Lunch on a day off

Wow. It has been more than a month since I last posted. While I certainly have been cooking during that time, I definitely have been slacking on all-local meals.

That's not to say I have not been using local ingredients. I've made roasted Japanese sweet potatoes (which I procured at the Crystal City farmers market) with miso-scallion butter. I've made sesame-garlic soba noodles with fried local eggs. I've made cannellini beans with local kale and garlic. But I didn't post about any of those, because I felt like they didn't really count.

As winter approaches, it is going to become even more difficult to make entire meals from local ingredients (especially since I did not try my hand at canning this summer like I had planned). So I plan to keep featuring local ingredients in my meals, but I'm going to give myself much more slack on using store-bought ingredients.

Which brings me to today's lunch. I have the day off from work, so I decided to take advantage of actually being able to cook at lunch. I had a bowl of local yellow cherry tomatoes slowly dying on my countertop, so I roasted them (halved lengthwise) with olive oil, salt, and pepper. When they were done (or rather, when I was hungry—about an hour), I added a bit more olive oil and some chopped chives (another farmers market purchase that needed to be used pronto). This became the topping for some homemade pasta from Radius, a great restaurant in Mt. Pleasant a couple of blocks from my apartment.

The results: delicious. I wish all weekday lunches could be like this.