Summer Vegetable Succotash.

Geek-out. verb. (ge/ek/augh/t):  To freak out and get extremely excited about seemingly normal things, especially in situations the would not necessitate euphoria and excitement from ordinary folk.  Pertains to those things which may be considered weird and nerdy i.e. math and Cabbage Patch dolls.

As it turns out, moving into a house with a new kitchen and the opportunity to cook all the time creates the absolutely perfect environment for one such as myself to ?geek-out.?  Do you get excited when constructing Ikea furniture?  Really, those little dowels and the picture-book instructions don?t get you going?  Does the visual of paint chips make you want to exclaim and do a little dance?  Most importantly, do you only feel complacent once all your dry bulk ingredients such as flour, dark and light brown sugars, cornmeal, and white sugar?just to name a few?are safely stowed away in airtight mason jars?  Although this may be reminiscent of a Ciyalis commercial, ?yes? is the answer to the above questions.

I have had my fair share of geeking-out this past week.  The pinnacle of my geekdom perhaps however was the rainy-day farmer?s market and my ensuing vegetable photo shoot.  (Yes, I did borrow that nice little wooden basket from the farmer?s market just so that I could have a country-style and down-home prop.)  I like vegetable photo shoots.  They?re fun.

Almost, but not quite as fun, as the actual farmer?s market itself.  Talk about geeking-out.

After scoping out the various stands and deciding on which had the best late summer harvest to share, it was an heirloom pepper stand that won out as most-likely to cause a geek spasm.  Peppers not being high on my list of delicious things, those imperfect and slightly unattractive peppers really did me in for some unknown reason.  Poblanos, pimento?. little yellow ones, long green ones.  Black pepper.  (My knowledge of peppers starts with sweet and ends with pimento.  With Poblano in the middle.  Throw in an ?heirloom? and that?s about it.)

So excited was I with the prospect of summer succotash in my dinner forecast, that I geeked-out, but just a little bit.  In general, I find that it is a good rule at farmer?s markets to flirt with the younger and cuter farmers or produce hawkers in the hopes of achieving lower rates on delicious things.  I?m in college.  (An excuse for much it seems.)  In the quest to get a lower price on peppers however, I forgot the key fact that most thin and slightly bug-eyed vegetable dealers are, in fact vegan or vegetarian.  It seems that farmer?s market are the prime location in the Midwest for those rare meat-refusers.  So unfortunately I lost any chance at cheap peppers when I asked which pepper, exactly, would complement the half-pound of bacon I was going to fry up for a vegetable succotash.

Hard life.  But, as with most things, bacon and summer corn can work wonders when combined and consumed together in a sweet and crunchy vegetable succotash.  Geeking-out appears to be a nice release as well.

Recipe on the following page.