The abundance of the summer season can be quite exciting, but also daunting. I try my best to make a plan each week after my trip to the farmers’ market about what I am going to do with all my produce, but given the quantities sold at the farmers’ market and life rearing its ugly head, a few vegetables slip through the cracks: a half pound of green beans here, some cucumbers there, you know what I mean. Maybe you’ve even had to face the shame of discovering rotting vegetables at the bottom of your crisper drawer. Those vegetables gave up their lives for you and you’re just going to throw them out?!

One solution is to cook all this stuff before it gets old but—and I’m sure I’ll be disavowing these words come February—a person can only eat so many steamed fresh green beans. For me, when nature’s bounty becomes a little too much to handle, I turn to pickling.

Maybe you’re thinking, “whoa,  pickling is too much to handle!” I’m not talking about your grandma hauling out the canning jars and putting up the whole winter larder (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Given the limitations of my stove and storage space there’s no way I could sterilize or properly seal a bunch of jars. But with refrigerator pickles, quick pickles that need to be stored cold, there’s no need to sterilize the containers or vacuum seal them: it’s just produce, spices, vinegar and you’re all set.

I had three particular overabundances to address: a bag of green and yellow beans that was two weeks old, a large bag of cucumbers that I had no chance of finishing, and the rest of the summer slaw from earlier in the week (which, obviously, was not dressed).

With all those vegetables stuffed into clean jars it was time to add spices. I don’t believe in using a recipe when making pickles; instead, I just put together a collection of what I vaguely consider pickling spices. With the beans I put in a few sprigs of fresh dill, a split jalapeño, a few crushed garlic cloves, coriander seeds, mustard seeds and peppercorns. Same drill with the cucumbers, except instead of mustard seeds I used caraway. For the cabbage I put in chinese five spice along with garlic and peppercorns. I usually prefer to use whole spices for pickling but my five-spice was ground; I don’t think it will be a problem, though those seeds floating around the jar are pretty.

At this point the pickles are ready to be, well, pickled. For this, pickling solution is required. I usually do a combination of two parts vinegar to one part water, with about two tablespoons of salt and ¼ cup of brown sugar if I’m looking for sweet pickles, as was the case with the cabbage. Vinegar choice definitely makes a difference here: I have had some excellent pickles made with champagne vinegar and I bet balsamic would give interesting results. Being economically minded above all, I usually just use pure white vinegar, a gallon of which can be obtained for less than a dollar. It tastes fine.

After a quick boil to dissolve the salt and sugar, the solution can be poured in the jars to cover the produce. With a short cooling they are ready to be lidded and put in the refrigerator. 24 hours later and the pickles are ready to eat. I think food safety experts might say pickles last refrigerated up to a month, but I have eaten pickled rutabaga that was over 3 months old and did not die, so proceed at your own risk. It probably won’t be an issue anyway, because after you try the first of your homemade pickles (trying my pickled cucumbers on a burger, for example, sent me into a fit of joyous expletives) they won’t last much longer at all.

With Martha out of town all week, I needed to hold back at the Midtown Farmers’ Market. There’s only so much produce one person can go through in a week! On the other hand, it’s the first day of August, what feels like the midpoint of the growing season, and that means there is tons of basically irresistible produce. I did the best that I could with restraint, but I am only a man. In terms of summer produce, there’s really anything you could ever want: summer squash, cucumbers, lettuces, kale, herbs, sweet corn, eggplant, carrots, radishes, beets, some peppers. Tomatoes are still just getting started: only a few stands have them and their are not many varieties to choose between. But who can resist in-season tomatoes, even if it’s just the beginning of the season?

Since I’m on my own this week, my strategy for buying was based on projects. I bought a bunch of dill, a quart of jalapeños and a bunch of pearl onions with pickles in mind. Specifically, I need to preserve a ton of cucumbers from last week before they tragically rot in the crisper drawer, as well as some even older beans. I may also pickle the jalapeños on their own. I doubt I’ll have any trouble going through my five tomatoes, but they can always be turned into a canned salsa if need be. I bought broccoli with a recipe in mind that should feed me for a few days, and while I didn’t have anything in mind for sweet corn I’m really a sucker for the stuff and couldn’t pass it up.

And speaking of not being able to pass up, take a look at those raspberries!

Living as a student in Cairo, I quickly learned what my cheapest meal options were: kushari, fuul, and best of all, ta’amiya — known elsewhere as falafel. For the equivalent of 5¢, one of these delicious little sandwiches was mine: pita bread (‘aysh baladi) stuffed with fried balls of spiced fava beans, lettuce, cucumber, tomato and carrot all topped off with yogurt sauce. Three or four of these was all I needed for lunch most days, with all my nutritional bases covered: bread, vegetables, beans, dairy.  Of course, eating uncooked vegetables for lunch daily, a practice which we were repeatedly advised against, might have been behind my chronic intestinal problems throughout my stay in Egypt, as might have been my switch to an almost all-bean diet. But for a 15¢ lunch, I was willing to put up with a little hardship.

After leaving Egypt (and allowing a suitable period of separation), I began to crave ta’amiya again, but since I have never lived anywhere with a significant Egyptian expat community it was impossible to find. Sure, I could find falafel, but it never tasted quite right — no doubt the result of blending fava beans with chickpeas, or omitting the favas altogether. With no restaurants around to satisfy my needs, the only option left to me was to make my own.

Luckily, I had the foresight to buy a cookbook in Egypt, which featured a good ta’amiya recipe. The basis of ta’amiya is fava beans, but a different variety of favas than those used for fuul. In fuul, it is crucial to get the round, brown favas that are about the size of pinto beans. For ta’amiya, you want the bigger variety that is a bit more commonly available. Ideally, you’ll be able to find the variety known as ‘fuul madshush’, which are already shelled and therefore white in color. Unfortunately, I’ve never actually been able to find such beans, so after an overnight soak I dig my hand into the pot and start shelling beans. You can make it a game: see how many beans you can shell in an hour, then try to double that amount.

With soaked, shelled beans ready to serve as the body of the ta’amiya, it is time to add in the flavorings. The dominant flavor in ta’amiya is dill. This was a bit surprising to me since I think of Middle Eastern food as being more about parsley and cilantro. I use a lot of fresh dill, and for good measure throw in a little parsley and cilantro. Next, a good dose of various allia: 10 cloves of garlic, an onion, and green onions or leeks. Finally spices: cumin, cayenne, salt and black pepper.

All of the ingredients are roughly chopped and tossed together. Great. But that won’t fry — you need a paste! If you were an Egyptian housewife of modest means you’d be reaching for your biggest mortar and pestle, but if you were a twenty-something lazy neo-orientalist you’d bust out the food processor. Because the beans need to be ground pretty fine for the patties to stay together in the hot oil, I grind them in several batches. After all is ground, I knead the mixture with my hands to make sure everything is distributed evenly. The mixture should hold together and have a pleasing green hue from all the herbs.

When you’re satisfied that the beans are as ground as they are going to be, it’s time to shape patties. The size of the patties in Egypt was rather small, maybe a couple of tablespoons, but to save time I make mine bigger, a rough handful. For frying, I use peanut oil heated to 375°. Reaching the right temperature is crucial — if the oil is too cold the ta’amiyas will break apart and you’ll be left with a big mess of oily crumbs. I learned this the hard way at least a couple of times.

The patties don’t need to fry long, just a few minutes until they are golden brown. I usually rotate mine a few times during the frying because it makes me feel like I know what I’m doing.

So you’ve got some ta’amiya. But as with fuul, at least half the fun of this dish lies in the toppings. Fresh pita goes without saying. Yogurt is also needed, preferably some kind of yogurt sauce with garlic and tahini. For vegetables, the classic combination is lettuce, cucumber and tomato. With the summer Farmers’ Market being my main source of produce, though, I have been going more seasonal: lettuce, radishes and spring onions tossed with sumac. I also had some rutabagas pickled with beets sitting in the fridge just for such an occasion.

I hardly need to explain what happens next. Put the ta’amiya in a pita (for authentic Egyptian style crush the patty a little), add topping of your choice, and enjoy. It probably cost more than 5¢ to make, but if you factor in the cost of a plane ticket to Cairo, you’re really coming out ahead.

Amazing what two weeks will do. I missed the last two weeks of the Midtown Farmers’ Market while on a trip home (and enjoying the very fine Midland Farmers’ Market). You might recall that my last trip, while exciting because of the first appearance of asparagus, was a bit disappointing since that was the only fresh vegetable to be had. This week, the market really exploded with summer produce—I can finally buy (more than) enough fresh vegetables for the week.

Greens. Greens are the most readily available thing right now: tons of lettuces, spinach, kale, bok choi and kohlrabi were available, as well as every kind of herb. I picked up a bunch of kale, nearly a pound of spinach, and an assortment of salad greens. Not a bad deal for 6 dollars,though I had to spend about an hour washing and drying greens at home. A bunch of dill and a bunch of parsley came home as well since I had a use for them in mind.
Roots. The first spring onions are available, and there are plenty of radishes to be had. So far, no sign of baby beets or turnips. I cannot resist buying radishes whenever I see them, nor could I turn down sprightly little purple onions.
Peas. Sweet peas were out in full force this weekend—every farmer seemed to have an abundance of them. They are sweet and tender.
Rhubarb. Rhubarb, the herald of spring in these parts (along with asparagus), is still available. I have not had nearly enough rhubarb this year so I had to have some.

I have some ideas for how to use all this great produce, but this is the first week where I have more fresh food than I know what to do with! I’m sure I’ll figure something out and have an empty fridge by next Saturday morning!

Making crackers is frustrating. In fact, making anything with a rolling pin is pretty damn vexing, but crackers especially so. Good crackers require two things: really thin dough and perfectly uniform dough. The thinness helps make crackers crispy, rather than chewy or, worse, brick-like (tooth-shattering). The uniformity of the dough is related: thin crackers will burn to a cinder while their thick brethren are slowly baking into breadish mediocrity. If there’s any saving grace to bad crackers its that you didn’t spend much time making them, but that’s hardly a consolation.

I am fairly experienced with rolling pins since I make a lot of flattened breads, but  I have never liked using them. It seems like my pin is always getting stuck to the dough, tearing it and ruining my shape. I also find it difficult to roll to a consistent thickness, especially when rolling very thin. I know you can buy little rings to attach to the end of your rolling pin that help control thickness but they sound like more trouble than they’re worth. And why use a rolling pin at all, when we have our friend, Signore Norpro:

Pasta has many of the same requirements as crackers in terms of shaping, so a pasta machine is a natural for making crackers. My working dough recipe is the Lavash Crackers from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, consisting of:

• 6 3/4 oz AP Flour
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/2 t instant yeast
• 1 T honey (I am just reporting this for accuracy’s sake; I omitted the honey)
• 1 T veg oil
• 3-4 oz water

Very simple. After all, it’s just bread! To make the dough, you proceed as you might imagine, mixing all the ingredients and kneading until the texture is right. Then let the dough rest so the gluten can relax. And you can relax too.

After an hour or less of resting I used my handy-dandy pasta machine to lay down a silkysmooth sheet.

I then divided each sheet into large rectangles then covered them with toppings before sliding them onto my pizza stone in a 400° oven. A lesson I learned with the first batch was that you have to remember to dock the dough (prick it all over with a fork), lest you get this:

Not that puffy crackers are a bad thing, but a one-ply cracker is almost too thin. For the next batches I almost always remembered to dock, whick gave a much more uniformly flat look.

Still pretty big sheets. To actually eat them, I used a knife to break the crackers into chaotic shards. I ended up with quite a few varieties. Here’s a family photo:

Top row from left to right: Vindaloo, Sea Salt, Chili Powder, Aleppo Pepper. Bottom row: seeds,  sesame-soy, garlic-dill.

Besides the lesson about docking above, I learned two things about dealing with toppings. For these crackers I rolled out the dough unflavored and then sprinkled the toppings on before baking. This resulted in toppings that weren’t very well integrated into the dough. In the case of the seeded cracker this meant my carefully placed caraway, poppy, nigella, and sesame seeds almost all rolled off the cracker during the cracking process, never to be tasted and enjoyed. Next time I will try to integrate the flavorings into the dough before rolling.

The other lesson is one about salt: you need a lot of it. Salt is the reason we can taste other flavors; in this batch of crackers the most flavorful ones were dill-garlic, loaded with garlic salt, and the soy sesame, soy sauce having plenty of sodium. The vindaloo and chili-pepper crackers had very subtle flavors since I failed to add salt with the spices.

I am excited to make crackers again. The pasta machine really took the effort out of rolling them, and they can be thrown together very quickly as a result of not really needing to rise. I have a lot of ideas for other flavorings to try, especially if the flavorings can be integrated into the dough. I also want to play with other flours and incorporate some whole grains.