Indian Summer

We're having gorgeous weather here - it's making up (a little) for the fact that we had such a cold, wet summer.

I'm such an overachiever - I cooked two new recipes today. Both from the October Good Food magazine. Sadly, it means that neither of them will be on the GF website until next week. First: apple streusel. Kind of like apple pie/crumble. It had a pastry base, apples with lemon (I used lime), cinnamon and nutmeg in the middle, and a brown-sugar crumble on top. YUM. I never bake, but we had friends coming over for coffee so I figured I'd give it a shot. Both John and Kosta had seconds - there's only one small piece left that John and I will have to fight over tomorrow.

We took them to the farm market (they were v. impressed), and we bought some eggplant and leeks and carrots and other fall-y things. So I made a Moroccan eggplant thing with tomato sauce for dinner - John and I were both really surprised at how it turned out. We were originally just planning to make pasta sauce but someone in the neighborhood was roasting a chicken during the afternoon and the smell drove me to do some serious cooking. The eggplant was really tender and not at all bitter. It's definitely a keeper.

I'm almost finished with Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her year of local and seasonal eating with her family. It was a little dry at first but I love her novels and it's really made me think about what we eat. Her family has given up all commercially farmed (i.e. not free-range) meat products, which I think is a VERY good idea. John and I eat relatively little meat as it is - I'm quite happy to pay a premium for happy cows/chickens/lamb etc. We're also making a conscious effort to eat seasonally - NOT to eat leeks in July and strawberries in November. We've been pretty good about it, for the most part. It all just TASTES so much better when it's in season, and it's cheaper. My mom fed us a lot of seasonal stuff when I was a kid - tomatoes in the summer and squashes and stews in the winter. My dad loves a good steak, though. I've been CRAVING steak for a few days - I think John and I are going to splurge on some this week. I haven't had it in ages and I think I must be low on some vitamins or something - I can't get it out of my head.