I’ve been meaning to tell you about this bean and veggie salad for a couple weeks now. A friend posted a link to the recipe on Facebook with the words, “PSA for all the gardeners who have more cucumbers than they know what to do with: This is delicious!”

I didn’t have too many cucumbers—I didn’t plant any this year—but I did have all the ingredients on hand, including the tail end of an ancient jar of orange marmalade.

It’s a super simple salad to pull together: tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, black beans, onions, and then the dressing. Actually, it’s less of a salad and more of a southwestern relish. The second time I made it, I doubled the recipe and made piles of cheesy tortilla chips to serve alongside. That’s all we had for supper that night, not counting the ice cream cones we had later (I think).

Black Bean and Veggie Salad
Adapted from Allrecipes.

Suggestions: increase the heat with a minced jalapeno, stir in some chunks of grilled chicken or sausage, add cooked quinoa, feta, fresh cilantro or parsley, green peppers, etc. Leftovers make great lunches, so start with a double batch.

Tip: The juicier the tomato, the soupier the salad. If you want the salad to have less liquid, de-seed your tomatoes or use paste tomatoes. (Or—this just occurred to me—what if you added some salsa and omitted the tomatoes all together? Just an idea…)

1 15-ounce can black beans, drained
1 cucumber, quartered lengthwise and sliced
1 cup each chopped tomatoes and corn
1/3 cup red (or regular) onion, minced
3 tablespoons olive oil
4 teaspoons orange marmalade
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon honey
½ ample teaspoon ground cumin
dash of hot pepper flakes
salt and black pepper

Mix together the beans and veggies. In a small bowl, whisk together the olive oil, marmalade, lemon juice, honey, cumin, salt, pepper, and hot pepper. Pour the dressing over the veggies and toss well. Taste, adding more salt and pepper as needed.

This same time, years previous: nectarine bourbon pie, in defense of battered kitchen utensils, the quotidian (9.16.13), making my children jump, goodbye summer, hello fall, a new day dawning, splat, and Greek pasta salad.

Last weekend was another food-and-people packed event. I mean, not an event event, just a regular life event. It all started when I invited a couple friends over for dinner on Friday night. Then my girlfriend asked if I’d keep her three kids for the weekend. Then, when my younger daughter learned that two of her friends would be here for the entire weekend, she said, “That’s perfect, Mom! I can invite a couple other friends over and we can do a movie night! Please? Please?!”

By then, I was like, Sure, whatever. It’s not like I’ll be doing anything else. Bring it on.

I decided to make pizzas for supper. Four pizzas should be enough, I thought. My husband had a different opinion.

“Four? Four?? Are you out of your mind? You make three for just our family. How many people is this for again?”

“Thirteen. No, wait. Fourteen. I think?”

“Nope. Four pizzas is not enough, Jen. Definitely not enough.”

I ended up making six large pizzas. And before the meal even started, the kids whizzed through the chopped carrots, celery, and black olives that I’d set on the table, so when the official company arrived, I was in the middle of fixing up Relish Tray Take Two.

It  also got decimated.

After supper, the adults moved out to the deck to eat ice cream cones, catch a breeze, and admire my mad plant-potting skills while the kids started setting up for their videos.

By  the time the adult company left, the kids were deep into their movies—the girls in the clubhouse, the little boys on the porch, and the big kids up in my older son’s room—and it was time to make six batches of popcorn, this is getting ridiculous. 

The next morning after my run, I made a quadruple batch of farmer boy pancakes, half with blueberries.

And as soon as that was done, I started on lunch: brown rice in the rice cooker (which makes awesome brown rice, by the way), grilled chicken, curried lentils, and steamed broccoli. In the afternoon I mixed up the wets and drys for Sunday morning’s sour cream and berry baked oatmeals (one with red raspberries and the other with blueberries), and we turned a bushel of ginger golds into sauce which meant I also had to make a gingerbread. I only made a single recipe. It was a rich cake and I thought the kids might turn up their noses what with all the fresh ginger and black pepper. But no. The cake was gone in five minutes. I stood at the table in the vacated kitchen, scraping the still-warm crumbs from the empty pan, shaking my head.

Supper time rolled around and I could actually feel my soul shrivel.

“I can’t do it,” I muttered. “I am physically incapable of cooking one more thing. We’re having cereal.”

Granola, Life cereal, bananas, and milk—from the kids’ reactions you’d a thunk I handed them the stars.

“We’ve never had cereal for supper!” the littlest boy chortled.

“Then something is wrong with your mama,” I snapped. “She needs her head checked.”

A couple days later when I was recounting the weekend’s cooking marathon to my friend, she laughed and said, “Yeah, my kids didn’t say a word about all that food. You know what they did talk about? The cereal for supper.”

Figures.

PS. I wasn’t cooking to impress the kids.

PPS. I enjoyed making all that food from scratch. It was cost effective, nutritious, and gratifying, shopping my shelves like that.

PPPS. The guest children went wild over everything I made. Including the curried lentils.

PPPPS. The friend said later that her children did talk about other food. Favorites mentioned: the basic homemade granola and the baked oatmeal.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (9.14.15), chile cobanero, curry ketchup and just-like-Heinz ketchup, whole wheat jammies, how to dry pears, lemon butter pasta with zucchini, coffee fix ice cream, and me and mine.

This same time, years previous: what writing a book is like, the good things that happen, 2012 garden stats and notes, blasted cake, the best parts, grilled salmon with lemon butter, and hot chocolate.