summer bounty

Yesterday's haul out of the garden. We are drowning in summery goodness.

Piles of fresh produce are the mother of invention and I have been trying out new recipes in order to keep up with the inventory around here. Matt's Mom brought us blueberries, ranier cherries, bing cherries, and peaches last weekend and despite munching on these goodies all week, I realized yesterday morning that I still had a pile of fruit nearing over-ripeness. Must save the fruit!

So I made a crisp. I almost went with my old stand-by crisp topping (melted butter, brown sugar, oats) but decided to try something new from Rustic Fruit Desserts. I used the almond crisp topping and oh. my. goodness. It's just butter + sugar + flour + toasted almonds but it could not be more delicious. I was nervous because Matt doesn't normally like nuts in his desserts (I know, crazy), but even he pronounced it awesome.

This week we've had so much rain that the tomatoes are splitting open on the vine. I dashed out to save them and then put together this watermelon tomato salad from the August Martha Stewart (sorry can't find the recipe on her website, must not be up yet). I didn't bother with making the basil oil, instead I just tore up some basil leaves. A little goat cheese, lemon juice, and a drizzle of olive oil. Quite tasty.

And this was my lunch yesterday, which was so pretty I had to take a picture. This is uncommonly healthy for me. I had a bowl of crisp for dessert to make up for it.

Now I need to figure out what to do with all this yellow squash. Matt tells me his Memom always made fried squash cakes and called them "croquettes." I'm thinking about this recipe. Paula Deen and fried food--can't go wrong. Any favorite squash recipes?