So much has happened lately, all my random thoughts never got captured. And they were really timely, pithy and witty.
A tragedy.
Oh well. I'll try banal. Borscht. Yep. It's summer and pink is in. I made some Borscht and it was pink. Very pink. I used a recipe from David Yanis' book "A Platter of Figs" - K., a vegetarian gave the book to me, which is odd because most of the recipes are pretty meaty and pretty fussy if you ask me. But K. was coming over for dinner and so I made the borscht which was such a pretty colour and used chives from the garden. The recipe calls for cloves, whole coriander and way too much cayenne. The flavorings do give you a nice central European zing, but the coriander and cloves get ground up when you blend the soup which you are then supposed to strain. Well my soup didn't strain (and who likes to strain 8 cups of soup? That's fussy. I was trying to press the soup through a strainer and gave up - pureed beets are too thick to strain) and I didn't like the ground up spices. The next time I make this, because over all I liked it, I am going to put the spices in a cheesecloth pouch that I can pull out and I'm going to add a chuck of fresh ginger and reduce the cayenne.
It's also the season of rose. I was walking through the wine store and picking up some roses to try and find this season's rose. You know something refreshing and interesting that is food friendly and they decided to stick all the roses in the French section of the store. So I'm not wearing my reading glasses and I pick out 6 bottles of French rose, I particularly like the roses from the Lang D'Oc region (which I am misspelling the Lang part). When I get home I notice that one of the wines has an alien head on the bottle cap. And then I noticed that the etching of the vineyard on the label has a cigar shaped UFO on it! Sacre Bleu! Something must be up - since when have the French gotten funny about wine? Putting on my reading glasses I realized that this was from Bonny Doon Vineayrds and so of course it was from an iconoclastic American vineyard. The wine was lovely and at 12.00 with a UFO on the label is probably going to be this summer's house wine. We did try a New Zealand Rose that was awful, okay (that is just wrong!) and bitter. Yuck!

I have also been making a lot of Farro salads. This one has fava beans, scallions, mint in a olive oil and meyer lemon vinaigrette. This was good with a few grilled shrimps on top. My recipe for Farro says to soak it overnight and boil it for a couple of hours, like it was a legume instead of a grain. I find that if I soak it for a couple of hours it cooks within 30 minutes making it easy to cook up, cool off and through some vegies and dressing on.