sky rockets in flight - cucumber delight

summer comes and sometimes you are too hot to cook. but you are still hungry. other times you just are exhausted from your day and cooking is hard. again, you're still hungry. thank goodness, then, for cucumbers, summer friend to the famished. a cucumber salad really needs nothing besides tasty cold cucumbers to make happy campers out of those hard working, sweaty summer laborers. so turn up the vampire weekend and get ready to chop!



here I took one cucumber and sliced it thinly into circles and then halves. then I added some chopped basil that was on its last legs and some scallions that were in similar condition. tossed in a handful of garbanzo beans (chick peas, if you prefer) and then mixed it all up. finally, I poured a bit of annie's cucumber-yogurt dressing onto the salad, poured some white wine into my glass, and sat down to read about john cheever's drunken escapades.

pros: no cooking, five minute prep time, yummy dinner.
cons: my mouth now tastes like stale cigarettes. I don't know what that's about, but I'm willing to bet it's unrelated to the cucumbers.

penne with sweet pepper sauce and sweet italian sausages

This is another of my dad's old standbys. He actually used to make this at his restaurant. I made it more than a week ago, but I will try to remember the details.

To start off, bought some *sweet* italian sausages at the whole foods. Usually I get little ones - but these were twice the size! I put them in a frying pan with the heat on low. I turn them every 5 minutes or so. I later learned from Kristen that slicing them into quarters lengthwise cooks 'em faster and more evenly. gonna try that next time.

gina marie sliced a whole yellow onion and we also sliced (into long medium strips, not chopped) 2 red, 1 yellow, and 1 orange bell peppers. We added this along with a lot of chopped garlic into a big saute pan with some olive oils and put the heat on low.

once the peppers had softened I seasoned with some thyme and a little pepper. then I added half a can of low-sodium chicken broth and brought it just to a simmer and then turned the heat back to medium. I let that simmer until the broth had reduced a bit and added 1 can of diced tomatoes.

continued to let this all cook on medium low. towards the end I added half a stick of butter to the sauce. just let it melt and stir.



when my sauce was the consistency I wanted, I added some chopped fresh basil at the very end. The following pictures were to document my basil chopping method Stack up some leaves, roll them, then slice the roll-up:



Then I served it over whole wheat penne. (I made too much penne - one box would have cut it - also, generally I wouldn't use whole wheat for this -but it's better for you!) Also, served with parmesan.






Kristen made it awesome by bringing us her favorite bottle of french red. Excellent!




Vegan options: use vegetable broth, veggie sausages, no butter at the end