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’
I love pasta. It’s easy to cook and you have to work really hard (or use guanciale) to make it taste bad. This particular one is new to me, contains at least two ingredients I used to refuse to touch and I want to shove it in my mouth all the time.
I’ve mentioned the knife skills class pretty frequently, and I feel like I learned a lot from it though since my retention is so awful I should really take it again, and I celebrated the purchase of a new chef’s knife with recreating the pasta that Chef Bob served to us with the fruits of our labor…with one small problem. He wouldn’t give me a recipe.
Now, he had no problem telling me everything that went in it, but as I know some of you are aware I function best with a specific set of instructions, ESPECIALLY with a new recipe. Not having portions or measurements of any kind broke my brain a little bit but I am totally pleased with the outcome, it tasted exactly like I wanted it to, and now I’m going to share it with you.
Continue reading ‘Linguine with Summer Vegetables’
Recipe courtesy of Serious Eats
As an extreme novice home chef, I’ve been generally operating under the concept that the more complicated and time-consuming the recipe is, the more I’ll learn from it. Mark Bittman, aka The Minimalist, from the New York Times tells me I’m a moron and I can accept and partially agree with that. I still feel like if a recipe is too simple, or too easy to prepare, it’s a copout of some kind, but in the interest of making sure my kid eats what we do (to try to encourage an adventurous palate) and feeding the one I’m pregnant with more than just Otter Pops and Doritos, I’ve been trying to add simple, fast recipes to my Bi-Monthly Menu of Doom. The past two weeks have featured more of the fast pastas, soups and this is one of them.
Continue reading ‘Tortellini with Brown Butter and Sage’
