Quinoa Pasta

with a sauce of simmered fresh tomatoes, garlic, and basil. We had it with these funny little yellow and green summer squashes. They were so cute that I ate them even though they tasted like (the despised, the dreaded) zucchini. For dessert more brownies.

Potato Frittata

with tarragon and chives, and sauteed cabbage. For dessert, spectacular brownies: we used the "Cakey" recipe in the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, cutting the sugar in half, using white whole wheat flour, and adding a chopped-up dark chocolate bar. I ate two and could go right back and finish the pan.

Buffalo Burgers

with pesto; also wilted escarole, corn on the cob, bread, and tomatoes and carrots from the garden.

Whole Wheat Mash Bread

This is my first recipe from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. It is also my first use of a "mash" in bread baking: a mash is a gelatinized mass of flour that has been hydrated and kept warm for a few hours until various enzymatic activities have had time to do their work. The bread also uses a nice big bit of starter. Let me tell you something: this is a crazy good loaf of bread, and you would never guess it's entirely whole wheat (a good thing). The color balance is off in the top photo; it is much more golden than it appears here (as you can see in the bottom photo).

Happy Father's Day!

We celebrated with homemade English muffins. I found the recipe here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/handbook/whole-wheat-sourdough-english-muffins. The dough was very wet and (for me) kind of hard to work with, but it didn't matter. As usual, no matter how many things I did wrong, the end result was delicious for this starter-raised bread.

Egg Noodles

with pesto. Salads composed by the spouse, and as delicious as they look.

Field Peas and Corn

in a sort of ragout, with sauteed onions. Also potato salad and crispy kale.

Grilled Steak

with quinoa and crispy kale. The latter was delicious: leaves of kale tossed in olive oil, then crisped in a 500 degree oven for about 8 minutes.

Quinoa Pasta

with leftover roast chicken and diced up summer squash and tarragon. With steamed green beans. For dessert, many, many chocolate chip cookies, from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion. We were out of chocolate chips so I chopped up a bar of super-dark chocolate.

Zucchini Gratin

from Richard Olney. Delicious; we had it with corn, tomatoes, and salad. One of the nicest unintended consequences of my breadmaking is that I now leave my baking stone in the oven full time, which results in beautifully even heat distribution in everything I cook. Makes a huge difference.

Clapotis Four

I may never stop making this scarf pattern. I've made three winter versions in wool; here is my first summer version, in silk.

Linen T-Shirt

All ready for summer.

Roast Chicken

with tarragon. We had it with a salad and the pictured pain au levain, even better than the first batch.

Eggs

Fried eggs (Miss Sue's, so very flavorful) with brown rice and roasted vegetables (cauliflower, broccoli, carrots).

Pain Au Levain

In my opinion, the best bread yet. Stiff dough starter, nice beefy percentage of whole wheat and rye flours, and oven spring that resulted in beautifully cylindrical batards. I think I am persistently slashing too shallowly, but other than that I have no fault to find with this mouthwatering bread. We had it with friends; I made a Swiss chard quiche (pre-baked the crust this time, which made all the difference in the world), salad, and banana bread for dessert (all-purpose, whole wheat, and amaranth flours).

Cheese Omelette

with sauteed okra, corn on the cob, and bread and butter.

Long-Cooked Broccoli

over whole wheat spinach pasta, with salad. The broccoli recipe is from Alice Waters The Art of Simple Food, a book about which I have mixed feelings.

Grilled Hake

with green beans, salad, and sourdough bread.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Miche

A very, very good loaf of bread. This is the first one I've made that I would say is genuinely sour. It is tender and flavorful, but its real glory is its crust: deeply caramelized and delicious. It was also the occasion for a discovery. I had to use all of the starter I'd made for it, saving none to ferment the next batch. For fun I decided to mix a new starter in the old container, which had a few clinging shreds of starter in it, and lo: a whole new batch of starter, no problemo (and for that matter, problem solved). I'm learning that wild yeast is strong.

Quiche

with spinach, onions, and gruyere. I made the crust with the aptly named "Foolproof Pie Crust" recipe from Cook's Illustrated. Though I did in fact out-fool it: "I won't bother to pre-bake it" I thought. "It won't matter" I thought. Next time I'll pre-bake. We had it with salad and the pictured carrots, harvested by my spouse.

"Whole" Spelt Loaf

"Whole" is in quotation marks because in fact I ran out of spelt flour and had to top it up with whole wheat (maybe 20%). This is what my spelt starter did; as you can see, it had oven spring that, once again, made a mockery of my slashes. I think it's a beautiful loaf, and has a deep, complex, tangy flavor I like. Unfortunately, only I and one of the household toddlers like it, so it may not get made again for a while. Will have to find another use for spelt starter (fragrant library paste?)