A fairly light weekend of cooking for me, all things considered. I spent my time mainly playing around with CSA produce in odd and less odd ways.

First thing I did was reduce a small watermelon down to two and a half inches of thick liquid in a squeeze bottle. The watermelons from the CSA are really good, but they're seedier than a porn shoot at Mos Eisley. So if you try to eat one plain, you'll be spitting seed more than... well, a porn shoot at Mos Eisley.

It's August, which means it's time for a nice, summery dish. You know, like beef stroganoff.

Yeah, I know. This summer's been way too hot for stroganoff. I myself haven't felt like stroganoff for months. But if you go that long without stroganoff, the thought of just one quick stroganoff builds until you give in.

In case you were wondering, the light posting this week has been a direct result of my spending the past four days falling back on my repertoire of basic dishes - all of which I've already covered here in one form or another in the past year.

That's the nice thing about building up a nice assortment of standbys. If your pantry is set up and your CSA cooperates, you can spend the better part of a week essentially cooking in your sleep. Which is awesome when you find yourself damn near asleep at dinnertime for most of a week.

This isn't actually that interesting a meal, but the post is historic nonetheless, from a nerd standpoint. Discounting the taking of the photo for obvious reasons, this post is 100% iPad. No intermediary tech at all.

So as I mentioned, I had time to spare, a fridge full of stuff, and three hours of prep time.

Again, I knew I wanted to use cucumbers, and that's where the cucumber-tomato soup came into play.

This dish from last weekend was inspired by a comment from Nicole - basically sauteeing a bunch of fresh green vegetables from the farm box and tossing them with some pasta.

So I watched the first episode of Michael Symon's "Cook Like An Iron Chef" finally, and it was a very good show. Highly recommended. It's on The Cooking Channel, so it's just Michael Symon cooking.

I think farmed salmon was the first food that a change in labeling made me stop eating. Once they started having to label it "color added", I couldn't buy it. Even though I eat things full of dyes and artificial colors on a regular basis.