Motherhood & A Taste of Summer

I sort of want to write a post about how incredible awesome, beautiful, spirited, smart, frustrating, vibrant, energetic, creative, artistic, and challenging our daughter is just now.  I want to write about how much I want to give her the focused time and attention that she seems to crave, but how I can't always and how sad that makes me and probably her too... I suspect, however, that I'm too tired and emotional to do so without tears or to do the subject justice beyond the obvious sentiment that I love her so and want to be an good mom to her.  Instead, I think we should contemplate vegetables.  Sound good?

As I've mentioned, we get weekly "garden boxes" of vegetables on Sunday and my personal goal is to use it all up before the next Sunday if I can.  The day I receive our weekly share I tend to have the vegetable I most love for dinner.  This means we often have, for example, corn on the cob or fried okra (or both!) on Sunday.  Conversely, Saturday I tend to be thinking of ways to use what remains (or maybe say give my brother a pepper or two, which might be cheating, but he likes them more than we do).  

The picture above is a recent "use it up" creation that I loved and my kids actually seemed to as well so I wanted to share the "recipe" we invented here before I forget.  The vegetable ratios below were based on what we had to use and could clearly be adjusted based on your options. Actually, I probably could have used one of those extra banana peppers here too if they hadn't already found a good home:)

Richards Family Taste of Summer

Ingredients:

1 small zucchini - cut into a small dice

1 c. quartered cherry tomatoes

1/4 of a large onion or one small onion, finely minced or diced

1 T. butter

1 -2 cloves of garlic, minced

1/4 tsp. ground cumin

1/2 tsp mexican oregano

1/2 tsp salt (to taste)

1/4 tsp ground pepper

1/4 c. water

Instructions:

Prepare vegetables as indicated above.  Warm a non-stick skillet over medium heat and melt the butter.  Add the remaining ingredients, except for the water, cook slowly  stirring occasionally.  If the mixture begins to look dry add water as necessary.  Cook until the zucchini is tender and the onion pieces are translucent.  This took roughly 25 minutes.  Serve on its own or over rice or noodles.

My kids loved this more than I had anticipated as they'd recently learned a song about zucchinis from their Sesame Street Ap.  On the off chance this helps your kids love it too I'm including the song here.  From about the 1:43 point B was singing the song to us as he ate.  It was definitely a veggie victory.  Perhaps I should find more vegetable related songs to help our tastes of summer along!

Note: the spices here were selected to match the tamales we were having and the same dish could be made in other styles just by alterning the spice mix.  One alternative might include substituting Italian herbs (or individual amounts of basil, oregano, parsley, etc...) to make this an Italian flavored dish instead. Of course my brother the soon to be spice merchant can, I'm sure, advise you on other good selections. (That link will take you to his spice shop's facebook page where you can get updates on the planned opening of the OKC Savory Spice Store in September and spice tips too). 

Anecdote:  The tamales had been purchased from a friend and were definitely spicy.  B had his first bite and said he felt like he was breathing fire--- and seemed to kind of like it.