It’s time to stuff your face folks. Have a crowd to feed? Need to use up a bunch of vegetables? Got a hangover that needs curin’? This will do the J.O.B. It’s summer comfort food at it’s veggie best! These nachos are piled high with tons of fresh summer vegetables and layered with ooey-gooey-melty shredded cheese. Top them with your choice of condiments and it’s a gosh dang party in your veggie-lovin’ mouth!
Bluebs! …as my friend endearingly calls them. It’s blueberry season, and since I’m now hooked on fermenting fruit– check out this post on how I fermented strawberries — I had to try it with blueberries! The turned out even better than the strawbs! I also came across an incredibly simple, quick, and healthier version of a blueberry crisp that I’m excited to share. I brought it to a BBQ and folks loved it! It’s adapted from pinch of yum, and also happens to be gluten-free and vegan. With 4th of July just around the corner, both of these would be wonderful to share at picnics or grill-outs!
Welcome to the Summer Virtual Progressive Dinner blog tour hosted by Lilly’s Table! I’m excited to be the first stop on the tour and share these summertime beverages with you! Lilly selected my Peach Cucumber Basil Infused Water and Watermelon Rum Fizz for this starter course – they’re fantastic picks for leading us into the warm months when you need a refreshing cool down!
Watermelon in October? Yep! Watermelon are still popping up at my local farmers markets and last weekend at our CSA farm tour my son found a huge one that we got to take home! We couldn’t eat all of it in time, so I ended up juicing it. I got 3 quarts of delicious, sweet pleasingly-pink juice outta the sucker!
Ok, so today IS officially the first day of fall, or tonight rather…but where I live (southeast Missouri), there are still tomatoes and peppers aplenty. And thank goodness for that, because this recipe has me swooning. Plus it’s insanely easy. You take a buttload of tomatoes, a couple bell peppers, a couple jalapeños, an onion, some herbs, and a hellaton of garlic and douse it with olive oil. Season it with salt and pepper and roast it for 1 1/2 hours. It turns into a lovely melted spreadable pool of sweet spicy caramelized summer veggies. It tastes similar to a Fra Diavolo pasta sauce. You will love it. I definitely love it. Even my not-such-a-big-fan-of-tomatoes son loves it. And the best thing about it is it’s versatility. I like to spread it on toasted bread, but it would perfect as a pasta sauce. I also used it in kale and black bean quesadillas. You could serve it over grilled mushrooms or fish. Or you could puree it and add some tomato juice or milk/cream for a spicy tomato bisque. So many possibilities!
The other day I was standing at the deli counter in my grocery store waiting for a lid to an olive bar container. I stood there staring at the various “salads” that lay limp, soaked in dressings and vinegars, and couldn’t take my eyes off of the 3-bean salad. It was drowning in a pool of vinegar dressing, which I imagined was sweetened to death with loads of sugar just to make it palatable. I thought to myself, this potluck/family reunion staple needs a makeover. I’ve got green beans from my CSA and dried black beans and chickpeas waiting to be used; let’s jazz up this boring, tired salad and give it a fresh zippy kick in the beans! {see what i did there}
Over the past month I’ve made 2 new food discoveries: savory (the herb) and kimchee (Korea’s national dish). I’m in love with both…and though they may seem like strange bedfellows, I’ve put them together in this recipe.
Savory, the winter variety, was introduced to me through my CSA; one of the many awesome benefits of being a member is experimenting with new foods and flavors. To me, it tastes like a cross between thyme and flat-leaf parsley; it resembles the woodsy flavor of thyme, but also has a clean, bright quality similar to parsley. It’s a beautiful in-between seasons kind of herb. I’ve been using it in everything, including these potato kale cakes.
Sometimes you have failures in the kitchen. You come up with a recipe idea, execute it, and it just doesn’t come out right. Back to square one. It can be a real bummer.
Other times, you have recipe failures and out of them comes something brilliant! That’s what happened here. I really wanted to make peach crème brûlée. I had a bunch of peach skins I saved from making a recipe with peeled peaches. I thought I could steep the peach skins in the cream and that would impart a light peachy flavor into the crème brûlée. I was so excited. My husband and son were so excited. We couldn’t wait to crack into that sugared top and dig into the creamy peach custard! But it didn’t work. You couldn’t taste any peach at all. Major bummer.
Then an idea struck me. Why not just brûlée the peaches themselves and serve them with ice cream? Yes, so much yes!
This is weird, but every time I see eggplant I think of that old 1980’s Nintendo game Kid Icarus. My siblings and I used to play that for hours. There’s a part in that game where you’re in a dungeon and you come across an eggplant-throwing monster. You have to dodge the flying purple eggplants as you pass through the room and if you get hit by one you turn into a giant eggplant with feet. I think that game was actually where I first found out about eggplants. Strange, I know. A little sad? Perhaps.
This Tuscan bread and tomato salad is exactly why summer was invented. It brings together the lovely veg that’s simultaneously in season; a harmony of ingredients and flavor. Historically, this dish spanned all classes of 16th century Italy. Though namely a peasant dish — it was a way to use up stale bread, which back then was only baked once a week — it was also adored by nobility. Poets even wrote about it. The stale bread was soaked in water and vinegar to soften then tossed with whatever vegetables came out of the garden, most commonly onions and cucumbers. Tomatoes weren’t introduced to the salad until the 1800’s.
the Seasonal Veg Head 