A few years ago when I was still teaching at the cooking school, we had a summer camp program for kids. It was really fun teaching a room full of young people the joy of cooking and food. Inspiring them to eat with their taste buds, and not worry about whether they thought they liked something or not based on principle, but to expand their horizons. Little foodies in the making. As part of this teaching we tried creating dishes with unique flavor profiles, that packed a wallop, a real flavor sensation!

One of the dishes we made up covered all the basics – super sweet, salty and savory. We stuffed dried dates with parmesan cheese, wrapped them in bacon and broiled them until the bacon was nice and crispy. We called them bugs – because that is kind of what they look like if you are a kid. For me, I easily looked past their outward appearance, this was one of the most amazing flavor combinations! One of those bites that you really can’t wrap your head around, until you have tried it! For me, it was love at first bite.

It has been a while since I last had these, but recently I got a craving for them. We had just picked up some dried dates from the health food store and I had some turkey bacon in the fridge that needed using up – and of course we always have Cabot Seriously Sharp Cheddar in the fridge (what kind of displaced Vermonters would we be without it?), so a plan started coming together in my head. We also had some nice peppery arugula in the fridge, straight from the farmers market and I thought that would marry nicely with the sweet and savory date bites. Topping everything off with some thick, black balsamic glaze, and it really was heaven on a plate. The stuffed dates are great on a salad, but certainly can be served alone as an hors d’oeuvre . They are so quick to put together, but the taste is totally amazing. Sure to impress anyone. Go ahead and make some – you know you wanna try them!

As I have discussed a few posts ago, summertime is all about simple, laid back fare, getting together with friends and family and just relaxing. We live very close to the beach now. We could walk there, but sometimes it is fun to take the car so we can bring our big cooler, a blanket and other goodies for a beach picnic.

While Rachel and Gwen were here, we went with our friends Lela and Bubba to have a beach picnic. Everyone met at our house, we made sandwiches with whatever was in the fridge and both Lela and I brought something to share. She made a delicious pasta salad with asparagus and red peppers and I made what I called a “New World” veggie salad – it contained 2 ears of corn on the cob, a roasted sweet potato, black beans, tomatoes, red bell pepper and zucchini. I tossed all the veggies in a light mustard vinaigrette and sprinkled with lime salt, cilantro and a pinch of chili pepper.

I also baked a batch of gluten free blueberry muffins for dessert. I used a gf muffin mix I found at the health food store. I topped the muffins with some cream cheese icing I had in the fridge leftover from when I made Lela and Bubba’s wedding cake!

We all had a great time enjoying the food and keeping away the sea gulls who really were hell bent on joining our party! They were some serious party crashers! But we didn’t let them stop of from enjoying surf, sand and each other’s company!

This is a dish I made a while back, that I have yet to blog about. It is so very simple, but the taste was just so bright and summery, I thought this would be the perfect time to share it – in the height of summer. These are my favorite kinds of salads – “leftovers salads”, where you pull a bunch of stuff out of the pantry and out of the garden, and make a simple masterpiece. I do a lot of these “leftovers salads” and they are always the best because they are always so unique.

I had half a box of orzo pasta that I cooked up and then cooled. I drizzled it with some sun dried tomato dipping olive oil that I received via FromTheFarm.com from Sierra Olive Oil Company. Then I chopped some heirloom tomatoes and garden tomatoes and some fresh mozzarella.

I stirred that in with fresh chopped herbs from our garden: basil, oregano, scallions and lemon balm. A little salt and pepper for the top, and a final drizzle of organic Meyer lemon vinegar.

I brought this to a potluck dinner and there was nary a piece of orzo left! Now that I am writing about it, I am craving it again!

I made this salad with leftover shredded carrots I had from making the Carrot Wedding Cake. I over bought on carrots because I wanted to make sure to have enough for the cake…so I had leftovers of course. Which IS ALWAYS a fun challenge for me. That is the beauty of cooking with leftovers – endless inspiration and ideas because you never have the same combination of ingredients – exactly. Which makes me think outside the box and just have fun experimenting!!!

I don’t normally buy pre-shredded carrots, so this was a new ingredient for sure . In reality, I can’t take credit for this recipe though, as I found it on the shredded carrot package. I did tweak it a bit, but the inspiration came straight from the label. Sometimes those on the package recipes are actually great! I served this with grilled organic chicken cutlets that had a Jamaican Jerk spice blend rub. For those of us counting calories/fat/protein ratios and the like, I do have nutritional information at the bottom of the recipe!

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So of course after receiving all those wonderful products from FromTheFarm.com I was inspired to start experimenting with them right away.

Santa Sweet Grape and Ugly Ripe Heirloom Tomatoes

Santa Sweet, the name of the company is also the name of the seed variety of this original grape tomato. The company owns the particular seed variety along with the Ugly Ripe heirloom variety seeds. Therefore they are the first company to bring the grape tomato to the United States. Any other company who sells “grape tomatoes” and are not Santa Sweet- their seeds are a cousin of the original. These grape tomatoes are super sweet and very pop-able. Children love their shape and taste. The Ugly Ripe tomatoes are reminiscent of a delicious tomato fresh from my grandfather’s backyard garden. They may be ribbed and bumpy, but their flavor is delicious and full of pure tomato flavor. Perfect to eat like an apple, or chopped in salads.

I live with a “tomato connoisseur” who just fell in love with both of these varieties of tomatoes. So much so, that all we really did with them was make wonderfully simple salads dressed with balsamic vinegar and and extra virgin olive oil.

My favorite salad was these dressed tomatoes over a bed of spicy organic arugala, mixed with a nice ripe avocado and some smoked cheddar cheese. It was like summer in a bowl. We ate these kinds of salads for 3 days straight!

FromTheFarm.com offers a Tomato Variety Pack that includes 6 Ugly Ripe tomatoes and 2 pints of Santa Sweet Grape tomatoes!

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Sierra Olive Oils and Spice Packets

So everyone has been asking to see how I roast a chicken in my tagine. I love my tagine and I try to come up with as many uses for it as possible. I am a huge fan of roasted chickens, and I usually roast one or two a month and I always make soup from the carcass. So when I got my tagine as a present, I did an experiment and roasted a chicken in it. As with anything you put in a tagine, the chicken came out super tender and falling off the bone – with no basting or liquid necessary. You literally throw it in the tagine, and throw the tagine in a 350 F oven and cook for about 1 1/2 hours. That is it!

This time, I decided to rub my delicious organic roaster with Sundried Tomato and Basil Olive Oil from Sierra Olive Oils. The company had also sent me a variety of spice packets used for dips (which are not available yet, but will soon be), but I thought it would be fun to try one as a rub for the chicken, so I chose the garlic variety.

I had some leftover fresh fennel that I stuffed the bird with. It came out perfectly delicious. Served with peas, it was a delicious and homey dinner, and almost too easy to make!

On a recent trip to the Farmers Market we stopped at one of our favorite organic produce stands. They were selling some nice pea shoots and the biggest, fattest, firmest portabella mushrooms I had the pleasure of seeing. I really wasn’t in the market for mushrooms on this occasion, but forgive me, it was like that moment in The Fellowship of the Rings when the hobbitses find the mushrooms and get so excited they trip over themselves and start rolling down the hill yelling Mushrooooooms!
Luckily for me there were no hills involved…

I brought them home and knew we had to eat them right away. I didn’t want to lose any of those fabulous fresh flavors or the perfect meaty texture. So I decided to really celebrate my veggie finds: mushrooms, pea shoots, arugala and eggplant. I broiled the portabellas and eggplant (remember I have no grill and can’t get one) and paired them with chevre and roasted garlic and topped with really good balsamic vinegar. This was a wonderful main course salad, perfect for all that summer weather we have been experiencing. Served with a nice crisp glass of white wine and life is good.

I served the salad with caramelized onion pumpernickel dinner rolls – a recipe which I adapted from the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book that has revolutionized my life.

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Independence Day in the US is all about BBQs and fireworks. I guess it is a fitting way to celebrate a birthday. I mean, we all usually celebrate our personal birthdays with great food,cake and fanfare .
I think next year, on my birthday, I should ask for the fireworks, too.

But really there is no better way to celebrate a holiday or event than with delicious food. We all know that well. This weekend we were celebrating with my family. My mom and my aunt and uncle came up to Saint Augustine to celebrate the birth of the USA in the oldest town in the USA. We spent Friday afternoon sightseeing and so I decided on a simple menu, that I could do ahead of time, so that I could not only enjoy my guests, but so that we could have a delicious, but quick meal in between all of the festivities.

You know what they say though about the best intentions…

Menu:

Pork Kebabs with my special Middle Eastern inspired meat rub with cippolini, orange bell pepper and cherry tomatoes with Tzatziki

Since I don’t have a grill, and can’t grill where I live (2nd story condo in a downtown area) I did my kebabs under the broiler!

Tangy Potato Salad: loosely based on Nana’s Potato Salad but with lots of sweet Hungarian paprika and some cider vinegar thrown in

Green Beans Vinaigrette: Just green beans tossed with garlic, cilantro, sherry vinegar and extra virgin olive oil
(sorry no pics)

To Drink? White Sangria with strawberries and stone fruit (bottle of Riesling, bottle of bubbly and chopped fruits)

For Dessert? Cardamom and Pistachio Brownies from Mallika’s blog with homemade Pomegranate Sorbet (recipe to follow)

So I gave myself Thursday afternoon and evening to boil the potatoes and blanch the green beans, prep the meat with the rub, make the tzatziki, the brownies and the sorbet. No big, do it all the time. I prepped the veggies and the meat in no time, with no difficulty. Then I made the brownies. It was a bit of a challenge because I have never made brownies from scratch (oh the horrors!) before (we are not big brownie people, so that is why), plus the recipe I was following on Mallika’s blog were in metric. So I sat down to quickly do the calculations and it just wasn’t making sense – so honestly I scrapped the directions and just winged it. They turned out a little on the cake-y side, as opposed to squidgy, but we actually prefer them this way, so they were fine.

Then it was time for the sorbet, my pièce de résistance. So I made the simple syrup in this tiny saucepan I have with a broken handle (meaning all that was there was the screw and a little piece of the handle). After it was all set, I went to pour it in a small pyrex bowl, to cool. But as I was pouring, the handle finally broke all the way off, and as this happened the pot fell onto the pyrex bowl, knocking it to the floor, shattering the bowl and spraying my freshly cleaned kitchen and newly bought kitchen carpet with super sticky gooey simple syrup. The first thing that came to my mind after, “thank goodness I miraculously avoided being burned” was: “oh crap, Roberto is going to kill me!” (he has been trying to get me to throw this pan away for ages), followed by “Damn it! I am out of sugarrrrrrrrrrrr!” also dammit, my pyrex bowl is broken and dammit I no longer have a small saucepan. Followed by “I can’t believe I have to go back to the store!”

From there it was just a downward spiral. My kitchen was covered in gooey glass, and I needed to go get more sugar. So I zipped out to the store, while Roberto kindly volunteered to do cleanup duty (thank the Universe for good and helpful husbands!).
As I was driving to the store, the light for gas came on, so I had to stop and pay a gazillion dollars for a tank of gas. Then when I finally got the the store, I stepped out of the car and dropped my cell phone onto the pavement, which then promptly fell apart. I had had it, and expletives were flying from my mouth when I look up and see a mother with her little daughter walking towards me. As I mouthed “so sorry” to her, I picked up my cell phone pieces, put it back together and braced myself for the insanity that is the day before a holiday shopping frenzy at the grocery! Luckily I made it out alive and without any problems, and back home with no other detours. I managed to finish making the sorbet before completely crashing. We ate some leftovers, drank a mojito to dull the pain and torture of earlier events, and watched a few episodes of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer on DVD. Normalcy returned and all ended well.

The next day our guests arrived and we all enjoyed a nice and relaxing weekend. I hope you all in the US enjoyed your long weekend too!
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Saturday was Midsummer, or Summer Solstice, known as the longest day of the year and celebrated all over the world.
However, since that date is always in flux, due to the rotation of the planet and the changing of calendars from the Julian to the Tropical, many people celebrate this holiday between June 21-24, because the actual astronomical solstice usually falls somewhere between these two dates. Midsummer is originally a pagan holiday, called Litha, and has since been Christianized to be the celebration of the nativity feast of Saint John the Baptist. This is a festival of fire and light, and of thanks for the sun and its importance for survival and fertility.

In the North of the Northern hemisphere, like Scandinavia, it means that the sun does not set this day in many places, nor the few weeks before and after this day. When I lived in Norway (Trondheim to be specific, located in the center of the country) at Midsummer, we got two hours of twilight and the rest of the day was as bright and sunny as a summer’s day. It was a remarkable thing to experience, especially when you are not used to it. It usually means staying up late, enjoying time with friends and family and cooking up some good food to celebrate. Scandinavian bashes are usually known for their simple and delicious seafood. This holds especially true at Midsummer, when fresh seafood is at the height of freshness – crab and shrimp figure prominently, as does the ubiquitous salmon.

So I decided to create a Midsummer Feast, by cooking up some crab and corn fritters with garlic aioli, crostini with goat cheese and smoked salmon,

a nice salad full of goodies, like cucumbers, olives, pickled garlic, and roasted red peppers with a delicious avocado dressing.

We enjoyed some lovely cocktails, mixed up with an awesome blend of superfruit juices from Genesis Today and spent a lovely evening listening to Caribbean music and enjoying our veranda until the arrival of night.
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