This recipe is especially for my friend Mark Saleski that he might assuage his anchovy hunger. Another of those weeknight wonders and easily one of my favorite pasta recipes. This has pretty bold flavors and is not for food wimps.

Pasta Puttanesca

• 4 tbs olive oil
• 4 medium cloves garlic, minced or sliced thinly
• 4 or 5 flat anchovy fillets, drained and chopped
• 2 tbs capers, drained and rinsed
• 1/2 cup pitted Kalamata olives, coarsely chopped
• 1/2 cup fresh parsley, chopped
• 28-oz can diced tomatoes
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 3/4 lb penne or other tubular pasta (rigatoni are good here too)

While you boil the water and cook the pasta, make the sauce.

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and anchovies and stir, breaking the anchovies up with a wooden spoon until they’re pretty well dissolved in the oil. Add the tomatoes and season lightly with salt (the anchovies are going to be pretty salty, so TASTE IT) and more heavily with freshly ground pepper. Let it bubble at a lively simmer until the pasta is nearly done, then add the olives, capers, and parsley. Taste for seasoning, and when the pasta’s ready, toss everything together.

Do serve a good, crusty bread with this, and something to drink that will stand up to the sauce — a non-wimpy beer or a full-bodied red wine are both good choices. A nice accompaniment is a hearty green salad, and maybe a chunk of good Parmigiano-Reggiano.

If you consider the ingredients for this dish to be pantry staples (and you should) you can whip this up pretty much any time on the spur of the  moment. The recipe scales well too, in case you have unexpected guests. The sauce by itself is delicious on other things — sometimes when I have a small amount left over, I spoon a bit on top of a piece of grilled tuna or swordfish. Quite spectacular. It would also do nicely on a serving of polenta. This is a great year-round dish — hearty enough for winter, quick enough for a warm summer night. It’s almost like the perfect dish!

Lettuce: We’ve eaten it all. I’ve cut the remaining plant stalks down to the ground. If current activity is any indication, we may well get a second harvest in early fall!

Zucchini: We ate those two perfect ones, and there are a few more growing on the plant, but they’re not looking well. I’m not sure if it’s the weather or something else that’s bothering them. The plant seems otherwise healthy, so a little research is likely called for.

Tomatoes: The plants are laden. The tomatoes are all bright green. Please don’t let them all ripen on the same day.

Eggplant: Blossoms, but nothing resembling eggplant just yet. I’m not sure what to expect.

Peppers: Lots of blossoms — we’ll have enough jalapenos for every Mexican restaurant in town if they all turn into peppers. The regular cooking peppers have blossoms too, but again, nothing resembling anything edible, and the timetable is unknown.

There sure is a lot of guesswork in gardening.

In the interest of getting dinner on the table quickly mid-week, I’ve developed a repertoire of dishes that I can throw together in about 30 minutes. Not surprisingly, many of them involve pasta paired with a simple sauce that can be thrown together and cooked (or not) while you’re waiting for the water to come to a boil. This is one such dish, and it depends on your having some pantry staples on hand and a little bit of seafood hiding in your freezer.

I’m in the habit of buying those giant bags (2 lb. I think) of frozen shrimp when they go on sale at the supermarket. I don’t get the cooked ones, I get the uncooked. You can thaw them out in minutes by running them under cold water, and they’re really good to use in dishes where the shrimp is a component. They’re not what I’d buy to make baked stuffed shrimp, for example, but for shrimp and rice, or paella, or any kind of pasta dish, they’re absolutely great. Last night I had the remainder of a bag of very large ones that I had used for another purpose — there were seven shrimp left, and they were pretty big. So I made this, which we really like:

Shrimp Fra Diavolo

• Linguini or similar type of pasta (1/2 lb. to 1 lb. depending on appetite and/or number of people at table)
• 28-oz. can diced tomatoes
• 2 tbs olive oil
• 2 or 3 cloves of minced garlic (or to taste)
• Salt and pepper
• Crushed red pepper flakes
• Fresh parsley
• 3/4 - 1 lb. shrimp ( or scallops — or you can use shellfish, in which case you’ll want a bit more by weight, or you can use a combination)

Put the water on to boil and cook your pasta al dente. While that’s happening, make your sauce. I like to do this sauce in a skillet as opposed to a sauce pan because the sauce doesn’t cook for long and it cooks a bit more thoroughly this way.

Heat the olive oil over medium heat, and then add the garlic. Don’t brown the garlic — as soon as it starts to become fragrant, add the tomatoes (with their juice — don’t drain them). Season to taste with salt and pepper, and add crushed red pepper to taste. The whole point of fra diavolo is spiciness, but be judicious if you have timid taste buds or haven’t used red pepper before. Simmer the sauce at a lively bubble — it’s not going to cook for long, but you do want it to thicken a bit while the pasta cooks.

About five minutes before your pasta is ready, add a handful of chopped parsley, and then add the seafood to the sauce and simmer until just cooked — if you’re using shrimp or scallops, cook them until opaque (or pink in the case of shrimp); if you’re using shellfish, cover the pan and cook until the shells open.

Drain the pasta, toss with some of the sauce, and arrange on plates topped with seafood.

As always, my favorite recipes are flexible. This will serve two to four people depending on how much pasta and seafood you use. You can always add more tomatoes too. It’s good enough to serve guests, and it’s really quick. Bread is a good accompaniment, and a green salad.

I was in the mood for chili this week. Since the house is cool now (AC all fixed, thank you very much), we don’t need to eat salads and sandwiches every night. Every now and then I can cook the sort of thing you don’t necessarily want to eat when it’s hot and steamy out. There were three avocados on the counter that had ripened to perfection (really) and we stopped at Jalapeno Heaven on the way home to get a bag of their excellent chips. My guacamole is simplicity itself: three ripe avocados, one (or two) cloves of pressed garlic, the juice of one lemon. Mash avocados with a fork, add in the garlic and the lemon juice, mix well. That’s it, truly. It’s the best.

My friend Greg taught me how to make real chili a long time ago — the kind with chunks of meat instead of ground beef. He grew up on the west coast and believed that real chili contained little more than chunks of beef and fresh chili peppers. Then you simmered it until the meat was ready to melt in your mouth. We’d experiment with that recipe all the time — add some tomatoes, add some beer. It never did have chili powder in it though. And it never had beans. Sometimes it was almost too spicy to eat, in which case we’d just drink the margaritas or beer that always accompanied such feasting. The problem with this type of chili is that you need a long afternoon in which to cook it as it takes several hours to simmer it to just-rightness.

What I like about this chili recipe is that it’s really quick, and it’s made from things you’ll usually have in the pantry anyway. If you don’t have (or don’t want) chips, you can always make a pan of cornbread to go with.

Weeknight Chili

• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 tbs vegetable oil
• 1 lb ground beef
• 28-oz can crushed tomatoes
• 1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
• chili powder
• cumin
• salt and pepper

Heat the oil over medium heat and cook the onion until soft. Turn the heat up a bit, add the ground beef, and break it up with a wooden spoon, cooking until it’s no longer pink. Season with salt and pepper. Add chili powder and cumin, stir, and cook for a couple more minutes. Add the tomatoes and the beans, and simmer for at least 20-30 minutes, longer if you’d like. Serve accompanied by chips or cornbread. Also good — guacamole, sour cream, grated cheddar or jack cheese, salsa.

You’ll notice I didn’t specify an amount for the chili powder or cumin. I’ve seen recipes for chili that call for a scant tablespoon or two of chili powder. I’m not sure what the point of a tablespoon is — I rarely use less than 1/4 of a cup. In any case, the point is that all chili powders are different (I like Penzey’s medium hot) and everyone’s palate is different. So use as much chili powder as you like. I usually keep the cumin to a teaspoon or so since it’s pretty pungent and there’s likely some in the chili powder anyway.

Similarly, use whatever kind of beans you like. Sometimes when I double this recipe, I use two different kinds of beans, but I tend to like black beans better than kidney beans, so that’s what I usually use. I’ve been known to use cannellini beans, too.

Cold beer washes it all down nicely.

I’ve been quiet for the last few days, partly because I’ve not been feeling well, and partly because I’ve been alternately busy and resting. In any case, the garden continues to grow and change and evolve daily.

Our early crop of tomatoes have been beset by what appears to be blossom-end rot, likely caused by either a lack of calcium and/or too much damp weather. We talked to the “veggie guy” at Van Wilgen’s (I like going to a garden center that has a dedicated “veggie guy”), and there doesn’t seem to be much to do at this point other than get rid of the bad fruit and be proactive next year. Which basically means bringing a soil sample to the Agricultural Station to be analyzed and then adding lime before planting to achieve the proper pH levels. In the meantime, we’re just going to hope that the problem will be somewhat self-limiting. The plants are heavy with fruit, all of them, and we’re just waiting for a couple to ripen.

There are a few rotting zucchini on the vine — I’m not surprised, since the ones we lost seem to be lying on the ground, which has been very wet. We’ve been inundated again — lots of rain over the last several days, and the ground is almost always damp, and when the days are cloudy, nothing really has a chance to dry out for a bit.

We’re hoping the peppers will start producing soon. There are lots of blossoms forming on all the pepper plants, and a couple are forming on the eggplant as well. We’ve nearly harvested all the lettuce, and the cut-down plants are beginning to form new leaves. I’m guessing that we’ll be going on to a second lettuce harvest, perhaps into early fall (it likes cool weather).

We’ve learned a few things this summer about prep work (we didn’t do enough) and weather (in spite of one’s best efforts, it’s ultimately the boss).

A couple of weeks ago, Jim decided we should expand our agricultural operation by growing more herbs next year, but not in pots. We’re going to put a four-by-four raised bed — or perhaps a four-by-eight if we think we can fill it with enough stuff — behind the garage and put it not just culinary herbs, but some things that will be good for soapmaking (like lavender). I’ve been meaning to get the soapmaking operation underway again and this might give me a good reason to start.

So here’s what I learned: I have three or four romaine lettuce plants that have been completely harvested, stalks cut almost down to the ground. They are growing new leaves. I have no idea if there’s sufficient time left in their growing season for them to produce more edible crops, but I learned that they’ll re-shoot once they’ve been cut down. So there’s one lesson. The second thing: I took a couple of marigold stems in when I replanted to marigolds we bought for companion plants in the vegetable garden. They had basically broken off the plant when I unpotted it, but they had blooms, so I brought them inside and stuck them in a glass of water. They have since made roots. I didn’t know a plant would do this in my house. Usually they just come in and die. I’m going to throw all caution to the winds and put it in a pot of soil and see what happens.

We’re also wondering what we can plant late in August that will be ready for harvest in mid- to late-autumn. Kale and broccoli seem to be pretty high on the list of possibilities, along with root vegetables. A little more research is in order, but we might see if we can prolong our growing season a bit.

I’ve written before about all the romaine lettuce we’ve been eating (and continue to eat). It’s delicious lettuce, with beautiful, unblemished leaves and a gorgeous spring green color. We’ve enjoyed salads almost every night, and last night I made a good grilled chicken Caesar with a spectacular homemade dressing. But what we were really excited about was the side dish.

Last evening when we came home from work, we harvested our first two zucchini! I can’t even begin to describe how exciting it was. We knew a day or so beforehand that Monday would be the day — one zucchini was certainly ready to be picked, and its cousin on the vine looked to be growing quickly. Several days of very warm weather and sunshine (a real change from what we’ve been experiencing so far) really accelerated everything in the garden this week, and sure enough, by the time we got home from work, we had two zucchini ready for picking.

We discussed how best to prepare them — I think we really wanted to experience them fairly simply just to see if they tasted different from store bought — so we settled on lightly steaming them and adding a bit of butter and a sprinkle of salt and freshly ground pepper. They were sublime. I steamed them for a scant three minutes so they still had a bit of crunch left to them, and wow — they were delicious.

I had no idea a vegetable garden could be this satisfying — as I looked at my very green dinner plate last night and realized we grew most of what was on the dish, I felt a little sense of pride and accomplishment.

In the meantime, more garden plans are afoot.

Life has conspired to keep me from writing much this week, but given that it’s too hot to do much else today [insert pathetic whine about broken AC here], I’m going to make up for lost time. Just a little bit about what we ate this week:

1. Lunches consisted of a very nice chicken salad — mostly poached chicken, a bit of sliced celery, and some mayonnaise and homemade pesto. I’m really looking forward to my basil plant getting on the ball so I can use my own for a change. I served the salad on a bed of arugula and surrounded it with some nice plum tomatoes, sliced in half lengthwise.

2. Made my first turkey burgers this week. They were good, but I learned that ground turkey by itself is fairly bland and depends largely on what you cook it with for flavor. I added some lightly cooked chopped onion to the burgers, along with a handful of chopped parsley. I cooked them on the grill and served them on buns, layered with arugula, sliced tomatoes, and topped with a very tasty chipotle mayonnaise that I made by mixing a bit of mayo with some finely chopped chipotle in adobo. Yum.

3. A really good potato salad made its way to the table Thursday night to accompany some grilled swordfish. I basically made an uncooked version of my fave puttanesca sauce and mixed it with potatoes. More on this later, as I think I’ll post the recipe.

4. There’s much news from the garden, and I’ll post some pics in a bit.

There. I haven’t actually fallen off the earth, I’ve just been busy. And tired.

Okay, we noticed that some of the leaves on the zucchini plant are acquiring a coating of what looks like white powder. After doing a bit of research last night on teh interwebz, I determined that we are suffering from powdery mildew, which is apparently something that thrives on wet, cool weather. And if we could characterize this season thus far, it would be wet and cool. Very wet indeed.

So now that we know what we’ve got, the next step was to figure out how to deal. The answer to this question was surprising. Milk. Diluted 1 part milk to 9 parts water (or 5 parts water, depending on which website you choose to believe), and sprayed directly on the leaves, preferably in the early evening so that it doesn’t evaporate off the plant too quickly. This sounds like some kind of plant voodoo to me, but of course I’m going to give it a shot. There are fungicides on the market, but since the goal is to keep things as organic as possible, we’ll start with the milk.

I’m also going to start keeping a garden journal so that we can keep track of our successes and failures this year.

We tried a noble experiment last week that apparently sounded better on paper than it worked in the execution. Our tomato plants are growing like… well, I guess like tomato plants. They’re huge. Freaking huge. And they’re getting heavy. So Jim rigged up a thing that went across the top of the garden bed, and we figured it made sense to tie the tomatoes up rather than stake them. Well, Jim noticed yesterday morning that the string had managed to cut right through a branch, so it was off to Van Wilgen’s to get more (taller) stakes. I spent a good deal of time last evening re-tying the plants.

While I was working out there, I did notice that a couple of tomatoes do look as though critters (the winged or crawling kind, since four-footers are fenced out) are snacking. It’s time for more Captain Jack’s Deadbug, which I’ll spray this evening after work. I did notice a beetle on one of the plants, and beetles, from what I gather, are not good garden visitors.

The most exciting thing yesterday was the appearance of our first zucchini. It’s not yet the size of my pinky finger, but it looks perfect. This, too, will hopefully live to adulthood and not end up as dinner for some uninvited guest. We are almost certain that we can see tiny baby peppers forming on some of the pepper plants (how many habaneros can we eat?), we’ve been eating Romaine lettuce every single night, and the eggplant is starting to look serious about its business. The potted herbs are mostly healthy — even the basil looks better than it did — and on Thursday I sprinkled some rosemary and some lemon thyme on the potatoes I roasted.

Wish us luck in the bug wars.