Summer is here and as much as I love chocolate in all its many incarnations, warm weather calls for treats that are a bit lighter and brighter than my favorite winter fare.  The higher temperatures also mean we’re less likely to gravitate towards large treats, preferring instead to savor smaller bites and brighter flavors.  This dessert fits that bill in all ways and more.

These may be mix based, but I guarantee that you’ll overlook that once you’ve gotten a taste of these little explosions of flavor. There is simply nothing here not to love. Every bite is an immersion in all that is wonderful about lemon.  Tart, sweet and tangy with just a hint of saltiness in the glaze. Eating one of these bars is sort of like drinking lemonade mixed with rocket fuel.  It’s an unforgettable experience.

Simple, wonderful and light.  Perfect for the summer no matter where you are.  Please give this recipe a try.  And if you make something like it, feel free to leave a link in the comments.

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Seafood and noodles is something that I just love together. The combination is simple, tasty, filling and has more than enough flavor to satisfy any seafood lover. Add in some lime, a bit of cilantro and a touch of heat and you have what I consider to be one of the best summertime lunch dishes I can think up, especially when the thermometer reads over 100 degrees.

I usually make shrimp when my wife is going to have to stay at the office during lunch, since it’s not her idea of a mid afternoon meal on most occasions.  The plus side is that I can have the shrimp working in the marinade while I’m feeding our son and getting him down for his nap.  That way Dad gets to eat as soon as clean up is completed and we’ve finished the ritual of “I just want a cookie!”.  A little peace, a little Bourdain and a great bowl of flavor makes for a much nicer afternoon.  Don’t you think?
(Note: When mom is home for lunch, we all eat together.)

If you’re not a huge fan of ramen noodles (though I don’t know why you wouldn’t be!), somen or soba noodles work just fine for this as well.  If you’re not fond of cilantro, use parsley, mint or Thai basil.  You won’t break my heart.  Not a fan of chili paste?  A good roasted pepper puree with a bit of garlic added would work just as well.  Have fun with it!

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Potatoes are the unsung hero of any pantry.  The possibilities for turning this ruddy little blob of starch into something amazing seem to be endless and just about every culture uses them in any number of ways. Potatoes are both a min course option and the perfect side dish.  they can be presented as the star of the show or as a minor player on an ingredients linst.  They can be baked, boiled, mashed, smashed, pureed, diced, fried, sauteed and sliced into chips, all with excellent results.  But my personal favorite for preparing them lately is to very simply grill them off.

there’s something to be said for simplicity and dpth of flavor.  For allowing the ingredient to sing its own praises in its own voice without being muddled by other notes or melodies.  This, my dear reders is the potatos summertime opus.  Crisp and fluffy all at the same time, with a hint of sweetness to all of the erthiness that you would expect from this humble tuber.

The next tme you fire up the grill, consider inviting your local potato to the party.  you’ll be glad you did!

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Another month and another blog event.  This is my first time joining in with a lot of my blogging friends for the Royal Foodie Joust, hosted by the lovely Jenn (a.k.a. The Leftover Queen).  The joust really is the perfect challenge for me, since you’re presented with a triplet of ingredients and challenged to come up with something unique using them.  What more could the king of cooking without a recipe ask for?!?

The ingredients for this round of the event were chosen by Elle, the winner of last moth’s joust. Her choices?  Raspberry, almonds and lime.  While these three could easily be used to create something very sweet and decadent, there was a hint that she’d like to see something savory come out of it.  I knew what direction I was going to take these ingredients immediately, all I had to do was go get some berries!

While I would have loved to use fresh raspberries for this, we’re not exactly in raspberry country.  The “fresh” raspberries in the market were not only outragiously priced, but smelled more of plastic than berries, so they were out.  I considered using frozen berries, but they tend to muddle the colors of other ingredients, and don’t present well, so I went with 100% all raspberry preserves, and the result was just a bit on the sweet side for me, but still fantastic!

If you’re looking for the perfect main course for a hot summer night, this is your dish.  The texture is cool and wonderful, with a load of crunch from both the iceberg lettuce and the almonds, but still quite a bit of toothiness from the romaine.  The queso fresco is the perfect accompaniment, as it has a texture much like feta but is more mildly flavored, like a cross between a goat cheese and ricotta, and blends perfectly with the other flavors.

My wife’s response was simple.  She just looked at me and asked; “We’ll be making this again, right?”

Yes honey, we most definitely will.

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What’s not to love about food on a stick?  Anything that breaks the stereotype of a fork and knife at dinner time is something I look forward to, and if you’re planning an outdoor party, skewers are the way to go.  Your guests don’t have to bother with place settings or even tables, they can simply wander and mingle.  Which is what makes a great party, after all.

I didn’t make this dish for a party, though I probably will before the summer is over, along with kabobs and anything else i can think of that can comfortably be skewered and cooked over coals.  This was made at the request of my lovely wife, and i was more than happy to oblige her.

I’ve seen a lot of recipes that call for using whole breasts or chicken thighs, but i find that for satay, chicken breast tenderloins fit the bill perfectly.  Prep is simple, as you only have to cut larger tenderloins in two before marinating and it’s almost impossible to end up with a dry piece of chicken.  The flavor of the marinade works magic.  this may just be the prefect satay recipe.

As for sauce, I tend to simply heat my left over marinade thoroughly in a saucepan and use that.  If the idea doesn’t sit well with you, feel free to either make more or to use a thai peanut sauce from your local market.  You won’t hurt my feelings either way.

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I’ve been blaming a lot of other food bloggers for my entries here lately, and today seems to be more of the same. This time it was Katerina of Daily Unadventures in Cooking who decided my fate for me. I was just taking my daily dose of food blogs when I ran across her recipe for Acorn Squash with Toasted Seeds, and I knew I had to make it, or something like it.

My first attempt was a complete disaster. Nothing I had read prepared me for the fact that acorn squash seems to amplify salt to a magnitude heretofore unknown by man. I’d used chicken stock as the liquid, and even though I use the low sodium variety, I figure that played a part in the over salinization. The resulting dish would have tasted great, if I’d been able to get past the saltiness of it, but I couldn’t. It was drain fodder, nothing more.

In the end, I looked over Katerina’s recipe again and decided I’d like to up the flavor by adding roasted garlic, cut out the chicken stock altogether and loose the toasted seeds, since my dental work didn’t find them to be all that much fun.

The resulting dish is thick, satisfying and oh-so delicious. I can honestly say that this is my own creation, since I used the original recipe only as a guideline for cooking the squash, which is of a variety I’m unused to working with. This has been an egregious oversight on my part, and I’ll not be failing to give the little forlorn acorn squash his due from now on. I crafted at least three new uses for it when I tasted this soup, and I can’t wait to see if they stand up as well as I think they will.

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Oh the feeling of visiting another food blog, only to discover you’ve begun to salivate uncontrollably over the recipe you’ve found there. You’ve discovered the perfect meal idea sitting right there in front of you, with photos and all. You just have to make this as soon as possible.

That’s what happened to me the other day when I popped in to Simply Recipes, culinary home of the lovely and talented Elise Bauer. If you haven’t checked out her site, please do. She’s not only one of the nicest food bloggers out there, she’s also very likely one of the most influential, and with good reason.

The inspiration for this dish came from her recipe for Spicy Grilled Turkey Burger with Coleslaw which had me on the edge of my seat the moment I saw it, and well, I just had to make something like it!

(Note Elise’s Photos are much prettier than mine, and I apologize for that, but there aren’t too many flat surfaces in our new house yet, and I’m forced to use the counters in the kitchen, where not only is the lighting not that great, but there really isn’t any contrast to anything… That will get better as we get settled in.)

Of course, I couldn’t follow exactly in her footsteps. My wife makes ground turkey patties fairly often, and I love them so much that I decided to mix the two concepts for a variation of my own, which would have been perfect, I think, except that a few of the ingredients I was just sure I had already moved to the new house either:

1. Weren’t here…
2. Were no longer viable sources of nourishment. (i.e., they’d gone bad on me while I wasn’t looking. Traitors!)

In the end, however, what I ended up with was not only wonderful, but wonderfully simple, and took less than an hour total for all prep, including a prerequisite rest in the chill-chest for the patties themselves and heating the grill, which of course is not gas, because I think if I’m going to grill, beer and fire are required in the process. (Besides, you can’t Barbecue on a GAS GRILL… If you’ve tried, you know what I mean… blech!) Read more…

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Summer is upon us, and with it the need for lighter meals and cool refreshing desserts. For many this means ice cream, gelato, sorbet or a float, all of which are wonderful indeed, but to me it means fruit, preferably with a bit of a kick.

This recipe stemmed partially from the fact that I have quite a bit of frozen fruit in my freezer that I don’t want to move to our new house over the following week, and the fact that my wife’s dietitian stated plainly that she needed more fruits in her diet. Faced with those two pieces of knowledge, there was of course only one clear choice…

Parfait!

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