August
in July?
“Be careful for what you ask – you
might get it!” is a popular admonition and it certainly seems to have come true
this week. All our complaints about cloudy skies and chilly June temperatures
have brought steamy sunshine, more fitted for the South than our usually
pleasant Maine summer.
As Wanda Macnair predicted in Gardening
pages last week, the break in the weather has my vegetable garden
photosynthesizing overtime and I can practically see my scarlet runner beans
sprinting up their supports by the hour. But one should not complain! Except
about the slugs maybe! Their digestive
juices seem to dissolve any tender seedling in their path. However, they remind me of a very amusing
event when I first started gardening in Maine.
Years ago in Pennsylvania I used to
put out pie plates with beer in my garden to catch the slugs. They obligingly crawled in the dish, got
drunk and drowned. The first night after setting similar traps in Maine, my husband
and I woke up in the middle of the night with such growling and commotion in
our back yard that it was hard to ignore. When we turned on the flood lights we
saw a truly amazing sight. A very large raccoon, the size of a small bear, was
staggering among my raised beds and growling in a most contented manner as he
searched out another my plates containing beer. Fearing reprisals from wild
animal lovers about corrupting the morals of raccoons, I had to stop this
practice of slug baiting. However, the raccoon kept coming back for many nights
searching for the local free bar.
The current heat spell put a real damper on my cooking energies for
the 4th of July celebration, and left me to think of recipes that require the minimal application
of heat and would provide a cooling and yet tangy dish. Gazpacho comes
instantly to mind, but my tomato crop seems to know the calendar and is still
at the flower stage in my garden, so improvisation came to a successful rescue.
Tangy
roast pepper and tomato soup
Purée in a blender one 15.5 oz jar
of drained roasted peppers in 2 cups vegetable or chicken broth until smooth
with white parts of 2 scallions. Stir in
½ tsp. garlic salt, 1 tsp. Morton’s Nnature’s blend seasoning (or equivalent).
Also blend one 28 oz. can Italian plum tomatoes in their juice until smooth and
stir into the roast pepper mix. Adjust seasonings with salt and pepper or
Tabasco and stir in 1 Tblsp. sherry vinegar. Serve cold with large Caesar
flavored croutons.
In fact this was so easy, that it
would make a more substantial Gazpacho later in the season with just an added
chopped tomato, cucumber or zucchini. The roasted pepper flavor is actually
more flavorful than any chopped red and green peppers.
Our desert was not exactly red,
white and blue, but the blueberry juices had enough of a red tint that it
qualified. To be a real purist, garnish
with a strawberry or raspberry.
Maine
version of peaches Melba
For each person layer in a small
dish: ½ sliced peach, top with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and spoon over it
2-3 tablespoons Maine blueberry jam. Garnish with a few berries and enjoy.
With hamburgers and corn on the
grill, it was a relatively cool 4th of July!
(I. Winicov Harrington lives in
Waldoboro and is the author of “How to Eat Healthy and Well for Less than $5.00
a Day: the Smart-Frugal Food Plan”; website: www.winicov-harrington.com)
