could it be any easier...?

I love cooking dinner. But like everyone, I don't often have much time to prepare much more than boiling water for a quick pasta or making an egg. Despite this, I really enjoy checking out different cookbooks from our local library. One such book that I've gotten out plenty of times is:



It's such a great book with some really delicious sounding meals. I always have been intrigued with puff pastry, but never used it. I knew it was something similar to a phyllo dough, which is something I use every time I make spanakopita (mmm...). Anyhow, I was glancing in the book, "A Year in the Vegetarian Kitchen" and stumbled across a recipe called "Easiest Roasted Vegetable Tart" that involved puff pastry.

Essentially I cut some zucchini, broccoli, and onion - roasted them in the oven with salt and pepper - tossed them with olive oil and basil- unrolled puff pastry to square- put roasted veggies on pastry leaving a small border on a sides- bake in oven.

If you never worked with puff pastry, you'll be amazed how it "puffs up"....hence the name.






See that puffiness up there? Amazing. It tasted wonderful and Kinsey and I are completely hooked on it. Next up, maybe a baked apple tart?

corn and what appears to be a jungle....

Hands down my favorite summer vegetable is sweet corn.  Well...zucchini is a favorite too.   And of course a nice, fresh, crisp cucumber.  But corn is easily in my top 5 summer vegetables.  Anyway, my aunt and uncle have a really large corn field in their yard.  I'm not entirely sure what they do with all this corn.  But the past two summers they've given us lots and lots of their sweet corn.  We've always gladly accepted this offer and proceed to them spend a few hours husking all of it, boiling it, and them freezing it.  We recently put corn away for the season, which was just in time because we were fast approaching our last bag from the freezer of last year's corn. 

 Here's our progress a few bags in:

The corn is grown organically, so there's always the chance of a few bugs or worms along the way.  Here's a bright green one that I found happily chewing away as I peeled back the husks:

The corn was dropped off at my parents'  house, so while we were there, we checked out the decline of what used to be a garden last year.  Yes, these are weeds that are taller than me.  Last year at this time, there were tomato plants and zucchini planted here.  A few random tomatoes did come up from seed this year.  There's a plant in the front right side of this picture.

.  Actually, there is a zucchini plant in the front of the picture below.  In May, there were rows and rows of sugar peas planted here.  We harvested many, many baskets of them.  It's sort of crazy to think how different this area was a mere three months ago.  Not sure how high these weeds will grow....