Tag Archive for 'fast'

Lemony Orzo-Veggie Salad

 

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I know I can’t be alone when I say that being in the kitchen in the summer is a drag. It’s hot outside, I don’t need it to be hot inside, too. And since it’s Utah, where central air is not especially common inside homes – they favor swamp coolers here – it is frequently already hot inside anyway so the last thing I want to do is make it hotter. I prefer to flavor my food with kosher salt, not beads of sweat.

Gross.

Anyway, like most people we move to a great deal of low-maintenance cooking in this wretched heat, like grilling or things that cook quickly, and especially things that can be served cold, like this fantastic pasta salad from the June/July 2010 issue of Cooking Light. It is everything you could want in a summer dish – bright, sunny notes from the fresh dill, the tang of lemon, the smooth, silky bite of cold orzo and the crunch of crisp red bell pepper and cucumber. And the best part? I listed nearly all of the ingredients right there. The full recipe is, as usual, behind the cut.

I know, too, that it’s been a long time since I’ve updated. I won’t apologize for it, since I was using that time well, or promise that I will update more frequently, because you can see that’s worked out so well in the past, so instead I will encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed so that you’ll get the updates whenever I do get around to posting them.

And you don’t want to miss the chocolate peanut-butter cookies coming soon!

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Tilapia with Endive and Lemon-Pepper Oil

from our fine friends at Food Network Magazine.

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Also known as lemony fish with greens and taters, which is why I do not work in marketing. The actual recipe calls for escarole, but after going to 5 grocery stores in search of it, I made do with curly endive – escarole is endive though a different and supposedly less bitter variety. I read that radicchio is virtually indistinguishable from escarole in taste but I had this awful fear that the red color of it would bleed onto the fish and that just did not sound appealing to me at all. Anyway.

 

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Peanut Butter Cups

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Warren, my husband, really likes Reese’s Cups. He will stick a bag of the miniatures in the freezer and only have one or two at a time, so it lasts him about a hundred years. I have no idea how he can do this, as I would eat one or two every 12 minutes or so, give or take a few seconds. So anyway, with the economy being as it is and some adjustments to our budget and another baby on the way, we opted not to do any Valentine’s Day presents this year, and instead of paying the babysitter and going to dinner and a movie, we ordered a pizza and watched a movie we already had instead.

Unfortunately, I am unable to not give presents of some sort on holidays. It’s necessary that I find some way to show my appreciation or else SOMETHING TERRIBLE WILL HAPPEN, I am sure of it. So, I thought, I have a cup candy mold from making Cupcake Bites (a post yet to be written), I have a toddler so there’s bound to be peanut butter, what on earth should I do? I know, I’ll make peanut butter cups! Genius, I tell you, sheer genius.

Guys, this turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. I looked at a few online recipes, decided none of them really worked for me and I might as well improvise, so I did and I call it a success. My success, let me share it with you.

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