Tomatoes!

My vegetable garden has produced a fair amount of veggies, so far -- tomatoes, peppers, green beans, cucumbers, eggplants, and squash. The corn is coming along nicely, as are the canteloupes, but they're not ready to pick.

It's green bean and tomato season. Good thing I love green beans, because I can pick a pint of Kentucky Wonder pole beans every morning, and eat them every night without getting sick of them.

The yellow banana peppers are nice (perhaps a little milder than bell peppers, although similar in taste), but honestly, I prefer the cayennes. Mince one of those, and toss it into dinner, seeds, pith and all, and it's got just the right amount of mouth-numbing heat, without killing the taste of the rest of the food.

We have seven different varieties of tomatoes: cherry, Big Boy, some sort of yellow one that's proving to be really prolific, Bush Early Girl, Bush Goliath, Mr. Stripey (an heirloom), and something that was labeled as Roma, but obviously isn't, given the size and shape of the fruit it produces.

We have a half dozen full-sized tomatoes waiting to be eaten, but tonight's dinner features a good pint's worth of cherry tomatoes from my garden, simply sauteed in 1.5 Tbs. of olive oil, with nothing more than chopped fresh oregano and basil, also from my garden, plus a couple of cloves of minced garlic, salt, and freshly ground Tellicherry pepper. My whole house smells phenomenal.

It'll only be a side dish, but during the past couple of weeks, dinner has consisted of mostly two or three vegetarian side dishes. Neither of us are vegetarians, but we can go for a few days without eating animal flesh when the veggies taste this good!