Summertime eating

 This is the season of tomatoes, zucchini, and corn. My husband and I have been eating gazpacho and focaccia with tomatoes, and zucchini several times a week. My son has passed on the gazpacho but has been living on the focaccia. 

The crust is essentially a vegetable delivery system.  We are not eating either gazpacho or focaccia for Shabbat dinner this week.

We are eating meatballs that are hot, smokey and slightly sweet.

Once again I grilled corn on our stove-top.

The charring is the only flavor added to the corn. It's all it needs. I still feel like a genius for figuring out how to cook corn this way.

Our son ate three ears last Friday night. In a month or so it will be hard to find new sweet corn, so we may as well eat it while it is in season.

We had a bag of onions in the fridge. After all of the reports of salmonella in onions, I was ready to throw them out.  My husband detests onions, but my husband hates the idea of wasting anything even more than he hates onions. He called the company listed on the onion bag. They said that our onions were safe.

I turned the bag into this.

 I had a taste after I transferred the onions from the frying pan into the pale yellow bowl. They are dark and mellow tasting. My son and I will finish them up tonight and will fight one another for the last bits in the bowl--they are that good.

Our vegetables will be blanched broccoli florets.  It takes very little time and the color is pretty.

This was a challah baking week. I decided to get a little bit fancy and add some chopped candied orange peels to the challah dough.

I rolled out each strand into a rough rectangle.

I then sprinkled the rectangle with the chopped orange peels.

You can dampen the edge before rolling up the strand.

No, you don't need a fancy tool for this. I ran water from the faucet across my fingertips and tapped my fingers onto the dough.

Roll up the dough. You can stretch the dough as you roll it up so the roll is prettier. Dampen the last bit of unrolled up dough to seal the roll.

When you have enough strands, braid your challah. I did a two-strand braid.

After rising and baking they looked like this.

I also had a bit of bread dough that didn't get made into the focaccia.

Now it is a baguette. Don't worry. It will get eaten.

Shabbat Shalom!