Where credit is due

If any of my readers are in the upstate NY area you are probably familiar with the megagrocery store Wegmans. I have several friends who have worked there for a number of years, and I know that unlike other grocery chains, they treat their employees well. I normally am quite cynical when it comes to giving the thumbs up to big businesses like this but well...they really get it, or at least it seems like they do. The organic produce section is almost a full third of the total and seems to get bigger each week at my location (dewitt). Some veggies you can only get organic. When you walk through the front door the local crops are right in front of you (and you cant get anywhere else in the store without walking past the local veggie racks). They have a huge chart on the wall with what vegetables are in season, and they post pictures of the farms they buy from right above the vegetables.

If I were better at planning and had more time I wouldn't need grocery stores, but lets face it, I'm not. So when I have to pick up a green pepper and some celery to complete an otherwise homegrown potato salad...I'm happy to report that its still local.


even the cherry tomato (the first of the season) Yesterday two more ripened (which my friend loved...but still no brandywines.)

Look what happens when your mammoth sunflowers are grown to close to your lemon queens, next year you get this.



Glamor shot, another 7 ounces of the most gorgeous cuke I have ever seen. I will be a shame to eat this one...no it wont, I've got three more on the way.


And on saturday I was a participant in a crop swap, and I didn't know it before hand. Some friends of my wife who live in CT met us at a halfway point (Albany) for a picnic. They (who has noticed similar problems with tomatoes being slow to ripen) had what he thought was a mix of zucchini and summer squash seedlings given to him. Turns out they were all yellow summer squash! He is swimming in them, so he cut about 10 lbs from his garden and gave them to me.

Desperate to start chipping at the mountain of yellow on the counter I pulled together this experiment, which I'm happy to say was great!



I worked in aMom&Pop pizza operation all through high school and college, so I consider myself fairly adept at the art. This one was a combination of one side just shrooms (for my wife who was not willing to be part of the experiment) and the other side with the rest of the green pepper, a little bit of our backyard onions, some rosemary and chunks of yellow squash.

It was fantastic, I've got some leftover dough and I'm cursing the brandywines right now because there is nothing better than pizza with slices of fresh tomato on top. Oh well.

If anyone has any favorite vegetarian recipes that use summer squash, please hit me up! I still have a mountain of it and so far only a few people at work have volunteered to take some. Abundance is killer isnt it.

Speaking of killer, the aforementioned killer in the previous post is a potato berry. Full to the brim of solanum, the thing that puts the deadly in deadly nightshade. In other words, eat the spud, not the bud.