A reason to love Mondays...

There has to be one, right? A reason to be excited that the weekend's over? The best one I can think of is that it's CSA pick-up day. Farmer James will be at the meeting place with my big basket of veggies. It's like a little Christmas or birthday getting my basket and seeing what surprises are inside. These days the best surprise is no cucumbers. We've been a little heavy on cucumbers and frankly one can only eat so many cucumbers. Fortunately, I've found many unsuspecting people to gift cucumbers to who seem to appreciate them. Anybody have any good cucumber recipes? Anybody need any cucumbers?

Ratatouille Tart

What I can't get enough of though is eggplant, tomatoes and zucchini! The boys were gone this past weekend so Mary Rollins and I had the most wonderful eggplant meals. Check out this ratatouille tart that I made on Friday. I'm a huge fan of tomato pie and experiment with variations on it regularly but this tart is amazing and beat out tomato pie as my new favorite summer meal. MR and I ate half of this one for dinner. We took the other half to Connie and they finished the remainder off but did so over dinner and breakfast. MR & I decided we didn't feel to badly about our excessive consumption of ratatouillee tart as she pointed out that I ran 6 miles on Friday morning and she'd danced for 3 hours. And, it's made with eggplant and had a minimal quantity of cheese, as opposed to Tomato Pie which has more than it's fair share of cheese and mayonnaise.

We also made some yummy grilled eggplant, cubanelle pepper, tomato, basil and goat cheese sandwiches. I forgot to take a photo of those and they were gone before we realized it.

The secret to good eggplant is the salting. No matter what, no matter how you're going to prepare it (I don't care what the recipe says) you have to salt your eggplant for at least 30 minutes. This requires a bit of planning ahead but I've found I can salt my eggplant before I take MR to ballet (or wherever) and let it sit out for a good hour or two before I actually use it in the recipe.