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Summer Potluck Favorites

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Watermelon small
Despite the seasonally cold and rainy weather that has swept across the majority of the US over the last few days, the beginning of summer is approaching in all its three-day-weekend glory. I love the bookends that Memorial Day and Labor Day offer to summer: for many, they mark the first and last travel weekends, family weekends and most significantly, cookout and potluck weekends of this productive season.

I always look forward to summer potlucks. As someone who hates to eat just one thing for dinner, the wide array of casserole dishes, salad bowls, and serving platters squashed together on an eight-foot table is a favorite sight of mine. I also relish the chance to pull out a few of my favorite recipes that are either too large or too high-calorie to cook for our two-person household. I imagine you have a few of these recipes of your own.

But if you don’t, or if you’re looking for something new to bring to any festivities you may have planned for the weekend, I dug through the archives for my favorite summer dishes that make for good sharing.

Broccoli Cauliflower Salad

Side salad
While I first learned to make this salad as a light, fresh foil to rich and heavy holiday menus, I find it really shines at summer cookouts and potlucks. It does take some time to prep as all the ingredients must be chopped and layered, but this can be done a day in advance. By adding the dressing immediately before serving, the result is a textured, satisfyingly crunchy salad that you cohorts will love. It’s almost a sure bet that your salad bowl will come home with you completely empty.

Caramelized Onion Dip

Dippity dip dip
This dip is easily one of my favorite culinary discoveries. Piles of onions are caramelized down to the soft, sugary, sultry versions of themselves. Then, mixed into Greek yogurt and mayonnaise, a delectable ambrosia emerges. I make this exclusively parties and potlucks: it’s not particularly high-calorie on its own, the thick-cut potato chips are a different story. Spread the calorie love!

Strawberry Rhubarb & Goat Cheese Toasts

Fancy breakfast
‘Tis the season for strawberries and rhubarb! And it’s ALWAYS the season for goat cheese and toasty bread. Give your party-goers a little DIY fun with these easy toasts.

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Cheddar & Apple Salad Bites

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Little appetizers

There is rarely a time when, if one is put in front of me, I will turn down a savory bite of something served on a cracker. Whether it’s cheese and fruit or creamy dips or thinly sliced cold cuts, if I lived alone and chose to appease only my deepest food-desires, I might never lift a fork to a plate of un-crackered food again.

Tray of tasty treats

These little bites grew out of a fortuitous collection of ingredients I happened to have on hand after returning home in January. A last hoorah of apples from the fall, a couple packs of crackers I didn’t use at my food-filled Christmas party, and a precious gift of maple cheddar from some dear friends who live in Wisconsin.

The stars of the show

Apple & cheddar cheese are a match made in heaven. The pairing of a sharp, creamy bit of cheese against a sweet, juicy apple would be delicious enough, all on their own, on these crisp little crackers. And I won’t lie, I’ve eaten my fair share of little bites just like that. But these little bites are more than that. The apple and cheddar are chopped into tiny little wedges and cubes with a tangy, punchy dressing.

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Community Garden: First Planting

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Three weeks ago, I finally gained access to a few square feet of earth to grow some of my own food.

Buuuuuuut then I spent the next 15 days traveling, working extra shifts, and spending time with my parents on their visit to the Tar Heel State.

Last weekend, though, I finally knew I’d have an afternoon to plant!

I just had to decide what to plant.

The first step, before any little green things could start growing my my 10’x4′ plot, was to make a plan. Brad chuckled that my obsession with organization was to blame for this, but it’s actually both important and common to plan out the garden well before any seeds or plants are obtained. Traditionally, gardens are planted in long rows with furrows in between for watering, which works very well for large plots but doesn’t really benefit a gardener with just a few square feet. So I borrowed a book from my dad called Square Food Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew.  Square Foot Gardening is a guide for organizing these smaller spaces to maximize the available soil without packing plants in too closely and limiting their growth.


Next, I found a very useful page on the North Carolina Cooperative Extension website with a year-round calendar of the best timing for seeding, transplanting, and harvesting all manner of vegetables. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to living in a place where there is more than one option for planting: in Colorado, gardens are planted as late in the spring as possible, and then fingers are crossed in hopes against a surprise freeze. I made a list of the recommended varieties for a June planting and made my rounds at the farmers market nursery vendors.

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Guacamole

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I find the phrase “holy guacamole” somewhat misleading. Holy things are revered. They are viewed from afar. They are stored in stone cathedrals and world museums.

They are never scooped onto chips, dolloped onto quesadillas, or spooned directly out of the bowl.

By these guidelines, this is decidedly unholy guacamole.

Cinco de Mayo was as good of an excuse as any to buy avocados and make my favorite electric-green dip. I generally try to limit my produce purchases to those grown locally, but the convergence of both a holiday AND a dinner invitation were enough to merit an exception.

The cilantro on the porch, however, was ready to harvest! After researching HOW to harvest cilantro without killing the plant and preventing future growth, I went to the balcony armed with scissors and a bowl and voila! Really fresh cilantro!

Guacamole is one of those things that can be prepared “perfectly” in a million different ways. Some guacs are smooth and creamy, some are chunky and spicy, some have tomatoes, some don’t. Personally, I’m in the no tomato camp. If I want tomatoes, I’ll eat salsa from the other dip bowl, thank you very much.

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New Years Pensive, 2013 Edition

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The sun sets

The New Year always offers such a nice, fresh start. A blank slate. New calendars, a few months with no plane tickets to buy, no approaching major holidays (or holiday parties). But I don’t exactly believe in New Years Resolutions. You can probably guess why. I don’t think I’ve ever made one that really worked. Often, my goals and resolutions are tied heavily to a season, a school year, a semester, or a show. But at this point in the year, I do like setting a few little goals for myself. Some specific, some general, some philosophical, some pragmatic.

At the risk of over-sharing, here’s a list of some little wants, needs, goals, and plans I have for the coming year.

  1. Cultivate a garden worthy of hobbits.
  2. Go outside every day (commuting and errands don’t count, no cheating).
  3. Explore salads.
  4. Don’t let the groundhog scarf up all the baby plants in the garden this year.
  5. Don’t freak out if the groundhog scarfs up all the baby plants in the garden this year.
  6. Join a CSA.
  7. Floss, dang it.
  8. Complete my watch-all-the-Disney-animated-features-in-chronological-order-of-release project (next up: Lady and the Tramp.)
  9. Learn to cook Swiss chard. Also, eggplant.
  10. Get. A. Passport.
  11. Give generously.
  12. Drive the Blue Ridge Parkway in October or BUST!
  13. Throw a Harry Potter theme party.
  14. Visit my sister.
  15. Write more.
  16. Read more.
  17. Laugh till I turn a little purple more.
  18. Call my grandmas more.
  19. Send fifty surprise letters.
  20. Don’t wish away any months, weeks, days, or hours. Each is rare if not unique.

That’s probably not all. But it feels like a start. Some things to look forward to.

What’s on your mind for 2013?

In the Tulips

Money Where Your Mouth Is: The Fall and The Year

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Im-not-totally-crazy

On January 1st of last year, I began meticulously tracking my food purchases, both for groceries and for dining out, to see how much of my money was going toward locally-produced & sustainably-grown food. It was a daunting task. I logged every receipt, made notes of my cash use at farmers markets and on nights out, and even calculated the market value of the produce grown in my garden plots. Though I originally planned a monthly post documenting my progress, life did what it does and I ended up grouping together the months in roughly seasonal quarters. Now, having tracked for a year, I wanted to take a look back at my spending to see how I did.

But first: a brief moment to discuss my September-December expenses (since, you know, that just ended).

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Breakfast Crostinis

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Weekend!

Weekend!

This is one of those rare weekends when I have not a single show to work. I love working in performing arts, but oooooh how I do relish these weekends with minimal events.


I feel like a superhero the Friday before a full weekend. So many potential things to do… elaborate cooking projects! Sleeping in! Planting seeds! Reading on the porch!

And of course, the opportunity to make fancy breakfasts. Or at least something fancier than a poached egg and an apple, my normal morning fare.

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Cranberry Maple Granola

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Hi.

I’m finally clearing out the dust bunnies and cobwebs from my little food blog, which has been somewhat abandoned on a shelf for a while while my job has been the focus of my creative energy. The last six months have been exhilarating, exhausting, and exciting, but as a result, I’ve felt culinarily dead inside. I’ve been in triage mode: cooking only the fastest and easiest recipes in my arsenal (that is, when I cooked at all) and focusing on meals that made lots of leftovers so I only needed to cook every few days. Finally though, the muse is slowly re-awakening. I am interested once more in trying out new recipes, and more importantly, taking twice as long to make them so I can take pictures of the process to share with you.

But I’m not jumping back into the deep end, exactly. What I needed was some granola, and when I felt pretty meh about the options available in the cereal aisle, I grabbed a canister of oats ran for it, deciding I’d figure something out when I got home. And thanks to my sister’s excellent Christmas present, I found the answer pretty quickly: a ridiculously easy granola recipe with only three ingredients. I decided to add a fourth, but only because I had some cranberries in the pantry.

I’ve made granola before, and I’ll be honest, there are a few reasons I don’t make it very often. First, I go through phases with yogurt, so it’s not something that strikes my fancy very often. Second, it’s kind of a hassle to round up all the ingredients. So this recipe, with only oats, salt, and maple syrup, sounded too good to be true. BUT IT ISN’T.

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Rhubarb Marlow

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Though the last few months have been a meteorological roller coaster here in Colorado, the temperatures that now soar up near or above 90 every day indicate that summer has finally arrived in full. The air conditioner in our apartment can hardly keep up with the summer sun, blazing through our western-facing windows on its long descent toward the mountains. Fortunately, our freezer faces no such challenge and can house within it a treasure trove of icy treats perfect for combating the summer heat. And what better way to welcome the arrival of the season than with a dessert that features one of its most celebrated fruits?

Ahhh, rhubarb. Such pretty stalks. Such poisonous leaves. (Seriously, don’t eat the leaves.) And such a short growing season that it’s best to indulge heavily when it finally appears. I can hardly prevent myself from making into my favorite Rhubarb Crisp, but in an effort to broaden my horizons, I dug into a very, very vintage cookbook to find some new ideas. To my delight, I discovered marlow, a dessert that is now so out of the common psyche that when I poked around to learn more, I couldn’t even find it on Wikipedia.

From what I’ve pieced together, marlow is a marshmallow-based dessert that can either be frozen to mimic ice cream or chilled to mimic mousse. It can feature a variety of flavors as the marshmallow, sugar, and heavy cream act as a clean canvas onto which you can paint rhubarb, cherries, chocolate, butterscotch, or anything else you want to eat for dessert. After the fruit (in this case) is cooked down with sugar, the marshmallows and whipped cream are mixed in to create a frothy, fluffy mixture ready for freezing.

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Workday Breakfast Burritos

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Easy Breakfast Burritos
When I moved to Columbus last January, Brad and I encountered a major first: we began working on the same schedule. With my former life in theatre and Brad’s many years of graduate and then law school, we always operated on schedules that left us with very few hours that we were both at home. But now, both working very regularly-scheduled jobs close enough that we actually carpool, we suddenly found ourselves facing a dilemma: who has to get up first?

Simple ingredients
For lots of reasons, I was the lucky winner to set my clock earlier and use the shower first. I like to pack my lunch in the morning, I blow-dry my hair, I could daudle around a bit. And one day, for a treat, I made us a hot, freshly-cooked breakfast. It wasn’t a major affair: there were no biscuits, no gravy, no French toast or quiches. But it was hot, it was savory, and it was DELICIOUS.

It was this breakfast burrito. Don’t be afraid! These take about 10 minutes to make, start to finish, and they take fairly basic ingredients. Sure, you can gussy up a breakfast burrito with sausage, bacon, peppers and onions, all kinds of things: but the basics are utterly delightful and allow for quick, weekday breakfasting.

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