Summer Strozzapreti Pasta with Vegan Tangerine Sausage Hash and Roasted Artichoke, Corn-off-the-Cob

It's the first day of summer and we enjoyed celebrating it a number of ways - attending a Pilobolus performance at ADF (I actually attended with a friend and her 3rd grade daughter a short 1-hour early afternoon performance, as well), visiting a relatively new "green" building store downtown (Common Ground Green Building Center) to find sustainably grown bamboo flooring for our new construction upstairs in our home as well as low-VOC paints, and treating a friend to dinner and having him join us to see Pilobolus.

He had requested corn, so I easily obliged with my standard corn-off-the-cob with 3 ears of corn, Earth Balance margarine, salt, and lime juice. I prepared some strozzapreti pasta (see my recent blog entry for details on the name) and prepared a hash to top it with. That hash (traditionally, chopped meat, vegetables, and seasonings lightly browned by sauteeing) was just apple-sage vegan sausage cut into small cubes, as well as chopped scallion (one or two), shallot (one), half of a yellow onion, and two small bell peppers that my wife purchased today from a farmer's market, sauteed for perhaps 8-10 minutes in a tangerine olive oil, with rosemary (maybe 2 teaspoons of needles) and oregano (1 teaspoon or so) added in the last few minutes. I also mixed in some salt and ground black pepper. It was a good meal, and we enjoyed our friend's kind company!

Tomorrow I'm not going to be making dinner. A friend is having about twenty of his friends, including my wife and me, join us at his favorite restaurant, Oriental Garden. My wife and I, unfortunately (but fortunately we both share the same dislike), don't like Chinese food, but do like Thai - hopefully there will be a good variety of Thai selections for us.