Cookin' Up the Harvest a.k.a. Wednesday Food Porn

I'm not what you'd call a "foodie," even though I love food and both the eating and cooking thereof. I'm not into fancy or exotic, though I do enjoy them on occasion.  What I am into is the fine art of being a household chef: You see, to me, the true measure of a good cook is the ability to work with the foods available to create healthy meals the whole family will actually eat and, hopefully, do so with gusto.I pride myself in my ability to keep the family in nutritious home-made soup stock made purely from vegetable and meat scraps we would have otherwise thrown away or my ability to whip up meals of whatever vegetables just happen to need to be eaten ASAP.  These meals may not look pretty...they may not have the delicate balance of flavor and texture you'd find in a fancy restaurant...and, yes, they may be the same four or five veggies made several different ways with little variety in the dishes other than the spices...but they'll feed the whole family for the next several days and, by golly, our taste buds will love us when we're done!

Today was one of those days where I looked in the fridge and realized most of our fresh vegetables were about to go bad, we had a plethora of stock-making odds and ends filling our freezer, and we had just enough space in the fridge to fit a few Tupperware containers of meals...  Those were my cue: it was time to have a bit of creative fun in the kitchen today!

It all started with some kitchen-scrap vegetable stock:

 

the more variety in your kitchen scraps, the better the stock

Then came the curry-lentil soup with rutabega, potato, celery, and kale: 

I do love my chunky stews!

Followed by my first attempt at a Mediterranean Vegetable Tajine, made with the rest of the rutabaga, local green beans and summer squash (last of the season), onions, prunes, and olives:

TIP: to avoid overcooking the other veggies, make sure to cut those root vegetables small!

Finally, our fresh corn (TIP: corn stays so much longer in its husk that this corn has been in our fridge for 3 weeks and is just now at the point of absolutely having to be eaten) needed to be used, so I created a raw salad using it, the rest of the celery, more carrots, just a few herbs, and a light sprinkling of olive-oil dressing:

Herbs de Provence just sounds so romantic, doesn't it?

Update:  My first try of a tajine turned out to be too spicy for a seven-year-old...and that is why it's always important to have a few quick favorites around the kitchen for last-minute food emergencies.