"You Should Only Be Happy" ... remembering a great weekend

In continuing to relish the bounty, I have made a blueberry sauce which has already been poured over angel food cake and will find itself accompanying cornmeal pancakes fairly soon. I have made cole slaw to go with tonight’s roast pork, which will cook in the crockpot all day long topped with the Spiced BBQ Peach Sauce I made last week.

I brought some of the beautiful edible flowers to dinner at Thom’s on Saturday night, to sprinkle over a perfect array of lettuces freshly picked from his own garden; he topped the salad with toasted walnuts and crumbled goat cheese, finishing it with a light blackberry-Balsamic vinaigrette … sigh … :)

The peaches were cooked in a bit of sugar to soften and sweeten them; I added a hint of ginger and cinnamon to one portion, which then found its way over cubes of angel food cake at breakfast yesterday morning. The rest, which I left unspiced, was combined with vanilla ice cream and skim milk to make a smoothie for Jeremy. I also intend to try a peach smoothie with butter pecan ice cream, but haven’t gotten to that just yet with all the sweets I’ve been eating ... because I’ve also used the plain zucchini to make a caramel-frosted sheetcake, a slice of which will accompany my quiche for lunch. (It does have both whole wheat flour and applesauce in it, so I can delude myself that it has nutritional value!)

I meant it when I wrote on Saturday that I had “a weekend of chopping, stirring, tasting, cooking, baking and eating ahead of me,” didn’t I?

In order to simply maximize the flavor of the green and yellow beans, rather than coating them with lemon sauce or almonds or garlic as I had for the “Great Green Bean Battle,” last night I simply roasted them. I placed them onto a baking sheet, drizzled them with some extra-virgin olive oil, sprinkled them with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, and then roasted them at 400° F. for 15 minutes; I stirred them around, then roasted them for another 15 minutes and voilà! That was it! They were tender but still a bit crisp, fragrant, caramelized … I started eating them “as is” before even putting them into the quiche. If you’re tired of the same ol’ preparations for all those beans that your garden may be producing or that you bought at the Farmers Market because they looked so gorgeous, try roasting them … I guarantee it will make you happy!

Mary Bilyeu has won or placed in more than 50 cooking contests, and writes about her adventures as she tries to win prizes, feeds hungry teenagers and other loved ones, and generally just has fun in the kitchen. The phrase "You Should Always Be Happy" (written in Hebrew on the stone pictured next to the blog's title) comes from Deuteronomy 16:15, and is a wish for all her readers as they cook along with her ... may you always be happy here!