End of Summer Lovin'

I guess summer is officially over since it's freezing cold today and raining cats and dogs. Last week was glorious and perfect weather and I rode my bike to work every day plus every day on the weekend. Anyway, enough reminiscing on to the food:

This represents another week of daily salads and a little innovation courtesy of a visit to a fancy hotel:

• mixed greens with canned wild salmon, yellow peppers, and sugar snap peas
• crispy red grapes
• fat free Greek yogurt
• mini pot of strawberry jam to go with the yogurt (genius!)

I had salad so often this summer that I started keeping a bottle of my favorite salad dressing in the refrigerator at work. I also started keeping fresh berries in that fridge to add to my oatmeal packets in the morning. This cut down on me having to carry so many things to work every day.
My fella made a small batch of his awesome barbeque pulled chicken. He normally makes a big pot of it in the slow cooker but he figured out a way to do it on the stove with just 3 chicken breasts that were rattling around in the freezer.

• sugar snap peas
• bell pepper with balsamic vinaigrette dipper
  
• barbeque pulled chicken
• watermelon
• whole wheat sandwich thin

That barbeque sandwich was probably one of the best lunches of August. So much flavor! Hot and hearty!

Here we have an example of a very dull week of lunches. This was last week, that is, the week after the weekend we were cooped up in the apartment waiting for Hurricane Irene to sweep us away. All we did was cook every bit of food in the fridge. I stewed/roasted/canned about 25 pounds of tomatoes from our CSA and we chopped up a whole bunch of other vegetables that were about to go off and I made 2 quiches. Well, we ate quiche every day, twice a day last week.
Oh! We are still doing the CSA and I realized I never took any good pictures of our weekly haul. In the one above we got lots of tomatoes, corn, green bell peppers, little plums, summer squash/zucchinis, a red onion and a leek. That's a lot of fresh food for just 2 lonesome souls. And even though we love cooking and do cook a lot, it's kind of overwhelming and burdensome to have to come up with new ways to cook this stuff up. We kind of end up making the same things over and over again. I think we cook anything that uses the most vegetables in one dish (soups, stews, chilly, quiches, omelets, etc.)

Last week we got a whole bunch of peaches. Now, normal people would just eat fresh peaches and say, "Hooray, fresh peaches. Viva summer!" But I have developed ANOTHER allergy and can't eat any stone fruit unless I want my eyes to itch and my throat to close. So, poor me. The weird thing is that I can eat frozen peaches once they thaw out. So I read up on this allergy and it has something to do with the chemical composition of the fruit being the same as certain pollens and...blah blah blah. The point is, I can't eat the fruit raw. Again, for normal people this wouldn't be that much of big deal because they can just put the fruit in a pie. For me, cooked fruit is the stuff of nightmares. It's so slimy and sloppy and mushy and just plain gross. I still, to this day, have never eaten so much as a sliver of apple pie or cherry pie. It's also the combination of cooked fruit and "wet bread" together that gives me the creeps. I know pie crust in not really bread, but the part that touches the cooked fruit gets soggy and mushy and makes me want to cry. Ok, I was trying to make this a short, sweet, triumph of the will story so here is the payoff:
I made and ATE a peach crumble!!! It is cooked fruit and a crispy crumbly topping that does, indeed, touch the cooked fruit and get a little soggy. But I ate it. It helps that there is a ton of sugar and melted butter in there. Anyway, the point is that I lived to tell the tale. I have been to the mountaintop!!