One of the things I like to do is pull inspiration from much better cooks than I am. If I have a fabulous dish at a restaurant, I'm tempted to try to rework it, and if I can get at least 60% of the way to a mindblowing dish, then the result is still going to be damn good.

So after an entire day of cooking, pureeing, and otherwise fucking with tomatoes, this is how many tomatoes I had left.

I actually don't have a picture of this, because it's just red sauce.

You can make a good cooked tomato sauce out of any tomatoes, because the cooking process levels the playing field. Oh, there are advantages to using good, organic tomatoes for your cooked sauces, but where they really shine is in a raw pasta sauce.

This is how madness starts, in case you were wondering.

As of Thursday evening, when I picked up the 20 pound box of Romas, plus the CSA box with two bags of mixed tomatoes, this is how many tomatoes I had on hand. It's a lot of tomatoes. So Saturday became Dia De Los Tomuertos, in which I attempted to process as many tomatoes as I could. Starting with the yellows.

You hear lots of cooks and food nerds talking about how the idea for dishes comes to them unbidden while looking at the food in the store. And that happens to me, too, but I don't just take inspiration from fresh foods.

As you know, assuming you've been paying attention, the CSA has been delivering unto us bountiful quantities of cucumbers. And the best way to keep cucumbers from going bad, aside from eating them, is pickling them. Fridge-pickling them, in my case, because, well, fuck canning. I admire people who do their own canning, but I am not one of them, because cauldrons of boiling water filled with glass are not the kinds of things people should trust me with.

And that post is now. Don't say I never gave you nothin'.

On Saturday, I bought a grill basket from the Home Depot. It is a mighty thing, roughly two thirds the size of my actual grill. I bought it because last weekend, I tried grilling green beans like Ruhlman suggested, except for the part where he suggested using a grill basket, because I didn't have one.

I had two thoughts when something, I think Ruhlman's blog, put the ides of elote, Mexican-style grilled corn, into my head. The first thought was "I must do this." The second thought, however, was that it might be too much, too rich, too excessive, for more than a one-time treat. One of those thoughts was correct.

So, remember how yesterday I said I had a cool new thing to do with cauliflower? And I put ironc quotes around "came up", implying that it wasn't really the most revolutionary or original thing?

Cooking! I still do it, sometimes. Why, just last week, I was thinking to myself that I would like to make myself a burger on my grill. And I did!

But I had a little extra time on my hands, so I decided to experiment. I'd had some success right before the move by mixing in about four ounces of pastrami in with a pound of ground beef, resulting in 20 ounces of burger - enough for four five-ounce patties. This seemed like a valid model, but instead of pastrami, I went with glorious, porky, spicy chorizo.