Early Summer in Texas
Summer in Texas is much longer than its allotted three months. An early start could indicate a 6 month summer!
Texas Summers know no calendar. They just show up. This year, Summer has made a very early appearance, around May 6th. Every day since then has been over 90. And through May 15th, only one day, May 13th, has been below 95! San Antonio has already registered 2 days with 100 degrees with more are predicted for this week.
I’m not going to make this post about Texas heat. Not totally. The older I get, the less heat tolerant I become. Yet I also become less cold tolerant. I choose the heat because of this saying: “You don’t have to shovel humidity!” 😉
Texas Summer has its good points. Summer vegetables are already showing up with our local farmer. I got my first yellow squash last week. Zucchini is on this week’s farm order!
Know what that means? That means tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers and okra are soon to show up. Julie, our farmer, is already talking about her tomatoes. All of that means one thing to me: Ratatouille Season is just about upon us. The main ingredients for my Ratatouille are onion, garlic, tomato, zucchini, yellow squash and eggplant.
By the way, my Ratatouille recipe is coming up in June. It is not for the lightweight cook. To do Ratatouille right requires several hours of work. I typically divide it up between the prep work and the actual cooking, but it is still a long process.
But worth it! I make big batches and then freeze some of it. In fact, we had some from last year a few weeks ago! Yum!
What did I make this week? I cooked broccoli, sweet potatoes (recipe coming soon), and Collard Greens. That’s likely the last collard greens we’ll see for a while since they’re mainly a winter & spring veggie.
The best thing was the yellow squash. I bought it last week from our farmer, and went searching through my recipes. Found a simple and tasty recipe that I ‘invented’ last year:
Yellow Squash in Tomato Sauce: Cut up 6 small yellow squash into bite-sized pieces. Put in a sauce pan with 2 cups of homemade tomato or pasta sauce. Heat for about 15 minutes until the squash get softish. I had the homemade pasta sauce in my freezer. Don’t have any? I suppose you could buy some pre-made pasta sauce!
Until next week…