Hi Friends,

Perhaps this week’s missive should be called “WHERE’S BEN?” As I may have mentioned last week, he spent last weekend out in the country near Bertram – so you got my cooking. This week, he’s in New York. How did this happen, you may well ask? Well he’s visiting our dad, who spends most of the summer in a big old house in Saranac Lake – about 10 miles west of Lake Placid in the Adirondacks. It’s pretty nice up there. And it does leave me tallying things up. Let’s see… Judy got 3 weeks in Maine, uhmm Ben’s going to upstate New York for a week. I went to Balmorea for one evening. It was a nice evening, but sheeesh. I’m not sure about all this, and I am definitely next in line for vacation.

But, enough with the whining. Stephanie and I are planning the dinner menu this week, as we don’t expect Ben back until late Thursday night. I shopped at Boggy Creek this morning – what a wonderful place. I got beautiful squash, four different eggplant varieties, Mexican heirloom garlic, beautiful cream (shell) peas, some young fresh arugula, and a boatload of gorgeous new potatoes. They had some purslane and amaranth greens which do well in hot dry conditions, but these were a bit more exotic than I had time to plan for (especially with Ben unavailable) and I decided to take what I had and get back to it.

Checking out, I listened to Carol Ann reflect on how challenging the weather has been for them this summer and the limitations this has placed on their summer offerings with only half my brain – I was thinking how beautiful everything was and about the bounty I had hauled in.

And that lasted until I stopped in Central Market to pick up a few items that we just can’t get locally. I needed some greens to put with the steak, a few green beans, and some radicchio among other things. The green beans had been available locally until about a month ago. Same with the chard. But now the green beans are only available from Canada, and the chard from California. Still, it didn’t really seem like cheating (not that much…) – I mean we just had that stuff here a week or two back. And what the heck – as long as I was buying stuff coming from California anyway – why not spinach and some dandelion greens – I like spinach way better than chard.

By the time I got to the check out stand, I had a big cart full of dark green leafy stuff – all if it trucked or flown in from far away, composed entirely of things that stopped growing here back about May when we jumped into triple digit temperatures and stopped getting any rain. I was face to face with the dilemma that we discuss every week, but that I don’t usually have to deal with so directly. Now I was looking at it in all its color coded pageantry. Exactly how local are we going to insist on being? Especially in mid-August when so much of the leafy green stuff has long since given up the ghost and headed for cooler climes, as all of us would do given then the time and the money.

Long winded way of saying – we’re serving spinach and dandelion greens with the tenderloin this week. Next week Ben’s back – it may be purslane and amaranth greens.

Come eat!

Murph