Summer's Bounty

We're halfway through the summer Eat Local Challenge, so in abbreviated form let me comment on some of my pleasures of the season:

• A batch of "dilly beans" marinating in my fridge right now, made from string beans our backyard neighbor gave us from his garden, and dill from our own. I don't make enough to can these, but I follow Jane Brody's recipe for a batch big enough to enjoy as a side dish for several days.
  
• Dinner tonight: 1000 Hills Cattle local, grass-fed beef hamburgers on bakery buns with slices of the first ripe slicing tomato from our garden, plus sweet, buttery corn on the cob from Grism's stand on Water Street
• A dozen or so new Sun Gold cherry tomatoes ripen every day or so in the garden - extremely prolific, early to ripen, and utterly delicious
• Enough zucchini from my two plants over the past two or three weeks that we have made zucchini-cheese bake, zucchini muffins, chocolate zucchini cake and oven-roasted zucchini "fries" (melt-in-your-mouth wonderful)
  
• The ever-wonderful local tortilla chips (both yellow and blue corn varieties) from Whole Grain Milling Company in Welcome, Minn. A terrific addition to practically any occasion.
• A mind-bogglingly enormous cabbage from a recent farmers' market made a nice big batch of Asian coleslaw, and we've still got some cabbage left over
• Potato salad from local farmers' market potatoes
  
• Cucumbers from my colleague's garden, plus some more of my own. I eat them many ways, but one favorite way is to chop them up and put them on top of a quesadilla that's first topped with good salsa, either homemade or Salsa Lisa (made in Minneapolis)

Things I still look forward to this summer: ripe cantaloupe (there's plenty around; I just haven't bought any yet); enough big ripe tomatoes to pile up on my kitchen counter and make lavish tomato sandwiches and fresh salsa with lime and cilantro; perhaps a blueberry-picking outing to the lovely Rush River Produce at Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, overlooking Lake Pepin (their website says that their midseason Nelson crop has failed, but they expect good picking from the Elliots in late August).

What are you enjoying eating this summer?