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!
Continue reading ‘Lemony Orzo-Veggie Salad’
The thing with copycat recipes is you are never sure how close they’re going to get to the real thing. For instance, Food Network magazine had a copycat recipe for the OG’s salad dressing, which we all know is basically the best part of going there. I was all set to enjoy a delicious salad, my tastebuds were dancing with anticipation, then I took a bite and drowned in a deluge of disappointment. (raise your hand if you were embarrassed for me upon reading that!) It was good, don’t get me wrong, but when you are expecting a particular flavor and embark upon finding that flavor, when it doesn’t arrive it just feels a little cruel, that’s all.
I think with some tweaking this could be very close, but as it is, it’s delicious. I don’t think anyone would be too disappointed with the results and it’s moderately low-effort to achieve.
Continue reading ‘Lemon Cream Cake’
from our fine friends at Food Network Magazine.
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.
Continue reading ‘Tilapia with Endive and Lemon-Pepper Oil’
Delicious, but not quite what I was after, these tart shells are extremely versatile for either a sweet or savory filling, and while the lemon cream was fluffy, creamy and lemony, I think it could be put to better use elsewhere, like in a full-sized pie. Similarly, though the blackberry sauce is tasty, in the sauce-making process it lost the tartness I think the lemon needed to balance it out. That said, these are still very good and not very complicated, so I thought I’d share it all the same.
Though I am calling this recipe mine, it is comprised (like most recipes) of pieces of others. These shells actually belong to a recipe for Pecan Delights that my dad sent me 3 years ago, which are ridiculously tasty, but I’m the only one in this household who likes pecan pie. (it’s wrong, I tell you. Just wrong.)
Continue reading ‘Lemon Cream and Blackberry Tartlets’
