Saturday, October 4, 2008

Irrelevant Grandeur


Do you ever have that feeling like you just want to plunge both hands deep into your chest cavity and fall backwards off a high cliff as the only possible means of successfully counteracting the catastrophic forward momentum in your life?! Me either. Summer is over; it's fall. Among the things winding down aside from seasons and friendships are my first year in New York City and the Roaring Camp song on my computer from the original AGCS Summer Mixtape. Perfectly Appropriate.

I made this dish weeks ago, when summer corn was still all the rage at the Farmer's Market and a large batch of garden-fresh tomatoes had just been brought to me by a co-worker from his parents home in Virginia. It was a spectacular conclusion to the sweetness of summertime, so fresh that I didn't even cook the corn all the way down before rolling it out of the pan and onto the plate. If you're looking for an easy way to clean out the vegetables in your pantry (in order to make room for things like spice jars full of cinnamon, canned pumpkin and fleshy halves of acorn squash, of course) I really think you should go for this recipe!

You Will Need:
Corn
Tomatoes
Fresh Basil
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil
Mushrooms

To Make:
As usual, so easy it's painful. Heat a tablespoon or so of olive oil over low heat, add a few sliced mushrooms. Let them cook down for about three minutes. Dice up your tomatoes (as many as you please!) and drop them in with the mushrooms. Add your spices and let them meditate over the warmth for awhile, soaking up the flavors. Everything should be awfully juicy and smelling pretty nicely at this point. Then toss in some handfuls of freshly shucked corn. Stir everything together, cover, and let simmer down for five to seven minutes. At the end-point, the corn should be cooked down but still have retained a little bit of its crunch. Serve immediately! Enjoy.




4 comments:

Suzy said...

Mm looks delicious. And thank goodness you've returned. I've already gotten rid of the last corn in my fridge and am already in the depths of a mushroom craze. I'm trying to incorporate eggplant and zucchini but mushrooms keep taking over. Nothing else to do but surrender to a huge pot chili at this point. Mm.

Anonymous said...

sweeetheart wins everything in the world.

sweeetheartfever said...

hi suzy! it is so nice to hear from you! and i know exactly how you feel. every single time i go to the grocery store and see the bulk mushroom bins, i have to count to ten and talk myself out of buying approximately 298732555 pounds of them. i've got a really great zucchini recipe, though, and i'll put it up for you soon!

Jamie said...

RIP summer. A fitting farewell. I too am a mushroom freak and have an intense love/hate relationship with the bulk bins at grocery stores. Anyhow, seriously, the L train is the smallest place in the world. So crazy! We should definitely eat some dumplings, and maybe some other things, too. Let's do it.