Week 26 - Berries

I think I say this on a regular basis because of the cooking challenge, but I'm not a huge fan of mixing fruit into savory dishes. Citrus really isn't too much of a problem, apples are generally fine, and there are some other fruits I can tolerate in savory dishes, but outside of lingonberries with my Swedish meatballs (and I have no access to lingonberries really), I'm not into using berries in savory dishes. For one, I find them incredibly sweet, almost too sweet for most dishes. Second, berries are so expensive that it just seems like a waste to blend them up for sauces and stuff. Third, my favorite way to eat berries is whole and unadulterated. So needless to say, I wasn't a big fan of the Week 26 challenge.

At least, I wasn't until I read the weekly challenge description where they gave a very broad description of what constituted a berry. Basically, this comes from the difference between what we normally think of as a berry and the botanical definition of a berry. Botanically, according to Wikipedia, a berry is "a simple fruit with seeds and pulp produced from the ovary of a single flower." That brought in tomatoes, eggplants, pumpkins, bananas, and things I was much happier about making for dinner. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to make, but I knew it would be centered around the tomato.

We were shopping for groceries for the week, and unlike most weeks, I was without a meal plan and shopping list since we weren't originally supposed to be in the city at the time (long story). I was browsing through the tomato section and the grape tomatoes just looked so plump, red, and fresh. Not far away, there was a section of gigantic local cucumbers, so I decided to just make a salad full of grape tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and feta cheese, along with olive oil, red wine vinegar, and some salt and pepper. All together, it was probably about $6 for a giant bowl of fresh vegetables, perfect for a 90 degree summer day.

We paired the salad with a couple of baked chicken tenders, and it was a healthy, light dinner. I was so much happier making this than I would have been using anything we commonly think of as berries, and was very thankful for the botanical definition!