A mother-daughter conversation on food and cooking (mostly)

Friday, June 22, 2007

Summer Food

This is food for those summer days when just the idea of turning on the oven or stove makes me sweat. I love bean-based main dishes, and this requires no cooking. You can use any summer herbs and vegetables you have around. This particular version contained:

Two cans of garbanzos
Diced red pepper
Chopped tomato -- the first garden tomato of the year!
Mint
Chives
Feta
Lemon juice
Olive oil
Pepper

I let the flavors combine at room temperature for about an hour. There was plenty left over for lunch the next day.

Canned garbanzo beans are the absolute best thing ever. I lived an entire summer in graduate school eating them at least four times a week. I didn't have much money, so I mostly kept the air conditioner off in my apartment; I didn't have a car, so I walked 90 minutes a day to and from the library in the 95-degree heat; and I ate one or two cheap, bean- or egg-based meals a day -- vegetable curries, bean salads, stews, scrambled eggs. My clothes were falling off me by the end of the summer, which was neat but unsustainable once I started having money for things besides rent again. Maybe I can get rich on marketing this in diet book form. The Sweaty Bean Method. Hmm.

I did make these potatoes in the oven. They are somewhere in between Southern raw fries and Mireille Johnston's various potato recipes in Cuisine of the Sun. I just sliced them, tossed them with olive oil, salt, pepper, and fresh rosemary, and roasted them at 400 for about 25 minutes. They were too salty, but I liked them.

1 comment:

Eva said...

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