This will be a short post, since the key two recipes involved are already on the Internet.

Yesterday, I was in the mood for meltingly-tender, slowly-cooked (but not in a slow cooker) vegetables, so I prepared two terrific dishes from recipes I came across recently.  One was Roy Finamore’s Broccoli Cooked Forever recipe on Food52.com.  The other was an Eggplant and Olive Stew from a food blog I follow, with the charming name of Easy Peasy Organic.  I had a small quantity of each last night and was more than delighted, so tonight we built dinner around them, using the Eggplant-Olive Stew served on organic brown rice as the main dish, with a large side plate containing these vegetables:

• haricots verts picked from my raised bed garden this afternoon
• leftover corn
• “broccoli cooked forever”
• boiled and cooled red and golden beets from the farmers market
• chopped cucumber, lightly marinated in rice wine vinegar, topped with sesame seeds
• plus a small piece of my olive-walnut whole grain bread to recover every milliliter of the unctuous olive oil seeping from the slow-cooked broccoli

Who knew that vegetables could be so satisfying?

The final component was wine, of course.  This was the third night with the 2011 Harrington Charbono.  I had kept it in the refrigerator, and the cooler wine was perfect with the dinner, so much so that I called Michael at Thirst Wine and asked him to save the remaining 6 bottles in the store for me.