A late-summer bounty of tomatoes and black figs

Black figs and tomatoes from our garden with Costco Wholesale's Earthbound Farm Organic Spring Mix and imported, aged Pecorino Romano sheep's milk cheese.

By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

We've managed to rescue a fair number of tomatoes and black figs from the critters that inhabit our garden.

We're having better luck with them than with the peaches from a tree that is very popular with squirrels, and they don't even wait until the fruit grows.

The tomatoes are great in salads and frittatas or paired with a good cheese and dressed simply in extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

We cut back the black fig tree every fall, but it comes back stronger every year.

Birds get to many -- but not all -- of the figs before we do.

Sweet and savory.

Transforming the daily salad with organic baby spinach.

I love figs in any form -- dried from Costco Wholesale, in Spanish fig cakes with nuts from Fairway Market and Whole Foods Market, both in Paramus; and in a fig preserve with anise from Fattal's Bakery in Paterson.

Related article

• Trader Joe's isn't as all-American as it seems

Nature's bounty makes me smile

From Costco Wholesale, fresh wild salmon from the Copper River in Alaska (2013).

Say cheese.

As in the goat, cheddar, reduced-fat Swiss, buffalo mozzarella and the other wonderful cheeses I've been eating since I gave up bread and pizza a year ago, and lost 30 pounds.

I went from having a breakfast sandwich stuffed with smoked wild salmon, greens, tomato and whatever else would fit to a breakfast salad topped with canned sardines or salmon, a fresh wild salmon fillet or smoked fish and cheese.

This week, I finished off the fresh Copper River sockeye salmon I picked up at Costco in Hackensack.

I baked it quickly with fresh lemon juice, Aleppo red pepper and a mint-and-cilantro pesto without garlic or cheese.

I made a bed of organic spring mix or red-leaf lettuce, layered on thick slices of beefsteak tomato, crumbled some goat cheese and topped it with a wild salmon fillet right from the fridge. 

The dressing was extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, or oil and fresh lemon juice.

My own mint tea

I wash it down with mint iced tea -- using ShopRite pure instant tea mix, lemon juice and mint from the garden.

This year, we're growing regular and heirloom tomatoes, sweet green pepper, cucumber and red-leaf lettuce. A few year ago, we planted peach and fig trees.

Squirrels, peaches

We have yet to eat any peaches from the tree, though there are hopeful signs this year -- in other words, the squirrels have left most of the small, green orbs that have appeared in recent weeks.

Of course, my wife put mothballs in women's hosiery on the fence the squirrels use as a launching pad, and I sprayed the growing peaches with red pepper, soap and water. 

Fresh wild flounder

I went to Costco today to get my third fillet of fresh wild salmon, but had to settle for wild-caught flounder at $7.99 a pound. 

I'll bread the thin, Canadian fillets in chili spices and bake them (done in under 15 minutes).

We ate five seedless watermelons since May 8 ($7.99 to $3.99), so we've switched to red grapes, blackberries, mangoes and bananas.

I make melted-cheese sandwiches for my 14-year-0ld son, using Cabot sliced cheddar and either Syrian pocket bread or 100% whole-grain bread from Costco.

But the closest I can come for myself is a slice of beefsteak tomato topped with olive oil, Italian seasoning, pepper-jack cheese and pesto, and baked in the oven. It's not bad.

The tomatoes are coming!

Image via Wikipedia

We haven't had much luck growing produce in our back yard since we moved to Hackensack in August 2007.


We planted peach and black-fig trees a couple of years ago. We got some figs, but squirrels ate all the peaches before they ripened. In the spring, I put a net over the peach tree, and now the unripened peaches are falling off.

We bought a greenhouse from Costco last year, but we had trouble assembling it, and then a nor'easter blew it down. (Costco gave us a full refund after I returned all the pieces to the Hackensack store.)


But we're doing much better with cucumbers -- long, curly ones a foot or more long -- and now tomatoes. I've been enjoying three or four dozen small, ripe cherry tomatoes this week, dusted with za'atar thyme mixture for breakfast, added to leftover Thai fried rice from Wondee's in Hackensack and cut up to supplement bottled pasta sauce for tonight's dinner.

Shopping the sale at Fairway Market

I drove to Fairway Market in the Fashion Center in Paramus in today's heat and humidity, lured by wild-caught jumbo shrimp at $5.99 a pound and fresh mozzarella at $3.99 a pound. But I brought home other good buys: a big bunch of peppery arugula for 99 cents and a cantaloupe for $1.50. Two heads of romaine lettuce were $1.49.

The white shrimp and arugula will pair well in a pasta dish. And I bought some tomatoes -- Jersey beefsteak and on the vine from Canada, both 99 cents a pound -- to go with the fresh, salted cheese, basil from my garden and extra-virgin olive oil as a light dinner with toasted Balthazar Bakery baguette from the freezer.

Other sale items include rotisserie chicken at $4.99, but not the drug-free or organic chicken; and USDA prime boneless sirloin steak at $3.99, labeled "the good stuff," but that boast isn't backed up with any information on how the animal was raised.

I also took a look at the olive selection in Paramus. A half-dozen signs urge customers to:

PLEASE BE CIVILIZED

NO HANDS IN THE OLIVES

VIOLATORS WILL BE EMBARRASSED

I guess New York-based Fairway Market doesn't think much of our manners here in New Jersey. Previously, I wrote Fairway olives sold for $6.99 a pound, but today, the Paramus olives were labeled $5.99 a pound. I'll continue to get my olives at Fattal's in Paterson, where most cost $2.99 a pound.

Fairway's sale prices are good through Aug. 21.