The glass pans earn their keep

Late July, height of the farmshare season, needing ingenuity to make meals of veggies as well as prep and freeze them, to keep up with the supply.  Roasting is a great way to do this, particularly since I've been using balsamic vinegar to sort of sprinkle over.

And the salt potatoes I learned from Deborah Madison's book on farmmarkets, redskins boiled with a ton of seasalt, took their place in this dish. I had Handsome Son come to dinner the other night, and help me eat the zucchini quiche with a big side of roasted potatoes, squash, onions and corn, and the rest of the frozen lima beans from an Ottolenghi recipe.  

The corn went in the dish raw, but I steamed the others, and boiled the potatoes in the saltwater.  Tossed the veggies in a mixture of olive oil, seasonings, black cherry balsamic vinegar.  Roasted them at 475F for about 45 minutes.

Dessert was a peach crumble, fresh farm peaches, done the way Rose Levy Beranbaum does them in her Bible of pies and cakes, this month's Bite Club selection being desserts. 

And HS pronounced the potatoes great, were there any more, the squash okay, the quiche hm, is there any  ketchup.  But the peach crumble vanished in short order.

The different way Beranbaum does the fruit is to macerate them for a while in sugar, drain off the juices to make a reduction, while mixing the drained fruit with a mix of spices and cornstarch, mainly ginger and cinnamon.  Then the reduced liquid goes back on the fruit and into the pie dish.  I didn't want to make the fancy pastry shapes for the top, so I used Martha's old standby oat crumble, and very good it was.  Not too juicy, but very flavory.

This week there were, among other exciting things, peaches and peppers and corn,  berries in the farmshare -- farmer explained apologetically that they ran out of cherry tomatoes the previous day, and had to sub with berries.  NO problem here with that!

So here's a berry and Granny Smith apple crumble, as per Beranbaum, using ginger and cinnamon, and the crumble part as per Martha, using oatmeal and ground oats.  

This is the kind of thing that's making me lean toward investing in a second little freezer for the kitchen, so I can have this sort of thing in the winter.

Since we are in a heatwave, with those heat index things zooming past 100F there are those who might question the sanity of a person who bakes on such a day, but I had to use the fresh fruit, and well, I was just needing activity indoors.

I finished the window sail for my neighbor, who came over last night to see, and was mad with joy, big hugs and thanks and it went down well.  His house is in an uproar, with wiring and tiling and workmen all over, so he asked me to hold onto the sail for the moment until the dust settles, literally.  I'll post a pic when it's installed.

And the dyeing is moving on, with black walnut dye on what was linen pants and will be a linen skirt with pockets, but that adventure's in Art the Beautiful,  here  http://beautifulmetaphor.blogspot.com/2015/07/transformation-from-linen-pants-to.html