the problem with produce.

Oh single friends, you must know how it is. You go to the grocery store and the farmer's market with such hope and ambition - you buy loads of fresh fruit and vegetables, making careful plans not to buy too much just because it looks nice. You are thinking ahead so as not to be wasteful! Good work! But then you do silly things like go out to dinner or happy hour, and pretty soon you are pawning off green beans on your parents (while stealing cherry tomatoes from their garden), wondering what the hell am I going to do with all this food?!

Such is my life as of late. It's gotten late enough in the week that all meals must be based around what is about to rot in the fridge. I finally finished the roasted veggies (eggplant, zuchinni, onions) in a wrap for lunch. For dinner, I stared at the cucumbers and the tomatoes, wondering if I should have tomato and cucumber salad again, and then I decided I would make some gazpacho.



(I've never made gazpacho before so I used this recipe as a guide. As usual, I was missing about half the ingredients so I just had to make do. It turns out that my gazpacho is tomato cucumber salad, pureed.)

Then I stared at the zucchini and thought, man, zucchini, you are boring. What can be done with you? The answer is definitely zucchini cheddar bread, with a recipe from The Joy of Cooking.

By this point the gazpacho was happily chilling (ha, get it? It's both hanging out and getting cold! [sorrrry]) in the fridge and the bread was in the oven but it was going to take an HOUR and I was starving. And it seemed like I should eat the bread with the soup, that just makes sense. So I made a small salad with spinach (never should have bought that!), blueberries, and walnuts.

Finally finally everything was ready so I ate this:



The gazpacho is a little spicier than intended but still refreshing. And the bread is savory and filling. Hurrah! Summer produce meal!

...of course, now my new problem is that I have too much bread and gazpacho to eat. Whoops.