Week 13

Tomatoes
Grape tomatoes
Melon
Hot peppers
Green beans

The theme of this week is frugality.  No grocery store runs, no specialty ingredients, if it's not on hand, it's not an option.  Early this month, I went ahead and made some large, long-planned purchases, and then boom (literally) I had to buy four new tires.  So until payday, I'm cutting back where I can. OK, I already cheated and picked up a couple things.  More avocados for sandwiches, because there's no beating an avocado and tomato sandwich while the tomatoes are ripe, an impulse buy bag of BBQ chips to go with the sandwiches, and a bag of romaine for caesar salad (but I made the dressing >smug<). 

Cutting back on the groceries is perhaps a good idea anyway.  Why did I decide that I needed so many blueberries last week?  They are really good, and were probably on sale, but I bought way too many.  So this week it's blueberry cobbler for dessert and blueberries and melon with breakfast.  No fruit purchases required.  I roasted all the little tomatoes I had over the weekend to throw together with red onion, the jalapenos, the green beans, garlic, and parmesan with spaghetti.   That's a few days worth of meals right there, plus a good refrigerator clean-out.

One last thing to mention, over the weekend, I turned a bunch of the tomatoes into tomato jam.  I used a recipe from a cookbook, but this one from bigoven.com is similar (recipe).  I used some of the jalapenos and a habenero (since the zucchini relish turned out very un-spicy) so it's got a nice kick.  It turned out sweet and spicy and intensely red, and I'm excited about putting it on everything.