about a year ago, i tried my hand at creating ratatouille, sans recipe, from a bunch of veggies my dad brought us from his garden. while i liked the creation, i couldn’t stop tinkering with it during this harvest season, thinking that if i started with a basic recipe and tweaked it i would be able to create THE BEST ratatouille ever. so when mike’s mom brought us a lovely bag of veggies from her garden a few weeks ago, i rolled up my sleeves and began working on a new version of ratatouille.
i know, i know, you’re either sick of tomatoes and corn by now, or you’re wondering why you’d make a chowder in the heat of the end of the summer.
but this soup is so light and so flavorful that you will want to slurp up as much of it as possible, leaving you wondering why you thought you were sick of tomatoes or questioning making soup when it’s warm out!
let me guess, your garden or your friends’ gardens are absolutely exploding with vegetables right now, huh? have you thought about grilling them?
it’s the very end of august, and we’ve reached the time of year when everyone’s going back to school, and tomatoes, corn, zucchini, etc, etc, are all coming out of the garden like crazy. but it’s not just the garden that’s going crazy – our lives have also been a tad nuts over the past few weeks as we squeezed in as much time as possible with my sister (who just left for grad school waaaay across the country), and juggled parties and work events.
no matter how busy we are, every time we walk into the house we’re greeted by beautiful, overflowing bags of produce that our lovely friends and family keep gifting us, and are filling our moments of spare time trying to use all of this produce. so what did we come up with?
well, we’ve made at least four winning recipes – the first of which is pie. yes, pie. have you made one lately? this week, we made two – a gorgeous blackberry pie with smitten kitchen’s amazing crust, and a tomato pie. i know that the latter one sounds weird, but it’s really amazing. since i didn’t edit smitten kitchen’s recipe at all, i’m just going to link to it here, strongly suggest you go there to try it out, and i’ll get to work writing the next installments.
after making red (ie normal) gazpacho a few weeks ago, i was excited when i found a recipe for white gazpacho – a real twist on the normal kind – in the september issue of vegetarian times.
