Food, glorious food.

I love, love, love this time of year. The seasonal produce is kicking into high gear. I'm faced with the daily dilemma of just how many tomato sandwiches I'm going to eat in a day- my all time favorite summer food.

I've been winging it more often with meals than follow an actual recipe, using what we have on-hand and making it up as I go. I've created some interesting combos: egg, corn & tomato breakfast burritos, kitchen sink veggie/chicken tacos (literally any vegetable that as in the fridge plus a little chicken), and some tzatiki-ish dip.

I'm also testing out new recipes to use up our morning bounty. And then there's the nights when it's just too dang hot to put on our Barbie Oven (the smallest. oven. ever.) and I go all "raw food" on the family proclaiming dinner to be edamame, cheese and fruit smoothies.

During my Family Command Center project, I also organized my recipes a bit better so planning meals (again) will be a snap. I actually have two Recipe Binders, well three. tee hee. One for recipes I use regularly or will be using in my meal plan and one to collect recipes- holiday items, stuff to try, family recipes, etc. And one other cool binder my friend Nikki made made with her personal family recipes. I loooove binders and hole punchers/page protectors for holding my recipes Plus it gives me another reason for office supplies!! Hooray! But seriously, it makes it so easy find my recipes. I hate those little cards, they just don't do it for me. I also have a delicious account to tag and organize recipes online. I use delicious to bookmark/tag just about everything I organize online. It's a social bookmarking site, so you can actually search for terms that other users have bookmarked/tagged too. It's super easy if you download their toolbar buttons.

I have lots of favorite food websites I check out, but these are the ones I go to the most:
tastespotting - Best food porn around
101 cookbooks - Things I typcially don't try, but love to think I will.
simply recipes - I've done quite of few of hers. Lots of Hispanic recipes too!
green lite bites - great healthy, recipes.
all recipes - My go-to site. Community based with reviews and pictures.

But honestly, when I'm looking for a new recipe for say, zucchini, I would just google "recipe zucchini" and see what pops up. Zucchini Patties was the latest. Something I wouldn't have created or searched for. But it was great! And the entire family loved them. We ate them with eggplant parmesan and fresh sweet corn. This turned out to be one of my favorite locavore meals and vegetarian to boot (something I try to do once a week.) I stopped by the produce farm up the road to got our usual eggs, plus eggplant and corn, we had zucchini already- viola!

I've had my fair share on not-so-great meals, but if you don't try you won't get any better or try something totally different, like zucchini patties. So jump out of your food comfort zone. What are you going to try with your yummy summer produce? Please post a new/favorite recipe in the comments that uses great summer veggies or fruits! I know, I know, it's scarey posting something in the ominous comments box. But I have faith, you can do it. You don't even have to leave your name, I'm making it easy for you!