Bridal Shower Bites - the Aunts' Watermelon Salsa

Aunt Linda and Aunt Chris both sent me this recipe, so I figured it had to be good! I've been wanting to make it, but had to wait until it's watermelon season. And lo! Tis now upon us! Hurrah!

Yum! I used to not like watermelon, which now I don't understand.

Veggie Burgers!

I'm pretty sure that Matt and I have never left a bookshop empty handed. He heads straight to their history section while I make a beeline for the cooking section - we each end up convincing ourselves that we don't have enough history / cooking books, and we desperately a few more. And so that's how I ended up with with a cookbook completely devoted to veggie burgers - Veggie Burgers Every Which Way.  What I really liked about this one was the variety of veggie burgers in the book - there's a chapter on bean-based burgers, vegetable-based burgers, grain-based burgers, all sorts of different type of burgers. 

Corn from our farm share! We had grilled corn with our veggie burgers.

Cucumber Night

So, one of the benefits of my new job is that I can participate in a farm share with a local farm, Ward's Berry Farm.  Every week, for $22, I get a giant box of fresh, local veggies.  I am in heaven.  The veggies change every week, depending on what's ripe that week, but we've been getting a lot of cherry tomatoes (yum!), peppers, squash, corn, potatoes, and cucumbers. 

This week's box.  You're jealous, right?

Cantaloupe Ice Cream

So!  It's been a while since I've posted anything on here, and after getting some flack about that this weekend, I've recommitted to my blog idea and am going to try to get back in the rhythm of posting.  I don't have pictures for this post yet, but they're coming!  But enough about me.  As I've mentioned before, one of Matt's favorite fruits is cantaloupe.  As part of my evil plan to get him to eat more fruit, I've started making just about every cantaloupe recipe I can find.  (Next up - grilled cantaloupe.)  Those of you who know my dad know that ice cream making is in the blood, so when I ran across a recipe for Cantaloupe Ice Cream in the Ben & Jerry's ice cream book, I figured it was worth a try for a couple of reasons.  Partly the 'Matt loves cantaloupe' reason, partly the excuse to make ice cream, but most compelling was the 'cantaloupe and ice cream - really??!' reason.

Pasta with Melon

This is an oddball combination, at least to me.  Melon is one of those fruits that I'm never quite sure what to do with, besides eating it straight.  You can't really cook with it (can you?), and it's too watery to bake with, so I guess you're left with eating it cold on a hot day.  Which is awesome.  But it's hard to eat a whole melon by yourself as a single person, and it's even a lot of fruit for two.  Those baby watermelons seem to be the way to go, except that's a lot of preparation costs for not a lot of fruit (thanks, optimal foraging theory), and the pre-sliced saran-wrapped chunks you can buy at the store never look quite as appealing.

It just doesn't seem like this would go well with pasta, right?