Summer

Nothing really speaks summer better than fresh rhubarb and fresh strawberries. I love going ot the farmers market and smelling the scents of summer. Fresh fruit is everywhere: berries, stone fruit, citrus, it’s at almost every stall and one piece of fruit tastes better than the next.

Wanting to create something that screamed summer, it was a crumb cake recipe from Canelle et Vanille that inspired this recent dessert. With lots of strawberries on hand, not only did I make a whole tart for our Father’s day, family dinner but I made individual cakes (in Weck jars) for end of the year gifts.

When I stumbled upon the recipe, it inspired a memory from middle school. My first memory of a crumb cake was an aluminum, massive tray, manufactured, in the school cafeteria. I didn’t buy lunch or snack often, but on coffee cake day you can bet I had change in my pockets. The flavor of my first coffee cake is a far cry from this wonderfully light cake, but a crumb topping is a crumb topping – and that flavor is hard to beat.

With my garden laden with cherry tomatoes this year, I've tried to come up with different solutions for using them in recipes besides eating them raw as fast as they ripen. Last year I made cherry tomato salad, but even then the plants were so abundant that I fed my coworkers with tomatoes for weeks upon weeks. This year, my cherry tomatoes are the only ones that haven't been affected by the blight, which has caused havoc on farms in the Northeast. Some farmers have now resorted to burning their crops. Luckily the disease hasn't been so drastic in the small scale. This year I'm keeping all the tomatoes to myself.

For me each raw cherry tomato is a burst of powerful summer flavor, but with a bit of cooking, they are even better. One of the best ways to get the maximum flavor from vegetables is by roasting them. Roasting cherry tomatoes concentrates their flavor so that they taste almost like sun-dried tomatoes. In this recipe, I roast them with the addition of garlic, oil, red pepper flakes, and vinegar. The balsamic vinegar brings out a layer of savory sweetness while the other ingredients create a simple and very tasty sauce. There are no long hours of cooking sauce on the stove top required. Once the pasta and roasted tomatoes are combined, the addition of fresh herbs releases perfumed aromas and pungent flavors. It's truly a very satisfying and quick-to-make pasta dish.

Canned Chipotle Peppers in Adobo Sauce are simply very ripe jalapeno peppers that have been dried, smoked and packed in a sauce of tomatoes, vinegar, paprika, oregano, garlic and onion. If you’ve never cooked with them before, you’ll be shocked at what a shortcut they can be when wanting to add flavor to loads of recipes.

And, to make sure those flavors, and a couple of other ones in this marinade, really travel to the deepest parts of the chicken, buttermilk is a miracle...

Cooks in the south, like the ones I grew up with, always used buttermilk to tenderize and moisturize fried chicken...The acid in buttermilk helps break down the protein strings, which makes the bird more tender and succulent, while carrying those flavorful spices and herbs into the deepest part of the meat.

And this spicy version of the marinade those smart cooks have used for generations makes this chicken just as delicious and juicy…even though it’s grilled and not fried!

A simple pasta is a life saver. How many nights are you rescued from eating out of a box just because you know how to throw together a good simple pasta? First tip: Don’t just rely on tomato sauce to coat the pasta. I love good sweet, milky ricotta and when I’m at a store where I can find it I tend to go overboard and buy a bit too much. So it’s ricotta on toast for breakfast, ricotta with fruit for lunch and ricotta as the “sauce” for a quick seasonal pasta.

In this dish I started with ricotta, then saw I had some pesto, added a couple of tablespoons of that, then added some crunchy sweet baby tomatoes and slices of green onion. While I was waiting for my pasta water to boil I discovered a couple of tiny zucchini with flowers attached and an ear of corn that needed to be used up. So I cut the niblets off the corn, sliced the zucchini in half lengthwise and shredded the flowers with my fingers.