Fried Pepper Tapas & Baked Green Tomatoes

My biggest desire with this CSA is to get my kids to eat the stuff. Sometimes there are just, by no means possible, like the hot peppers today. So I sauteed them at a real high heat in olive oil, splashed on kosher salt, threw in the tomatillas (I've never liked them an there was no way I was making salsa - if I was going to eat them, it had to be cooked), it was great, like a perfect tapa for me and Rob. I think I had this dish at Boqueria in the city. I did!

fried peppers & tomatillas with splash of kosher salt

breaded tomatoes on baking sheet

And so last week I made baked green tomatoes. They taste no different than fried ones, much less mess too. They are seriously addictive and awesomely delish. I sliced them, salted them, dipped in flour, dipped in egg, dipped in breadcrumbs. Coated a baking sheet with olive oil. Placed the tomatoes on top, and baked for 30 minutes.

Baked Green Tomatoes

I also made this awesome corn salad. It used many CSA ingredients. The recipe is from Susan Goin of Lucques in LA. I had the pleasure of eating there last time I was in LA and it was one of the best meals. She's a tiny little waif. Who knew waifs could cook?

Corn salad with edamame, sauteed summer squash, red onion, basil, tomatoes,
watercress, lemon & shallots

I'm having an overabundance of tomatoes in my garden, and eating a tomato salad every night sounds wonderful if it was winter, but we're kind of getting sick of them. So as a variation, I made a tomato pie. I think this was originally a Paula Dean recipe, but I changed it.

Assembling the pie. Those green tomatoes are ripe green zebras.
The best and sweetest!

Tomato decadent!

The recipe calls for a pie shell. I save all the heels of bread from loaves to make croutons, so I used 4 of them instead of a pie shell for this square baking dish. Then I covered the bread in tomato slices. Sprinkled with salt. Then I shredded cheddar cheese and gouda, it's what I had, into a bowl. Mixed it with mayo. I happened to have some homemade on hand from the weekend (I make it like once every 2 years, and it happened to be last weekend). Then to the mayo cheese mix, I added some finely diced onion. Spread this over the top of the tomatoes and baked it in the oven until it was bubbly, about 30 minutes. It was so good. And I had the leftover piece for breakfast this morning.

My kids ate all the peaches already, and most of the sungold tomatoes. The lemon verbena is sitting in a little vase on my windowsill. Most likely to be unused. It smells wonderful, but I fear it tastes like citronella, and I just don't want to eat something that tastes like bug spray from Whole Foods.

So much lettuce this week. How many salads can I make? I remember Mark Bittman had some recipes at some point with cooked lettuce. I need to Google those!

Oh, fun thing (NOT). One of my ears of corn had a huge wiggly worm tunneling between the nice rows of kernels. Thank God it was at the tip and I cut the top off. That was some sweet corn today. I actually ended up nuking it for 2 minutes because I thought it was too fresh to boil. It was sweeeeet!