Trader Joe's is on a bit of a yuzu kick between yuzu kosho, green tea with yuzu spread, and now yuzu miso. What's interesting about the yuzu miso is, it's basically a jarred version of miso ae, a sauce/dressing you'd usually make from scratch.
It's typically just a combo of miso paste, brown…
Green Beans with Sesame-Miso Vinaigrette is the summer variation of an asparagus recipe I make every spring. While you do have to boil water to blanch the green beans, you won't be heating up the house for long. Served chilled, this green bean salad is just what you need for the dog days of summer…
I've got France on the brain this week. France and Croatia are headed to the World Cup final, I'm reading the Paris Wedding, then Bastille Day falls on Saturday. It's all France all the time. So it should come as no surprise that it creeped into my cooking as well. French Potato Salad with Green…
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was lamenting the end of summer. Something about back-to-school signals an end to the summer fun, but the truth of it is, it has been a grrrrrrrreat summer in Seattle. Maybe the best one we’ve had in the handful of years we’ve lived here. A long summer of…
Some long weekends I go into overdrive on cooking projects, but over this past Labor Day weekend, I felt compelled to do almost nothing. I hit the farmers market Saturday morning after having missed the two previous weeks and bought a ridiculous amount of Roma tomatoes and nectarines to stave off that nagging (read: desperate) feeling that summer is slipping away. But I didn’t have anything really in mind for them.
OJ is embarking on a new diet and exercise regimen, which puts some real food limitations on half our household, so a nectarine buckle was out of the question and I didn’t feel motivated enough to make tomato paste. So despite our larder being more than full, this weekend was about simplicity. It was also about baseball games, braving the crowds at Pike Place and stocking up on this and that at Cost Plus, but mostly, it was about simplicity.
In the summer, it's supposed to be easy to be extra virtuous. Cherries, berries, peaches. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers...the markets are overflowing with lovely produce to tempt your tastebuds. But I was anything but virtuous this weekend. It was glorious in Seattle. Summer truly arrived, the sundresses and sandals came out of hiding and we had a little barbecue. Nothing fancy, just sausages, potato salad, grilled peppers and zucchini. But something about sitting out in the warm summer sun put Doritos, Fritos and cupcakes on the menu, too. It was a "I'll start that diet on Monday," kind of weekend.
Today's post comes courtesy of my handy recipe binder. I've been clipping and keeping recipes for 10+ years, and sure, it'd be easier to just bookmark them and go back to them online when I need them. But there's something reassuring about just going to binder and knowing they'll be there. I mean, what if you bookmarked some recipe that was on someone's Angelfire Web site in 1997? It's probably toast, long ago abandoned by someone who probably moved on to Blogger or hosting their own site. (Holy cow, I just googled it, Angelfire still exists and is part of Lycos. Lycos still exists? Really?)
Anyway, I clipped the recipes for the balsamic BBQ sauce and the chopped vegetable salad. They're great for summer grilling, but luckily both are still available online.