Here we go folks, another Fabulous Farmer’s Market recipe! This is really fun and challenging. Stay with me because I still have two more meals to show you – still from out FIRST Farmer’s Market Adventure! This weekend my Dad and Stepmom are coming to visit and guess where we are going Saturday AM – you guessed it! I will try to get some better pictures of the market itself…this was the best I could find from our maiden voyage.

Anyway, I digress…

I am a die hard beet fan. I just love them. Maybe it is their beautiful color, maybe it is their sweet taste, maybe it is the fact that they just SCREAM health. Whatever it is, when I see good looking beets, I am all over them, I can’t resist.
My favorite way to prepare them, is to roast them. It just really brings out their sweetness – it is like making vegetable candy. I could eat em by the bowl full. But me, I love the entire beet, I love the sweet purple root and I also adore the bitter greens. Nothing goes to waste – just the root if it is still attached.

I got gorgeous beets at the Farmer’s Market. In fact this dish is the dish I made the night we went to the Farmer’s Market. I just could not wait to dig in! I paired the roasted beets with goat cheese and pine nuts and served it on a bed of baby greens and wilted beet greens. It doesn’t get fresher than this guys. We just loved this salad. We ate along side crusty country bread also purchased at the Farmer’s Market dipped in reserve Greek olive oil from Kalamata. It was heaven.
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Happy Autumn Everyone! Wow, time is really flying! I have so busy working these past few weeks, I forgot that I still had this summer-y recipe waiting in the wings to get posted. Roberto and I are heading for a much needed vacation to New England to visit friends and family the second week of October and so I have been working feverishly hard on the Genesis project – typing out recipes, meeting with food vendors, collaborating with the menu design, etc. I have also been invited to participate in a very exciting blog event – I will reveal more about that later. But anyway, here is the long awaited second part to my Giada De Laurentiis tribute. Although the ingredients are summer, the colors are fall! Enjoy everyone!

I adore papaya – it has probably become my favorite fruit of all time – it has a wonderful creamy texture and is not too sweet but not at all bitter. I love eating it straight for breakfast or with a dollop of cardamom whipped cream for dessert. Paired in this salad with another creamy flavor of mine – avocado and you have a winning combination. The colors are beautiful and the flavors are simple. This is what makes this recipe great.
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I hate to say it, but it is past the middle of August and so we all must face the reality that for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, summer is coming to an end. Even though I live in Florida where it is always summer I can feel the change at an instinctual level. I have started craving heartier meals, with autumnal ingredients, like squash and herbs like sage and there has been this urge in me to drink hot chocolate. I have even been having dreams about snow and our old house in Vermont…So even though the temperatures are still hot and humid, there is something about the air that is changing and it is creating in me the need to use up the summer surplus – do something with all those eggplants, peppers and tomatoes. Preserve them from rotting in my fridge now that my taste buds have shifted.

I have made a lot of grilled vegetable dishes over the summer and for me it is essential to have them – they are great for sandwiches and wraps, wonderful stirred in pasta and perfect just as is. The grilling of the vegetables brings out the natural sweetness in the vegetables and the marinade adds tang. It is best to prepare the vegetables a day ahead so they have time to marinate overnight. Leftover grilled vegetables go great in a wrap with a dressing made of Tahini, Greek Yogurt, Olive Oil and Sumac, which has become my condiment of choice this season! I use it in place of mayo.

This recipe is a wonderful Tunisian dish which is served alongside of hard-boiled eggs, anchovies, olive oil packed tuna and green olives. It is great as a meal served with warm pita bread.

I featured it in my Mediterranean Cooking Class that I taught last week. It was perfect as we had some vegetarians in the group and they could still eat this dish, by passing on a few of the garnishes! They loved it! So this dish is also very versatile.
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This is a wonderful and easy dish to prepare. It can be served hot as a main dish or you can chill it and serve it as a salad. It is a wonderful and refreshing dish that is easy to make variations of depending on what you have on hand and is the perfect dish to make with leftover shrimp!

Enjoy!
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Now if this is not mouth watering, I really don’t know what is.
Have I mentioned how much I love figs? They are just so magnificent – They look like strange little pods from the outside, but when you open them up they are so lucious and delicate and gorgeous! They take my breath away! I love figs so much that to look at them in person makes my heart leap, my mouth water and my eyes to fill with tears…well at least that is what they did when I saw Sylvia’s Rocket Salad with Grilled Figs and Goat Cheese
a few weeks back. That was when I was beginning to despair about ever finding fresh figs again! Since we moved to Florida, it has been like acclimating to everything – the weather, the culture, the driving, and the availability of well-loved ingredients! I took for granted in the past the easy availability of certain favorite ingredients living in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast where there was always a plethora of ethnic markets, including Mediterranean. But having moved to Florida, I have had trouble finding things like, hazelnuts, pomegranate syrup and FRESH FIGS! So I began to loose hope of having fresh figs again and when fig season began and I saw recipes like the one on Sylvia’s blog I began to feel a little crushed and a deep longing for figs, glorious figs. My luck was about to change.
One day at the grocery store recently while I was perusing the tropical fruit aisle (one of the great things about moving to Florida – there is a tropical fruit aisle!) something I often do so I can try new and exotic fruits, I saw a little place card for fresh Turkish Figs and my broken heart began to mend! My beloved figs were there! Yes, they were $8 for about 10 of them, which I knew was ridiculous but at this point I was ready to throw caution to the wind, they were there and I wanted them! Once I brought them home I knew I needed to eat them fast – as they rot quickly! So I had two recipes in mind – Sylvia’s salad and Fresh Fig and Sage Grilled Pizza. Here is Sylvia’s Recipe as she posted it!
It is heavenly!

Stay tuned for the Pizza recipe!
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I have seen many variations of Fattoush Salad around the blogoshpehere as of late. It is no wonder, as Fattoush salad is one of those colorful, fresh, flavorful salads that pairs up so well with the summer season and foods of the summer. It is also one of my favorites. I am one of these people who never eats the same salad twice. Sometimes I have a common theme, but there is always something that gets tweaked along the way depending on what is in the fridge at the given moment. Salads are great for the Leftover Queen in all of us! I love variety of texture, taste and smell in my salads and almost more than any other dish, a salad has to be colorful! It has to represent all the beauty and bounty of the season.
This is why I love Fattoush Salad. There are many varieties of this salad. Kind of like
Stuffed Grape Leaves (which is probably why I paired them in a meal together!), there are as many varieties and as many methods as one can imagine. However, this is my favorite version.
Sit back on a warm summer night with a bowl of Fattoush, some Stuffed Grape Leaves a glass of Shiraz, put TheLegendary Fairuz, one of my favorite CD’s and therefore in honor of this post, my featured Product Of The Week on in the background, close your eyes and you won’t remember if you are in your own backyard or the busy streets of Beirut.

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Last week..was it really last week? Maybe not, but anyway, I wrote about the Mediterranean Diet and its health benefits. I suggested a book: Mediterranean Diet Cookbook: A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health and just to illustrate how wonderful it is, with regularity I will be posting easy delicious, fresh recipes from the book for you to enjoy and cook at home.

Who doesn’t have some extra carrots lying around, or a jar of olives. Or if you are like me, a jar of Harissa….if you do, you can make this salad in minutes. The hardest part is waiting the ½ hour for the flavors to marry!
This is an incredibly flavorful and delicious salad. With so many textures and tastes it is a symphony for your mouth. This kind of dish is what makes me fall in love with food all over again and makes me giddy with excitement upon eating it. All of my favorite things in one dish, sopped up with a warm pita bread and life just doesn’t get any better. Well, maybe it does if you add a nice glass of Shiraz into the picture! I am going to be running around like a crazy mad woman for a few days getting ready for my class, so I leave you with this to carry you through! This is also my entry for Salad Stravaganza! Go check it out to enter your favorite salad!

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This is one of my favorite meals. It is so easy to cook and tastes delicious. Placed on top of a salad with olives, feta cheese and crunchy veggies it is the perfect dinner salad for summer! If you are not a chicken lover this dish is perfect with Lamb – that is the way I am cooking it for my upcoming Mediterranean Medley Class. However, this week we seemed to have an over abundance of chicken so I made it this way. Serve with grilled pita bread and you have a wonderful, healthy meal! If you want to be a bit naughty, it tastes wonderful with home made baked oven fries (in addition to the pita of course!!!)! I also served it with the leftover
Baba Ganoush and some Hummus we had!

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