[Week 7] Salads on Vacation Part II + Essential Condiments to Pack for the Road

Also: A quick zucchini sauté I love.

Farm Share Friends: Greetings from Lake George ☀️

Cooking in rental kitchens is never easy, and over the years, I’ve learned that keeping things simple is the name of the game: chop up vegetables, set out some hummus, buy the salsa, don’t stress about it.

I’m at Lake George with my husband’s family for the week and just like last year, every night for dinner, we’re enjoying some sort of massive chopped salad.

To refresh, here’s the formula: chop up any vegetables and fruit you have on hand — bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, snow peas, nectarines, peaches, strawberries, avocados, etc. — then dress with a 1:1 mix of olive oil and white balsamic vinegar. Season with flaky sea salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste. Add cheese if you wish.

Pictured above is the simplest version of this sort of salad: halved cherry tomatoes + mozzarella with an additional splash of an aged, syrupy balsamic vinegar. Had the local Tops had basil, I would have added it. It took no time to throw together and comfortably fed the 13 of us last night aside our burger-and-hot dog dinner.

This is the 7th year we’ve come to this spot on Lake George, and every year I add and remove items from our master packing list, but the essentials stay the same: Diamond Crystal kosher salt and Maldon sea salt…

… as well as a selection of oils and vinegars: I love having both white balsamic vinegar and an aged, syrupy balsamic on hand. And I love having an excellent olive oil (for dipping) on hand as well as a really good one for everything else.

This year, I packed a few more condiments: cholula (for morning eggs), sriracha mayo (for leftover grilled chicken… so good), Mama Lil’s pickled peppers (a recent discovery which I now buy by the case).

Friends, what seasonings and condiments do you pack for the road? Do you have any favorite easy, go-to meals for a crowd? Please share!

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Week 7 Vegetables

This week I will not be partaking in farm share cooking, and I am devasted to hear I’ll be missing the first new potatoes of the season — they’re so tasty!

If I were home, I would shoot to use the lettuce first. Everything else will keep fine in the fridge or on the countertop for one week.

• head lettuce → Salads

• bell peppers → Bell Pepper Recipes

• ​​fresh onions → Onion Recipes

• Swiss chard → Swiss Chard Recipes

• new potatoes → Potato Recipes

• parsley → Herb Recipes

• eggplant → Eggplant Recipes

• cucumbers → Cucumber Recipes

• jalapeños → Jalapeño Recipes

• zucchini or summer squash → Summer Squash Recipes

• scallions → Scallion Recipes

Find recipes for all the vegetables here → Farm Share Vegetables

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8 Recipes

Thank you, Erinn, as always, for all of your wonderful ideas. Here are a few recipes to make this week:

Simple White Bean Salad: My friend Sandy sent me this recipe several weeks ago, and I’ve been making it on repeat. It’s such a good one for so much farm share produce: zucchini, scallions, parsley, and jalapeños. You can make it ahead and it feeds a crowd.

I read about these on Margaret Roach’s A Way to Garden: Dan Koshansky’s Refrigerator Dill Pickles, and I can’t wait to try them:

Gimme Some Oven’s Cucumber-Quinoa Salad: This looks refreshing and tasty:

Real talk: this is what I do with 97% of the farm share peppers: cut them up and set them aside hummus. I discovered Esti dips via Susan Spungen’s newsletter, and I am obsessed! The traditional hummus is so good as is the eggplant hummus:

If you’re feeling ambitious, make the hummus:

After tasting the Esti Eggplant Hummus, I’m dying to re-create it. I’m thinking about doing a mashup of the above and below recipe: Smoky Eggplant Dip:

Deb Perelman’s Quick Zucchini Sauté (So fast and tasty! This became a favorite after I discovered it last summer.)

New Potatoes with Green Harissa

And if you, too, are on vacation and find yourself out and about shopping: The Department of Salad’s Origin Salad. This is very similar in spirit to the chopped salads I describe above, but Emily uses olive oil and fresh lemon, which sounds lovely:

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Fellow Farm Sharers: Please share in the comments links to recipes you are loving for your early season farm share vegetables! Tips, questions, and suggestions are always welcome, too. Enjoy your vegetables! 🥦🥬🥒🌶🌽🥕 See you next week :)