija. A jalapeño would have been nice, but since I didn’t have one, I just used chili flakes and chili powder in the dressing, which was mostly lime juice and olive oil with cumin and a splash of red wine vinegar. We served it with pickled onion on top and a big bowl of tortilla chips, and didn’t quite eat the whole of it in one go, but we came close.
I used the rest of the grape tomatoes plus a few more of the cherry tomatoes from the garden in a pearl couscous and slow-roasted tomato salad with olives, similar to how I made it back in June, with extra herbs and some feta. The tomato flavour and texture is amazing, and all you need is some salt, olive oil, and an hour in a 300° oven. To go with it, we grilled a salmon filet my sister left us as a parting gift, with a little lemon juice and some thyme and marjoram from the garden. A really nice patio dinner, and the salad leftovers are almost better the next day.
The Smitten Kitchen archives did some heavy lifting in my kitchen this week, as I also made my version of this summer squash pizza, which I’ve loved in past summers. We prefer it with a kalamata olive tapenade base instead of the olive oil base in the recipe, so now I just always blend up a tapenade while the dough is rising. Since the Costco-size jar of pitted olives is a mainstay in my fridge, it comes together really easily.
The pizza has only a few ingredients otherwise, so it’s a nice one when you have a lot of zucchini to use but not too much else in the fridge. The recipe uses gruyère mixed with the shredded zucchini, and it is great this way, but I didn’t have any this time and used a mix of pecorino and mozza, which was still delicious. I wouldn’t go for all mozzarella since it’s so mild and zucchini itself is also mild in flavour, but the stronger taste of the pecorino was an excellent offset for the creamy mozza. The crust also came out amazing on this one, and it was probably worth turning my oven to 500° in the middle of a heat wave.
Media:
The discourse this week has been insufferable and I personally have been having a hard time focusing on reading, so I am not sharing anything! Please watch Strange New Worlds and then get back to me with whether you think Spock or Captain Pike looks better wearing an apron.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please smash that like button below, or share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats are much appreciated. Please enjoy this amazing photo of a musical legend, and I’ll see you all again in September.