mama eats

mama eats

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mama eats
mama eats
quick summer meals

quick summer meals

vacation edition

Amanda Leigh's avatar
Amanda Leigh
Jul 31, 2024
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mama eats
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quick summer meals
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Welcome to mama eats, a twice-weekly newsletter inspired by a simple + seasonal home life. This week’s post, quick summer vacation meals, is for paid subscribers. I try to provide as much free content as possible, however, this newsletter is a labor of love and I am a busy mother to three. If you have the means, and find value in what I share, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which also gives you access to the growing archive of posts older than a month.

Hello friends, we are back from our holiday- it was wonderful, will share a bit more in the Saturday newsletter- today I wanted to share a little about the quick and easy summer meals I cooked from our little kitchenette, with minimal tools and simple, fresh, limited ingredients.

the staples I used for meals:

  • cucumbers; lots of English cucumbers (the very long dark green ones)

  • tomatoes- I took a small can of the Trader Joe’s “super sweet san marzanino” tomatoes, as well as fresh ones, both cherry and large.

  • one eggplant and a good amount of zucchini

  • a bag of 6 fresh, sweet red onions

  • 2 heads of our garden garlic

  • fresh basil- I brought some from our garden with us (in a glass of water like cut flowers) and also picked up a plant at a local grocery store for the windowsill, as I use a lot of basil in summer meals.

  • pasta- I brought fettucine and pappardelle

  • olives- a jar of garlic stuffed, a jar of pitted, a jar of regular- all green.

  • good sourdough bread- I brought some with us for the first day, and then we picked up fresh bread at the local bakery every day, which had wood fired sourdough, we were so lucky!

  • wine; red and white

  • extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar (worth it in my opinion to get the better quality ones), salt

  • feta, parmesan, mozzarella (I picked up the non dairy options at Trader Joe’s as it is where we happened to stop)

  • a few cans each white beans and chickpeas


On the day we left I harvested everything possible from our garden to take with us- zucchini, eggplant, shisito peppers, tomatoes, basil, and cucumbers. I picked up a bag of red onions at the farmers market- they are so fresh and sweet right now that they can be used liberally as a vegetable instead of a flavoring. We also picked up a flat of peaches and several ripe Galia melons to take. We also went to the grocery store near us halfway through the trip to pick up a few things.

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