It’s been a foodish time for me lately. Partially it is because it is hot. We stay home more, so we cook more. Our new refrigerator is part of it, too. I just love having crisper drawers I can actually open! And of course my new kitchen shelf adds to the kitchen appeal.

We had friends over the other evening and I made minestrone soup. The recipe said it would be good cold and especially good if it was made the day before so that’s what I did. It was excellent, along with a loaf of homemade sourdough bread, roasted garlic to smush on top,  and a tossed salad. I also made couscous with mint and peas. It was a refreshing meal, and Paul and I enjoyed it the next day as well.

I’ve gotten in the habit (thanks to Leslie Limon’s food blog) of making a pot of beans on the weekend, just plain beans.  My favorites are Peruano and Flor de Mayo.  I am making them based on her recipe and we have been adding them to everything throughout the week.  One of my favorite lunches is some onion, red pepper and zuchinni kind of charred/fried and then some beans added.  A cut up tomato and some seasonings at the end.  Sprinkle with a little parmesan, and enjoy…

I’ve been reading about food lately, too.  I just finished reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. I have been a vegetarian for about 25 years and I didn’t think I could be surprised by a book about food, but I was.  Having been an avid nutrition label reader I didn’t think about how I had been suckered in by the food industry. (yes, INDUSTRY) They want you to think that a food is only a sum of its nutritional parts.  But it isn’t!  Food is just that, food.  Or it should be.  So much of it is engineered and adulterated.  He was preaching to the choir with the book’s punch line – Eat Food.  Not too much.  Mostly Plants. I highly recommend the book, or at least check out his website where there is a synopsis.

I am almost done with the book Julie & Julia.  I usually am repulsed by books that show the movie actors on the cover.  But I had read about the movie, and the premise – a young woman decides to make all the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year.  To add to the book’s appeal, she started a blog to track The Project.  So I bought the book at the airport while we were waiting for Jess to arrive a couple of weeks ago.

It is a pretty  fun book, and I am enjoying it in a chick-lit meets cooking geek kind of way.  I doubt I have ever made anything out of MTAOFC but you don’t have to to enjoy the book.  I will go see the movie whenever it comes along.  By the way, for the best food oriented books in the world, read M.F.K. Fisher.  I wish there was some way I could erase my memory and read them all for the first time again.

So what am I making tonight?  Well I made a huge salad for lunch (what I call my Big-Ass Salad because it has everything in it) and the calabacitas (zuchinni) were beautiful when I shopped yesterday, so I am roasting calabacitas with olive oil and then drizzling them with sea salt and balsamic vinegar when they come out of the oven. Buen provecho!