It was so good, yet only an hour before I had begun to assemble this meal I wasn’t into cooking anything. It’s typical for me that once I had an idea, even if it was about a single ingredient, any reluctance vanished. This time it was remembering that I had some Mexican sour gherkins in the crisper drawer.

• short pieces cut from a part of one garlic scape from Phillips Farms sautéed until softened in a little olive oil inside a large antique copper pot, followed by 8 ounces of halved ‘Mexican gherkins’ (which are not actually cucumbers, but ‘pepquinos’, or ‘Melothria scabra‘), along with a tiny bit of Brazilian wax pepper from Eckerton Hill Farm, after which 8 ounces of a New York pasta, Sfoglini whole grain reginetti, were mixed in, together with about a cup of reserved pasta cooking water, the mix then stirred in the pot over high heat until the liquid had emulsified, after which some small tomatoes were added (less than a handful), halved, remaining from a basket of mixed colors and shapes from Tamarack Hollow Farm that had been incorporated into an earlier meal, plus both the zest and juice of a Whole Foods organic California lemon, the pasta drizzled with a little bit of tomato water (same tomatoes!) remaining from that same meal, seasoned with local sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, placed in 2 shallow bowls, topped with micro lemon balm from Two Guys from Woodbridge, drizzled with a little olive oil
• the wine throughout was a Portuguese (Douro) white, Quevedo Family Alvarinho 2018, from Naked Wines
• the music was an album of works by Charles Avison which included 6 concertos ‘in seven parts’ (transcriptions of Scarlatti sonatas), performed by Cafe Zimmermann; Charles Avison (1709-1770) was a rara avis, a good eighteenth-century English composer)