Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, but I haven’t been posting much lately. This is mostly for positive reasons: fun and interesting social engagements, steadily progressing training runs in anticipation of a marathon in October, excellent meals eaten outside the home, all working together to spare you of my culinary musings.

Related to the aforementioned activities or not, I’ve also been feeling a little blah about cooking lately. I’m still putting food on the table most nights, but it has mostly seemed pretty automatic — nothing quite interesting or delicious enough to share. I was uninspired.

Inspiration, happily and frustratingly, comes at unexpected times. So it was this afternoon, in a moment of distraction from the tasks at hand, I allowed my RSS reader to direct me over to the latest post on our friend Brett’s blog Trout Caviar: Grilling the Market. Whether it was the picture of a beautifully charred carrot or Brett’s call for simplicity in summer preparations, something about his post got my wheels spinning again.

My mind jumped immediately to dinner, where suddenly a pasta with some kind of onion, summer squash and cream sauce — most definitely blah food — started to take on a more interesting character. For one thing, pasta was out: no need for imported starch when a bowlful of market new potatoes sat underutilized on the counter.

The summer’s first squash could still be used, accompanied by some of its first carrots. Given our current urban living situation, grilling was not a possibility; luckily, roasting can also develop those deeply browned surfaces I was after. A quick dressing with olive oil, vinegar, market parsley and garlic, and plenty of salt and pepper was all that was needed to showcase the best of the season.

I read fifty to one hundred food-related blog posts in any given day; most of them are discarded with the spin of a scroll wheel. Sometimes though a post comes along like Brett’s that changes what I’m doing in the kitchen — and even my outlook on this blog. It’s enough to inspire someone to write a post.

Roasted Summer Vegetable Salad

• 1# golf-ball sized potatoes
• 5 or 6 small summer squash
• 10-12 small carrots
• 3 small onions, sliced
• 2 T butter
• 1/2# flavorful sausage, cooked and sliced
• 4 oz goat cheese

Dressing

• 1/3 c olive oil
• 2 T apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup parsley leaves, minced
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 450ºF.

Cut the potatoes in half and place in large microwave-safe bowl. Microwave on high for 8 minutes, until starting to become tender. Toss potatoes — careful, they’re hot! — in ample quantities of olive oil, salt and pepper. Don’t wash the bowl just yet. Arrange the potatoes on a sheet pan, cut-side down. Roast 20-30 minutes, until cut-sides are deep brown, just about to burn.

Meanwhile, cut the squash into 1″ chunks and place them in the bowl you tossed the potatoes in. If your carrots are pencil thin like mine were, you won’t need to peel or cut them; thicker carrots can be quartered. Toss carrots and squash in bowl, adding more olive oil, salt and pepper as necessary to make everything good and moist and seasoned. Turn the contents of the bowl out onto a sheet pan and roast in the oven 3o minutes, until the surfaces start to brown. It’s probably a good idea to flip these veggies around about halfway through the cooking so both sides get brown.

Heat the butter over medium-low heat in a small skillet and add the onions. Cook until greatly reduced and deep brown.

While the vegetables are roasting prepare the dressing by combining all the ingredients. Salt and pepper should be added to taste; given the quantity of vegetables, you may need more salt than expected. Add in the sausage (I used the beef, bleu cheese, and Surly Bender sausage from Clancey’s Meats & Fish).

As the vegetables are done roasting/caramelizing, add them to the bowl with the dressing. When all is ready, toss the vegetables well. Top with crumbled goat cheese and serve.

Tom and I spent last Sunday welcoming the Solstice with our friends Brett and Mary, a few of their Wisconsin neighbors, and a handful of others who made the trek from Minneapolis/St. Paul. It was a beautiful day…

We contributed this salad of cauliflower, mint, carrots, &c. with market produce inspired by a Black Sheep Pizza market salad. Many thanks to Brett and Mary for hosting. I’m only sorry I don’t have more pictures of the rest of the food!

There’s been a lot of talk about asparagus and the lack thereof on our part this spring. With Monday marking the first day of summer, we’re officially past the peak season. Last year we were fortunate to discover asparagus at Midtown in only week four of the market season. We were hopeful for similar this year, but asparagus stalks never came. So hungry we were for this spring treat, we visited the St. Paul Farmers Market as Tom revealed in his prayerful post to the green goddess. As you can see, we found a little more than just (perfect) asparagus that Sunday after a light shopping day at Midtown the day before:

On another occasion, we resorted to buying our asparagus at the Wedge, which Tom was careful to note here. Now, on the verge of July, we’ve officially called off the search. As we learned from a fellow market-goer, the frosts that followed the unusual warm weather we were treated with in early spring dashed any hopes Midtown Farmers Market had for an asparagus vendor.

We did, however, miss sharing with you what we brought home from the market’s fifth Saturday. Thanks to a new crop of t-shirts from new-to-Minneapolis vendors PlantWorn, Tom took home the Asparagus Clump t-shirt at left below:

PlantWorn’s asparagus t-shirt is part of a series the duo is developing around vegetables. Kohlrabi preceded the asparagus and continues to be a part of the many designs PlantWorn brings along to Saturday markets in Midtown and Northeast Minneapolis.

I’m curious to see if the series continues and what market produce might inspire future designs. In the mean time, we’re enjoying our asparagus—and wearing it too.

Midtown Farmers Market continues to provide. Carrots were a welcome new addition this week, bringing fresh color and sweet, early season flavor to the table. I’m looking forward to how this crop will inspire Tom’s cooking in the coming days.

Look at all them vegetables! Only a couple of weeks ago that I was whining about the slow pace of the season; now the dreamed for abundance is upon us: radishes, fingerling potatoes, frisée, beets, strawberries, rhubarb, spinach, a rainbow of chard, sugar snap peas, broccoli, mint, basil and a jar of the salsa Mayor RT Rybak just can’t get enough of (I take market vendors at their word). An imposing haul, but I refuse to be intimidated! I am invigorated! Sure, my crisper drawer may be stuffed up to the glass now, but I will not let any of these veggies languish past the next weekend. The key is to attack your produce head on — don’t sit on it trying to make it last through the end of the week: this much produce lasts forever.

Within an hour of returning from the market Saturday morning, I had the oven fired up roasting beets — a roasted beet can be used without any forethought in salads, sandwiches and side dishes — a raw beet, not so much. As it happened, I layered beet slices with basil and chevre in a terrine that we ate that very night. If you don’t have the patience for careful stacking and weighting, this trio works just as well in a salad. The radishes were also gone by Saturday evening, roasted to make these crostini from the New York Times.

With the knowledge that the strawberries wouldn’t last overnight on our warm counters and lose much of their flavor in the refrigerator, after enjoying a few berries fresh I cooked the remainder into a strawberry sauce with just a little sugar. We’ll be eating this sauce all week; it was perfect for Sunday morning waffles enjoyed with the World Cup on in the background.

Even after separating all the stems from the spinach leaves, the bag of spinach I was left with (which I paid $2 for, by the way) was still taking up half of the crisper drawer. Obviously, it would have to go. I like spinach salads as much as the next guy, but quantities like this demand to be cooked. You know those recipes that, if you go to the grocery store, force you to invest a small fortune in spinach only to have you cook it down to a small fistful? Those are the recipes you want to make with farmers market spinach. Case in point: spinach lasagna.

One and a half days after the market, I’m feeling reasonably good about my progress: beets eaten, radishes roasted, spinach dispatched, strawberries sauced. I even made headway through half the head of frisée in a salad to accompany the lasagna. I have plans for some of the rest: the chard is bound for a north African soup, the rhubarb will likely become jam. If I remain vigilant, the fridge should be empty again just in time for next week’s market.