Tag Archives: summer recipes

Pan-Fried Peppers

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I like a vegetable as much as the next girl, but I am the first to admit that they can sometimes be time-consuming to prepare.  (I’m looking at you, fava beans.*)  As a consolation for the minutes I lose shelling fresh beans or dicing winter squash or washing mountains of greens, though, there are the times when I can cook a vegetable whole (like that cauliflower!) with little or no preparation at all.  This is one of those times.  Pan, oil, whole peppers, salt, and they’re ready for the table.  My mother in law regularly makes these peppers to great acclaim, and I follow her method Continue reading →

Steamed Fish and Bok Choy with Garlic and Ginger

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Yes, of course you can make this spunky 15-minute healthy meal with tofu instead of fish. Or halibut fillets instead of salmon steaks, which is what I usually do. Or any white fish, really. But lest you think that lean-protein-of-choice steamed with bok choy sounds too dull and virtuous, let me assure you that this dish is all about the zippy sauce. In fact, be sure to make some rice to sop it all up. (Brown rice is in keeping with the virtuous theme and usually my preference, but it makes this a 45-minute meal instead. You do what you like.)

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S’mores, or, In Praise of Not Cooking Sometimes, Too

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I love cooking for my family, but it’s nice to have an occasional break everything, even things I love.  Like maybe once a year, when we go to family camp, stay in rustic cabins, and let the nice people there cook and clean up for us.

This is literally the only thing I made all week.  It was a good week. Continue reading →

Raw Broccoli Salad with Raisins and Walnuts

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So here’s a nice secret that I’ll tell you more about tomorrow:  I haven’t cooked a thing all week.  We arrived home late tonight after lucking out both with the ferry times and the three sleeping children in the car.  Smooth sailing of the figurative sort, which we appreciated tonight almost as much as we appreciated the placid waters when we were out canoeing in the lake this morning with a literal boatload of our kids and our friends and their kids.  A lovely ending to a lovely week.  And not only because I didn’t have to cook.

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Summer Squash with Feta and Fresh Herbs

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I’m no Cheryl-style desperado when it comes to dispatching zucchini.  In fact, I’m kind of pleasantly surprised when they come my way.  The squash plants in my garden are despondent and I think they may have given up for the year, so I’m glad to be getting a weekly bag of bitty squash (with flowers!) from the warm side of the mountains in my CSA box.

I know that most of you are in a different boat, though, so I thought I’d share my favorite method for cutting zucchini down to size.  This recipe (once again inspired by Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone) cooks a big pile of squash into submission all at once.  The resulting dish–sweet, herbal, salty, tender–makes a fine hot or cold salad on its own, but it’s also dandy tucked into tacos, tossed with pasta, or spread onto a summertime pizza. Continue reading Summer Squash with Feta and Fresh Herbs (click for recipe)

Parsley Pesto Toasts with Radishes

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I love to cook.  The rhythm of chopping, the aroma dancing up from the pan, the colors and flavors and textures of food transformed by heat and human ingenuity.

I also love to not cook.  The ease of a salad fresh from the garden, a handful-of-this-handful-of-that pesto, a plum I pick from the tree and eat outside.

This flavorful recipe is not-cooking cooking.  It takes less than 5 minutes (including the pesto) and can be lunch or a snack for one, or you can make a platter of these pretty little toasts to serve at your garden party.  Invite me!

You do need a nice hearty bread, thinly sliced and toasted (you could rub it with olive oil first, sure, but I didn’t).  The pesto recipe is mostly parsley, so heap it on there.  Top with lots of thinly-sliced radishes for crunch and zing, and anoint your toast generously with flaky salt.If you’re in more of a cooking kind of mood today, allow me instead suggest these “green tartine” radish top toasts.  Can’t decide?  You could always make both together for a top-to-tail radish tasting.

Broccoli and Green Garlic Soup, Chilled or Hot

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Here’s my high-tech approach to tracking the many recipes I find online that I’d like to try: I open a new tab in my browser with the recipe I want to remember and leave it there until my computer slows to a crawl because I haven’t rebooted in days.  Then I shut my computer down and start all over again.  Efficient, right?  (I do technically have a Pinterest account, but I guess I’m a slow adopter.)  (There’s also this list.)

Luckily, this chilled broccoli soup recipe from Sassy Radish appeared at just the right moment in my life, and I was able to press it into action right away.  Nash’s graced us with both broccoli and green garlic in our CSA box this week, Seattle provided us with soup weather today, and the rest, as they say, is history.

We ate the soup warm the first time, as eating a cold broccoli soup would have required either advance planning or patience, neither of which I could muster today.  But now that it has thoroughly chilled in the fridge, I can confirm that it also makes an excellent chilled soup as intended.  Either way, a crusty chunk of bread and a soft cheese alongside will make this a a nice summer meal. Continue reading Broccoli and Green Garlic Soup (click for recipe)

Tomato, Pesto, and Mozzarella Sandwich for a Crowd

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Summertime, with its good weather and long light evenings, always means more spontaneous meals with friends.  The past few days we’ve had plenty of them because my sister and I and a couple of girlfriends took all our many children to some nice little cabins by a beach on an island.  We worked hard all day–the pool! the beach! the playground! roasting marshmallows!–and collapsed at the shady picnic tables at the end of each day for a small feast together.  (Although “collapsed” may be wishful thinking here; moms traveling alone with a contingent of young children rarely get to “collapse” for more than two consecutive minutes, I’ve learned.)

One of my favorite strategies for feeding a hungry crowd is to slice a baguette or two in half lengthwise, stuff it full of delicious things, and cut it into many pieces.  Serve a few salads alongside and voila, an easy dinner for as many people as you need to feed.  (Bonus points if you give the kids popsicles for dessert so they can run off and get sticky while the grown-ups linger over another drink.)

The classic caprese combination (tomato, mozzarella, basil) makes one of my favorite sandwiches.  I find that some versions can get a little dry, though, so I juice mine up by using pesto instead of basil leaves and a generous drizzle of balsamic vinegar.

The order of assembly is important here: pesto on the bottom half of the bread, please, and vinegar on the top, so that the vinegar soaks down into the tomatoes, which should be on top of the cheese, which collaborates with the pesto to keep the bottom piece of bread from getting soggy.  Got that?  Top to bottom inside your baguette: balsamic vinegar, tomato, fresh mozzarella, good basil pesto.  Yes, I spend time thinking about these kinds of things.  I can admit it here because I know that you do, too.  That’s why I’m glad we’re friends.

Continue reading Tomato, Pesto, and Mozzarella Sandwich (click for recipe)

Peach and Tayberry Upside-Down Pie

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What?  It’s been four days since I posted the recipe for the Easiest Pie Crust Ever and you still haven’t made a pie?  What are you waiting for?

Ok, ok, here’s a recipe that’s even easier than pie.  I’m calling it an upside-down pie, because it’s a single-crust pie with the crust, get this, on top.  Isn’t that smart?  So you get a scoop of juicy fruit and a crisp, buttery top crust.  That’s it.  The Rustic Fruit Desserts people (I told you you’d be hearing hearing more about them) refer to this dessert by the funny name “pandowdy,” and indeed it was their Gingered Peach and Blackberry Pandowdy that inspired mine.

This dessert was especially sweet because I made it with the last of the peaches we brought home from California and tayberries from our Tonnemaker’s fruit CSA.   (You can substitute raspberries or blackberries or both; tayberries are a cross of the two.)  I personally wouldn’t usually put peaches into a pie–I know, other people do it successfully!–because I think they give up too much juice, resulting in a too-liquid filling and a soggy bottom pie crust.  Both problems are solved by this recipe: the bottom crust has vanished and the filling is thickened to a luscious consistency by macerating the peaches and then simmering the juice to thicken it.

Continue reading Peach and Tayberry Upside-Down Pie (click for recipe)