Grilled Cheese on the Grille

Last night we had one of our favorite dinners: grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. Okay, that sounds a bit boring, but these are great. Evelin noticed in an old issue of Kitchen Gardner an article about grilling vegetables. One of the recipes as for these pseudo-kabob sandwiches with tomato, cheese and red onion skewered together, painted with olive oil and grilled over indirect heat. The only problem is that some of the cheese ends up leaking out as it melts.

They are fantastic. We used some dilled havarti and this chewy bread laced with garlic and pepper. I stopped in Brookland on the way home and caught the tail end of the farmer's market so that I could pick up tomatoes just this side of over ripe ... add a glass of seyval blanc (Loew Vineyards in Mt. Airy, Maryland) and a touch of a cool front to take the heat off and to dry things out before Tropical Storm Bill arrives and it made for a nice evening on the patio.

This morning was quite cloudy and Bill should be arriving by midday. Hopefully, the sun will be back out tomorrow (although the forecasts look a bit iffy until the middle of next week) so that the garden can get a bit of a boost. The gloom of April and May has left things in sad shape. This past week and a half, the tomatoes and peppers have really shot up, the zucchini and squash are doing well and the cucumbers have tons of flowers, but nothing is even close to harvestable yet. And the carrots, oh the carrots. That's the raised bed that was filled with the Home Depot top soil that seems to have almost zero organic content (the others got nice Canadian soil from Behnke) and it drains terribly. So, with all the rain in May, the seedlings seemed to be being grown hydroponicly. Now, about two-thirds are looking decent to good, but I have a feeling it's going to be a while before we'll get to eat any of them. Oh, and the raspberries seem to be growing well and the birds haven't discovered the blueberries yet, so we may get a handful or two of fruit from them this year!

On a totally different front, I listed to the Friðarey album I picked up at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on Friday. I cut out of work a half hour early to catch Fiddler's Bid, and they were awesome. Friðarey was an impulse buy because no Fiddler's Bid albums were available. It's mostly vocal folk music from the Fair Isle in Shetland. The first three tracks weren't quite to my liking, but the rest of it was a bit more interesting. One or two seem to be in an odd dialect of Scots; it's probably wishful thinking to hope there's a touch of Norn left in it, but who knows ...