Now I’m no stranger to Thai basil but I’ve never had it outside of typical Thai food, which is usually made with the sort of ingredients that are rarely found in my kitchen. Well, except for the obvious new bundle of Thai basil. Oh, and fish sauce. Must have that for truly delicious burgers.

I searched for Thai basil recipes on epicurious and stumbled across this one, which has enough crossover with what I happen to have on hand today (namely, onions, garlic, and chicken) to inspire what Wayne humbly calls “The Scrumdillyiciousness” and what I have more humbly dubbed Thai Basil Chicken Mess.

Serves two

Ingredients

• 1/2 pd of boneless chicken
• 10-12 sprigs of thai basil
• 8 cherry tomatoes or equivalent in regular tomatoes
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 onion
• 2 tbsps of fish sauce
• 1 small Carmen pepper, or equivalent
• cooking oil

Preparation

1. Chop the onions coarsely. Chop the pepper finely (and remove any seeds if you dislike even mildly spicy food). Remove the leaves from the basil sprigs and chop finely. Slice the garlic thinly. Cut the cherry tomatoes into quarters.
2. Add oil to frying pan along with the onion, pepper, basil, and garlic. Saute over a medium fire until onions start to turn translucent, stirring occasionally.
3. Slice the chicken in thin strips and add to the peppers and onions. Add fish sauce and tomatoes and saute until chicken is cooked through.
4. Serve as is or, over rice or orzo, as below. Bread and butter mandatory if you’re serving Midwesterners.

Postprandial Notes: This is a really nice blend of Asian and Italian. One of those dishes that came together perfectly and I’m sure I’ll never be able to replicate exactly again. As usual, it’s highly improvisable – regular basil could probably be substituted as could beef or pork strips, a spicer pepper, and more vegetables (perhaps bell peppers).

There have to be about a billion (almost typed a dillion – ha!) pickle recipes. I am pretty openminded about my pickles – I like most except really sweet bread and butter types. The pickling cucumbers were pretty big and looked like they’d already been off the vine for a few days so I decided to go with something simple with ingredients I already had on hand.

To be honest, the real challenge was finding a big enough container – I had just enough large enough pickles that they didn’t neatly fit into any of the jars I had on hand. After a 30 minute crash course study of cucumber volumes in various glass containers, I decided to use my ceramic nabe.

Ingredients

• 3 pounds-ish pickling Cucumbers
• 8 sprigs of fresh dill, chopped
• 5 fat cloves of garlic, sliced fine & slightly crushed
• 2 cups of vinegar
• 2 cups of water
• 2 tbsps of non-iodized salt

Preparation

1. Put pickles in a suitable storage container, ideally not metal or plastic. Chop the dill and slice the garlic and throw in container.
2. Mix water, vinegar, and salt in a bowl and whisk until salt is completely dissolved. Pour over cucumbers.
3. Close container and park in the back of the fridge for at least 2 weeks before eating.

The pickles about 15 days in. Sampling data was taken at this point and results compiled below.

Postprandial Notes: I used a mixture of apple cider and white wine vinegar for my first batch. They were received pretty well but they’re a bit on the sweet side for my taste. I think I’ll go with a different vinegar next time. I may throw some raw onions and mustard corns in as well. For a different opinion, let’s have a look at Wayne below.

In the famous words of some random kid, “He likes it! Hey Mikey!”

Le Bumblebee: Quelle est? Ah, le belle femme fleur fatale. How is it that she can sleep when I am so near? We must stoke the furnace of love, must we not?
Le Fleur: Le mew. Le purrrr.
Le Bumblebee: This little love bundle. Now she is seeking for us a trysting place. Touching, is it not? Come, my little peanut of brittle. I will help you.

Le Bumblebee (caressing Le Fleur tenderly): You are ze corned beef to me, and I am ze cabbage to you!

Le Bumblebee (intoxicated with the scent of Le Fleur, buries his head in her pistils): I pierce you with the ack-ack of love, flowerpot. Ah, there ees very little difference between men and women. But.. VIVE LE DIFFERENCE!!

Heh. Not this year, no sir! 2010 ain’t no punk@ss moderate year, content with soft breezes and gentle temperature fluctuations.

Nope, 2010 is the year that announced, “I’m gonna be different! I’m gonna dump more snow on the city than it’s seen in over 100 years. I’m gonna be really freakin’ cold and then I’m gonna be really freakin’ hot. Not hot like “Hey Koolaid!”-hot. Hot like fry-an-egg-on-the-nice-flat-hood-of-an-old-Jeep-Cherokee-Classic-hot. Now that’s HOT.”

In concrete terms, it means we’ve had one rainstorm in the most recent three week period. And we’d already hit 39° C/100° F-plus temperatures by late June. LATE JUNE. It ain’t even August yet.

Fortunately, my current addiction to triathlon has revealed a solution to being hot and sticky: getting more hot and sticky. After all, if I’m hot just sitting around the apartment, imagine how much cooler I will feel after baking for an hour or two in the hot sun on a bike/run training brick?

Now, if I were a tomato plant who sat in full sun all day, I might feel differently. I might feel like I was being just a tad whiny about the temperature indoors in the shade. I would probably counsel myself to be a little more grateful – at least, I had shade. Shade which I wouldn’t have if I were a tomato plant. Which, of course, I’m not. No, quite fortunately, I’m not a tomato plant who sits in full sun all day; rather I’m merely the morning and evening waterbearer.

Which brings me back to beans. On last night’s watering foray, I noticed little green bean sprouts poking up through the dirt. Hence this morning’s pictures. It’s the same Dragon’s Tongue bean I planted earlier in the year – if you look closely at the picture below, you can see tiny purple flecks in the veins of the baby leaves.

It is the quintessential scent of summer for me – sweeter and more vegetable than basil, cleaner and more refreshing than mint, and stronger than pretty much any other vegetable in the backyard. It’s also the cheapest time machine I own – nothing transports me back to growing and picking tomatoes in my grandmother’s backyard faster than the smell of tomatoes.

I learned today that my favorite summer smell doesn’t come from the fruit itself but from these tiny little hairs, aka “glandular trichomes.” According to this article, that strong summer scent doesn’t just smell good, it also protects the plant in various ways from various insect and pathogenic attackers.

Fortunately, it’s not terribly effective against gardeners.

This is a pretty basic salsa recipe (adapted from this one I found on Epicurious and easily customizable to your favorite tomato type or heat tolerance. I used a combination of yellow and cherry tomatoes because that’s what I have on hand and I encourage you to experiment with your own favorite tomato/pepper combinations.

Ingredients

• 2 medium-sized tomatoes
• 1 cowhorn pepper
• 12-15 sprigs of cilantro
• 1 large garlic clove
• 1 small onion
• juice of a half a lemon
• Salt to taste

Preparation

1. Chop the tomatoes and onions and add them to a bowl. I chop them coarsely but, depending on your onion tolerability, you may want to chop them finely.
2. Chop the garlic, the pepper(s) and the cilantro finely and add to the onions and tomatoes. Add lemon juice and salt and stir till well blended.
3. For maximum raw onion kick, serve immediately. For maximum flavor blending, let the salsa sit covered overnight in the refrigerator.

Postprandial Notes: I also made a batch of guacamole, substituting a cowhorn for two jalapeños. Here it is slathered all over a freshly grilled burger. Yum.

The chard below, of course, seems equally determined to keep up with the Joneses, er Kales. Its leaves aren’t as large as the kale’s yet but the plants seem to be growing at about the same rate. I find it interesting that, of all the colors of rainbow chard, only the red-stemmed chard survived the seedling stage – I wonder if the birds find the other flavors tastier?

This week marks a couple of exciting firsts – 1. the first eggplant and 2. the first yellow tomatoes. Recipes to ensure, of course.

It also marks the last harvest of beans from the current plants. I’m going to try a second planting with seedlings. Getting the seedlings started this weekend are my way of celebrating independence (at least, of the food variety) this weekend.

And so begins the deluge of cherry tomatoes. This year’s batch of sharp, tart little things – perfect for salads, dipping into hummus and eating on their own.

Weeds? What weeds? Oh, just pretend you don’t see them. I do.

I envision the one above luxuriously resting atop a fresh lettuce leaf draped across a freshly grilled burger. I haven’t a plan yet for the ones below but I’m sure something will occur to me. As Roy Scheider famously said in Jaws, “You’re gonna need a bigger fridge.” Or something like that.

Author’s Note: I’ve tagged this post both fruit and vegetables in an effort to satisfy both purists and those less hindered by rigid conformity to plant taxonomic conventions.