I've been plowing through Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I'm loving, mostly because of Ms. Kingsolver's prose, which gives eating a ripe tomato the same appeal of spending an afternoon with a new lover. Of course at my age, eating a ripe tomato is perhaps more... oh, well, never mind.

And then there are all the gardeny knitting blogs in the upper and mid-Atlantic states and the midwest where all y'all are pulling baskets of berries and greens and broccoli out of your dark, rich soil and those of us out'chere in the West with our sandy dirt, hail storms, droughts, plagues and locusts are lucky to coax a tomato or two from the gardens we watch like first babies, afraid some caterpiller or quirk of weather will smite our meager efforts.

All of this literary and vegetal fecundity has my culinary juices flowing. Ms. Kingsolver's chapter about cheese making has me in a lather to suss out the differences between curds and whey and try my hand at rolling my own. Have you ever compared fresh mozzarella to the stuff you buy at Costco? Like the difference between fresh whipped cream and Cool Whip.

The book she references is Ricki Carroll's Cheesemaking Made Easy. Kingsolver makes it sound about as challenging as baking a tray of brownies. How many milk-borne illnesses could there be?

One of my motivators is that we are currently harvesting a bumper crop of crook-necked yellow squash. (What did I know, I thought I planted zucchini?) My jaundiced lovelies would be delicious con queso, don't you think?

Are you awash in squash? Stay tuned for some recipes on how to dispatch mass quantities of these tasty cucurbits.

Still life: Recumbent big-assed squash