A quick, local dinner

Dinner was "planned" to be a quick and informal affair, if you can say that you planned anything that ends up being informal. I ended up fixing the door (which, with the humidity had stopped hitting the strikeplate properly) so it was later than I expected when I finally started cooking.

And we started off with arugula. When I asked Josh what he wanted for dinner, he started off with "arugula" before adding that since we just got it, we should not let it go to waste. And so we had Burge baby arugula with the spicy Chilean olive oil from Star, kosher salt, pepper, and lemon juice, tossed gently in the bowl.

From there, I wasn't sure where to go for protein. We've been using protein mainly as just another side this summer with all the goodies from the farmers market, which is nice as a balance. Josh seemed to not want anything too heavy -- and really, even though we have a freezerful of meat, most of it is frozen in portions more meant for winter. So I took out a couple handfuls of our medium brown shrimp from the Sweet Savannah shrimp company with a mind to make spicy shrimp. But the only shrimp I could really think to make spicy-style was with hot sauce, and eventually, I decided to make a garlicky shrimp with minced padrons. But Josh didn't seem to want too spicy, so I with just minced shrimp and then minced ginger to balance it. I was envisioning shrimp that were stickily covered with garlicky and gingery bits but they didn't stick so I added a little extra oil. They turned out pretty damn well.

You know, I am going to be really bummed in the middle of the winter when we have no more of this shrimp in the freezer.

We bought Chinese eggplant from Burge Farms last week, so they were starting to wrinkle a bit, which is sad to waste things from the market. So I made eggplant with garlic sauce, a Cecelia Chiang recipe which calls for steaming the eggplant stalks and then combining it with a sauce of soy sauce, chili oil, black vinegar, and minced garlic and ginger. It was pretty good, but a little spicy for me.

Lastly we had a canary melon from Riverview. A bonus melon that we got with our six pounds of okra! It is crisp and lightly honeydew-flavored. A nice treat.