What I Made for Dinner Last Night

It's been a busy week. As you might have guessed, the kids are out of school, and there's no summer school or camp until July 6. There's only so much time you can spend with a 9-year old and an autistic 15-year old until you start to empathize with animals that eat their young.

Yesterday the whole day was spent driving up to New York state to take my son for a school interview. My husband and I want to outplace our son to a residential program so that he can hopefully, finally learn to do things like dress himself and shower independently. The school seemed to love him, so if he gets accepted the next step is to hire a lawyer to fight with our local school district to accept the outplacement. Needless to say, they do not want to pay for our son to go to a school where he may actually learn something, so it's time to gird our loins for yet another battle with the Weston School District.

Wednesday, however, was a bit calmer, I ran a number of errands with the kids, including taking a run up to "Farmer John's." That's the name my kids and I gave to a local farm stand. The real name of the place is Holbrook Farm. I've been going there, however, since my son was three months old, so the owner, John Holbrook, has seen both my kids grow up from the time they were infants, and both kids call him "Farmer John." His wife, Lynn, is also ever present at the farm, but for some reason she's just "Lynn" and doesn't get a special designation.

I'm weeks away from seeing a tomato come out of my garden, but Farmer John was already selling them. He can't be bothered getting an organic certification. "Too much paperwork," he tells me, but his crops are probably more organic and more pesticide free then most of the ones labeled organic in the supermarket.

Wednesday I tossed up a meal of pasta with pancetta and Farmer John's Kale. It was delicious.

Last night I again made pasta . We're going out tonight, and tomorrow we're leaving on a short trip to Plymouth, MA so that I don't go totally insane until the kids are in summer school and camp. I realized that I better use up the tomatoes I got at Farmer John's, so I whipped up a concoction totally out of my head and that actually proved to be delicious.

I sliced up all the tomatoes I had (six big ones) into a large pyrex dish and added in two, peeled, sliced, yellow onions. I then chopped up three gloves of garlic and added it to the dish with a sprinkling of hot pepper. I drizzled olive oil, and balsamic vinegar in, sprinkled in some salt and pepper, mixed everything together and popped the dish into the oven at 425 degrees for 40 minutes. Then I rinsed out a can of white beans, mixed it in, and popped everything into the oven for another 10 minutes.

In the meantime I boiled the water and cooked the pasta. When the sauce was done baking, I tossed it with the pasta and mixed in a generous amount of fresh basil from the garden.

YUMMY!! I'll have to write out a more detailed recipe one of these days.