Summer Week in Review

Hot out. Lower 90s and humid.

Some evening thunderstorms. ❤

Enjoying our beach tent and kiddie pool, both in the back yard. Today, I literally tossed the tent off the deck folded up, it popped open mid-air, and was thus pretty much set up for me so the girls and I could hang out by the pool.

Baby C just had a well visit, which confirmed what we thought: she’s doing great.

Week 2 of our CSA included spinach, kale, scallions, Swiss chard, and lettuce. I processed it all the evening we got it, even though we had a late dinner and I didn’t get out of the kitchen till 11ish. It felt good.

I cooked my most successful Glorious One Pot meal yesterday. It was mostly free-styled. Just need to do a better job adding seasoning.

F and I worked together to wrap a present for her best friend’s birthday party tomorrow. F wrote the card and insisted on putting it inside the box before we wrapped it. 🙂

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Spaghetti Sauce

…with basil fresh from the deck

…enough for us to eat for dinner

…enough to freeze some for a future meal

…with a couple summer squashes that have been kicking around the fridge for a week

I planned this (and our other meals this week) on Saturday morning, as usual. That routine is about to change because:

Our first CSA pick-up is this afternoon! Greens, greens, and greens. And strawberries. Looking forward to a harvest-centered meal plan strategy!

Strawberry Cake

Still trying to make good use of our farm-fresh strawberries, and reveling in having cleaned the house the day before, F and I made this strawberry cake. I didn’t do any recipe research or evaluation – it was just the first hit on Google.

It came out pretty nice despite a couple of challenges.

First, I had no cake flour. So I mixed in some cornstarch (with no fussy sifting, in part because I’m lazy and in part because I don’t own a sifter).

Then, I could not find my 9″ round cake pans. This turned out to be a good thing because I found this lovely pan substitution chart which will certainly come in handy again sometime. I ended up using a silicone bundt pan that I miraculously found kicking around the basement.

Lastly, I ran out of powdered sugar for the glaze, but only just. My solution here was to ignore it. It tasted phenomenal, but was very drippy, and my cake plate has no rim so there was some goo to wipe of the counter.

We had our local family over for dinner that night, and it was fun to surprise them with a random cake!

Basil!

My supermarket basil seems to be recovering and flourishing! I got an Italian basil and a Thai basil (because I’m obsessed with homemade pho).

Almost as soon as I brought it home a month or so ago, it flopped over and looked dreadful. I planted it in a container immediately, and it was so pathetic that I took a bunch of cuttings in hopes that at some point I’d have something to show for having purchased two basil plants.

Then a bunch of leaves on the original spindly plants started turning kind of white. Powdery mildew, maybe? I plucked the icky leaves off, figuring that I’d end up just plucking all of the leaves off.

But the disease seems to have gone away, or is at least gone for now. And the plants are growing!

Thinking about taking more cuttings and growing basil all over the place, because free plants and because yum.

Strawberries

We drove out to a farm and picked strawberries!

It was a gorgeous day and there were plenty of ripe berries for the picking. Even though it was hot and sunny, the breeze and fluffy clouds helped keep us very comfortable. Plus I had packed an unreasonable amount of water.

Highly recommended outing for a 3.5 year old!