Difficulty Level Easy

I'm always writing about the benefits of buying your produce from the farmers' market. You know that the produce is local, and you have the opportunity to actually talk to the farmer and ask him about his farming practices. In my experience they are happy to chat, as long as you don't try to engage them in a long philosophical discussion when they have a long line up of people wanting to buy their produce.

Now that my husband and I are at our cottage until after Labour Day, I'm not making my weekly foray to the market. I just go one better. We buy our vegetables from a local lady who has an extremely large garden behind her modest home. She grows the Ontario vegetables that our grandmothers would have recognized, lettuce, carrots, beets, zucchini, cucumbers, onions, squash, tomatoes and pumpkins. There is nothing esoteric in her garden, but that's just fine with me.

If her sign is out at the bottom of her driveway it means you are welcome to come up for a chat and see what's ready for picking. My husband and I were a little worried because by mid-July her sign hadn't appeared and we feared that she wasn't well. It turns out that the cool, damp spring and summer has made her crop late this year. As we toured her garden she showed me her cucumber plants which have barely begun and her pumpkins which are seriously under-sized. We've had so much rain that she hasn't watered the garden once this year, but we haven't had the corresponding sunshine to get the necessary growth. However, she had beets and zucchini ready and we walked up and down the rows of her garden chatting while she picked the nicest vegetables for us to take. When you are shopping for produce, it doesn't get any fresher or better than that.

This is one of those dinners that I just put together out of the ingredients I had in my kitchen. I used thyme from my garden, but I could just as easily have used basil or oregano, or even some mint. I had a combination of green and yellow squash and it made for a very visually appealing dish. I didn't add any cheese because I didn't feel the sauce needed it, but feel free to add some. The amounts, as usual when doing my own recipes, are approximate.

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