Greek Salad

I've been going heavy on the Greek-ish salad this week. I say "Greek-ish" because I don't really know how authentic these recipes are, but they are good.

Part of the reason is that it is summer.  We're getting the right ingredients from the CSA and the garden.

I cooked up a big pot of chickpeas in the pressure cooker last weekend, then made myself a little salad with cucumber, tomatoes, peppers, goat cheese, and kalamatas.

Then yesterday, I made a  HUGE salad.  We headed to the annual Greek Festival for lunch (gyros! spanakopita!)  Turns out my kid loves gyros too.  We chowed.  The canned lemonade was overpriced.  Live and learn, I should have packed water.  Man, with a baby you end up packing a ton of stuff.  And on the way back to the car, we found a kid on his front stoop selling lemonade and water, way cheaper than at the festival. 

I skipped the Greek salad at the festival (4 gyros were $28 and the lemonade/spanakopita were $16, I was feeling poor).  I was pretty impressed with my 6 year old.  He really wanted to play on the jumpers.  They aren't free at these festivals (like they are at birthday parties).  When he realized that they were $4 for 5 minutes, he decided to go play in the playground instead.  That gives me some ideas for August.  I will be keeping him home in August.  My MIL will be here for 2 weeks, but my spouse will be gone for one of those weeks.  This particular park also has a wading pool (18") for the kids that I think he will like.  I am looking for other things to do during the month.

Sorry about the digression there.  Anyway, I had three tiny tomatoes from last year's tomato plants.  (I think I'm not going to get any from this year's.)  I had peppers, cucumbers, avocado, feta, and kalamatas.  And yummy leafy greens.

So I googled "Greek Salad Dressing recipes" and found THIS ONE.  I wanted one with lemon juice.  This was very good.  I made it in the blender.

Other than this, there's been not a huge amount of cooking.  I made pasta with marinara and chickpeas this week, and another good friend brought over dinner (pasta with sausage).  We've been eating leftovers and salad mostly.  I'm trying to plan for the time when my MIL is here, but it's going to be rough.  Little baby boy here is fussy from 9 pm to midnight, and that's not my calmest, best time.  When my hubby is gone, I'm going to have a hard time.  We did just try out the pacifier yesterday for the first time, and he took it for a few minutes.  I wanted to wait another week until he was 4 weeks old, but the crying was getting to us.

I did make another batch of banana muffins (and now I only have TWO frozen bananas in the freezer!) and another batch of green tomato relish (ended up with 5 pints this time) because we got green tomatoes from the CSA.