When There’s Nothing Left to Do Besides Saucin’ It

As much as I’m like *oooomigawd I LOVE the farmers’ market* or whatever, and I totally do love it, it sometimes overwhelms my judgment.

I love it too much. It’s like a freaking social for me. I’ve become BFF with one of the vendors, Jaci, who always makes fun of her farmer family and talks shit about picking vegetables. She’d never been more grateful than when she found out she was allergic to bees and therefore couldn’t harvest the crops with her uncle and grandfather.

And then there’s the market director, Rebbie. She’s tall and beautiful and may or may not have magenta hair on any given Saturday. Plus she’s nice as shit.

I also run into my neighbors and now fellow ES bloggers, Maids and Bliz.

There’s Mike, who I met when I interviewed him about his group DC Homebrewers, who has since quit his job to work full time for Tree and Leaf Farms. He now bags my ever changing order of greens (it was a mix of kale this week) and I’m not so secretly jealous that he’s out composting during the day while I’m staring at a computer screen.

Anyway, I’m so distracted by my market friends, and of course all of the food, that I always over buy. In my fridge right now I have too many herbs and veggies to deal with: asparagus, kale, squash, shelled peas (holy crap all you do is pull this little cord and open up the shell and then eat the peas like candy—so delish), and then there’s this other purple thing that starts with a “K” but I can’t remember the name of it. I will thank Jaci for that impulse buy. And then there’s sage, garlic chives and garlic scapes. Good christ.

Now this is not a bad thing, of course. I just need to find new and exciting ways to digest all of these veggies, especially on nights that I don’t feel like full-out cooking.

Jessica Seinfeld-esque sneak attack post jump.

Kale Pesto Hummus

I’ve finally figured out the best way to use up large quantities of greens: sauce it!

I had a random half can of chickpeas in the fridge and then a half pound of kale. Of course I think to blend it up for a thick cross between a dip and a sauce. This way I could schmear it on bread and know that I was getting  my fill of veggies without having to knife and fork a salad (Can you use *to knife and fork* as a verb?) It was a great compromise for a hardly-cook meal and something from the garden.

I quickly sauteed/steamed the still-wet kale in a drop of oil and covered it. I only left it on there for about 2-3 minutes. I then dumped that into my mini food processor with the 1/2 can of chickpeas, 2 crushed garlic cloves, ground red pepper flakes, a touch of oil, salt and pepper. And when the blending attachment (is there a more succinct name for that?) wasn’t moving through the thickness, I threw in a spoonful of yogurt. Somehow, I restrained myself from throwing in some feta (more on that later.)

Actually, more on feta now. So this pesto-hummus thing became the majority of my meal. I slathered it over market caraway rye bread (can you even call it rye if it lacks caraway seeds!) and then topped it with crumbled feta. And only because the sucker turned soft, I scooped chunks of avocado over the open-face sandwich.