the perfect summer gratin

Imagine being home alone on a warm summer night, the kitchen all to yourself, and six glorious ounces of fresh, local chevre burning a hole in your pocket. Pour yourself a glass of wine and settle in, folks. You are not going to want to miss this recipe.

My soon-to-be-husband was out for a work happy hour (or five), which meant that the kitchen was mine to do with what I pleased. Which ended up meaning I'd take my time making a dish that I knew I'd love. He's not the world's biggest fan of goat cheese, so I had put this recipe on the "make especially for myself" dockett. And wouldn't you know, I ate every single bite. (Over the course of three meals, that is!)

See this?

This is why I love my mandoline. Don't tell my 11-cup Cuisinart, but I love the mandoline (here's a fancy one) more than my super-charged Cuisinart. It slices and dices into the nicest of pieces, and uses no wattage whatsoever. It can be tucked easily away into a cabinet, no heavy lifting required. Using the mandoline, with its quick back-and-forth motion, lulls me into a near-zen state until I am urgently snapped back into real time as I realize my fingers are getting far too close to that gleaming blade.

So I started off with one fresh squash, picked from my mom's garden the weekend before. I had a good number of purple fingerling potatoes from a local CSA begging to be used, too. While I know their skin is dark purple, I'm always pleasantly surprised to see their vibrant inner patterns.

Enter some fresh, local goat cheese (basic chevre from Pure Luck, worth every penny at about $1 an ounce). Also, notice that beautiful cutting board in the background? My dad made it.

And then, layer it all together with copious amounts of extra-virgin olive oil, and top it off with freshly grated parmesan.

Follow the recipe below, and this is what you get. Don't be fooled; it may look like a mere gratin, but it is So. Much. More. The tang of the goat cheese is balanced nicely by a slight sweetness in the squash; the salty flavor of the parmesan plays off the potatoes just perfectly; the milk melts it all together and you've got a combination of crispy, tender, and smooth. And even though it's a hot dish, it spells out summer. The only thing I'll add next time? A sprig or two of fresh rosemary from the garden.

Potato, Squash, and Goat Cheese Gratin

adapted from the Kitchn

1 medium yellow squash
6 small to medium red potatoes
3 tablespoons olive oil
6 ounces goat cheese
salt and pepper
1/4 cup milk
1/3 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Use a mandoline or chef's knife to slice the squash and potatoes into very, very thin slices, 1/8-inch or less. Toss the sliced vegetables with the olive oil in a large bowl.

Pour a small drizzle of olive oil in a casserole dish (around 8 or 9 inches square) or pie plate and spread it around the bottom and sides. Place 1/3 of the squash and potato slices in the bottom of the dish—no need to layer them squash-potato-squash-etc.—then season with salt and pepper. Top with half of the goat cheese, scattered evenly in large chunks. Repeat with another 1/3 of the vegetables, seasoning again with salt and pepper and topping with the other 1/2 of the goat cheese. Finish by layering on the final 1/3 of the vegetables and seasoning with salt and pepper.

Pour the milk over the entire dish. Top with the parmesan cheese. Bake, covered, for 30 minutes, then uncover and bake 15 more minutes, until the top browns.

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that's good enough.

For some folks, an afternoon of therapy involves a clinic, or maybe a shoe store. But for me, therapy is most often found in an afternoon cooking and conversing with my mother, in the kitchen of the home I grew up in.

Unlike standard therapeutic practice, I find myself wanting to share with you what happened during this particular session. Mainly because it resulted not just in me becoming much more at peace with the world in general . . . but because my mom and I just might need our own cooking show. Think, Julia Child meets the Three Stooges.

Thankfully, I now know that my aloof kitchen moments, while many of them happen because I have failed to follow directions, do indeed descend from my mother's genetic line.

Neither of us will ever follow a recipe dead-on. The other day, for instance, neither of us knew which recipe we were even attempting to follow; there were three out on the island and, for the most part, we were just looking for measurements. And even that was hairy. We went with three eggs, but didn't measure anything else. If a recipe calls for thyme, we'll throw in parsley. If it calls for squash, you can bet we'll throw in zucchini and—why not!—tomatoes. We kept hearing ourselves repeating one line during the course of the cooking session, whether we were forgetting to blind-bake the pie shell or dumping untold amounts of cheese into our quiche: "Well . . . That's good enough," followed by a hearty laugh.

Our afternoon in the kitchen included, but was not limited to, the following:

• a pastry too small for the pan we'd chosen

• the pouring in of sauteed veggies to the unbaked pie crust, only to ask once it was done, "Should we blind bake the crust?" ...and having the answer be, "Yep."

• the line, "Oh! You're walking around with your timer so you don't forget that the crust is in the oven!"

• the overflow of custard because said pastry was too small for the pan

• and, graciously, an absolutely marvelous end result.

I don't have a recipe for the quiche we made, but I can tell you that it included three sauteed garden squash, one sauteed onion (also from the garden), plenty of Swiss cheese, and a few eggs. I think there was a can of evaporated milk in there too, but I can't be sure.

On the side, we had a matchstick salad of fresh garden vegetables and herbs (squash, carrots, zucchini, bell peppers, and tarragon) with a simple vinaigrette.

It was one of the best afternoons I've spent with my mom, and though everything was just "good enough," it all felt perfect in the end. How very wabi-sabi of us!

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hello to a kitchen

Forget that dark old kitchen with particle board shelves and a smelly old pantry. Why did I even wax nostalgic about it at all?

I am in love. Head over heels. Our new kitchen is as charming as it could possibly be, and I don't even care about the dishwasher. We've even decided that the old fridge has a certain je ne sais quoi.

It's that window. The glorious window. Any time of day, it lets amazing amounts of natural light in and gives the whole kitchen, every square inch from the pantry to the recycling bin, a glow. That and the paint color. The galley kitchen may be small, but it's so fresh and open that it feels much bigger.

We moved in Saturday, got the kitchen unpacked Sunday, and cooked our first meal at home (with a guest!) on Monday. We whipped up dinner Tuesday and breakfast Wednesday, and to top it all off, Ryan and I shared dish duty. Heaven. I'm in heaven.

I'm even going to attempt blackberry freezer jam on day 4 in our house. Yeah. That's how together the kitchen feels already, even without cabinet doors attached.

It's such a wonderful feeling to walk into this place and immediately feel at home. Ideas to make the space more functional are already popping up, and the edits we've made thus far have all felt very natural. Once I get my act together, I'll post some before and after photos of our kitchen; you'll see that we totally revamped it (and on a budget to boot!).

Ryan and I are both looking forward to a summer full of cooking. We enjoyed a dinner of fresh garden veggies once already this week, and tonight I'm going to try a riff on two recipes I've been wanting to try. Stay tuned, because . . . Sustainable Diet is BACK!

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goodbye to a kitchen

We're moving tomorrow.

It's one of those momentous moves; we're leaving our apartment and moving into our first house. It's been a big year for us, to say the least; plenty of life changes (not the least of which was turning vegetarian, I'll add, just to keep this on a food track) have kept us on our toes. Hence the great swaths of time between blog posts here.

I really did not anticipate any feelings of nostalgia for my little windowless apartment kitchen. But this week, as I packed up a seemingly endless cupboard-full of kitchen supplies, I realized that this was the place where food came to mean more to me than so much else. Somehow, in about ten square feet of counter space, I discovered something very important: I love to cook. I went from being a mediocre-at-best home cook to a food blogger, all in this tiny galley kitchen. There, I learned how to caramelize sugar and make fig preserves; in that kitchen, I began to roll sushi for the first time and made some of the very best chicken stock I've ever tasted.Our apartment kitchen held my hand as I began a more natural foods journey. I made homemade yogurt, homemade pasta, homemade crackers, homemade tortillas, and even homemade caramels.

I did not, however, learn to make homemade bread.

But more than that, I discovered a deep connection to food and the way it is prepared. I journeyed from junk foods to food junkie. In this kitchen, I learned to respect food and what it can do to our bodies, minds, and spirits. I connected in exactly the way I had hoped when I started this blog: I found ways to weave sustainability through all these facets of life.

What, then, I have to wonder, is in store for our new kitchen? It's about the same size, and the very same layout, minus one very important appliance: the dishwasher. But I'll take it any day, because what it lacks in modern conveniences it makes up for with a full-size window and a gas stove.

I am so excited about the edible escpades that are going to take place in our home's kitchen. For one thing, this summer I plan on meeting our neighbors, becoming the beneficiary of their over-productive peach tree, and making homemade peach preserves. I also plan on trying my hand (again) at sprouts, to make loaves of sprouted grain breads.

Big plans are in store for this kitchen of mine, so please stay tuned for the ride. And in the meantime, help me bid adieu to my beloved apartment kitchen. It has been the backbone for this whole site, and I think we should all wish it well with its next family.

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