home grown

It's not a big harvest, but it's the first harvest. And nothing tastes sweeter than the first tomatoes of the season from your own garden. Except maybe the first tomato, basil, mozzarella salad. Next weekend I'll be making mozzarella for the first time!

We planted 5 different kinds of tomatoes this year, and the first 2 to ripen are Celebrity and Better Boy. We bought those as seedlings from a local grower; they're a few weeks ahead of the plants I started from seed: Old Flame, Black Tula, and Sweet 100. The squash is from seeds I brought back from Tokyo. I'm going to try it in a pasta recipe I found in Barbara Kingsolver's new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

I tried another recipe from that book this weekend and was sorely disappointed! It was for basil-blackberry crumble, and when you brave the thorns of a blackberry thicket, you really care about what you do with every precious berry. I suspected the recipe had too much butter and not enough flour & sugar, but I always try a recipe as written the first time, then tinker with it later. I should have trusted my instincts! The fruit was swimming in butter and was barely salvageable.

It's an excellent book, in general, so I'm hoping this is just a typo. I went to their website, but there's no place to post a question or comment. At any rate, if you decide to try the recipe, make your own topping and save yourself some heartache. Tonight I'll give that pasta recipe a try, because I think everyone deserves a second chance! I'll let you know how it turns out.