Summer

We are big barbecue lovers over here, ribs, pulled pork and brisket make for an amazing meal. But the sauce has to be right. Like perfection. Sometimes I crave my tangy-vinegar based Eastern Carolina Barbecue Sauce. But lately I’ve been wanting something sweet with a little bit of smoke on the side.

Kansas City Style Barbecue Sauce is known for its balanced sweet-smoky-spicy flavor. It can be hard to achieve since the sweetness can easily overpower the other flavors. However, I’ve been playing and tweaking and I think I’ve finally gotten it. Practice makes perfect!

The sauce is thick and somewhat dark brown. It’s powerful and ornery with lots of attitude. I love this sauce on pulled pork and all kinds of other barbecue. I have been spending a lot of time learning about all the different regional styles of barbecue, it’s fascinating and it’s not just about the sauce.

Blueberries are intense. Intense color that stains your mouth purple. Intense sweet and tangy juice so rich it almost tastes like wine. Unlike other fruit, such as apples, they don't even need vanilla or cinnamon to give them a boost. They are the boost. The intensity of blueberries make them a nice kind of accent to other dishes, like in a fruit salad or a salsa. They are also great as polka dots in pancakes and muffins but a little trickier in pie. Just too intense. That's why I love blueberry tarts.

When you pick a bucket full you end up with about four pounds, which is a lot of blueberries! I called my mom for a recipe for a blueberry tart. This particular one uses three cups of blueberries and combines them with a sour cream filling that bakes up like a custard. Plopping blueberries into a custardy base, a pastry cream or clafouti seems like the right way to handle them.

I am hopeless when it comes to pie crust. I just don't have the pie crust mojo. So I rely on recipes with graham cracker crusts, and press-in crusts. This recipe has a crust that is no fail. Really. I swear. I'm going to use it as my default pie crust from now on. My mom cut the recipe out of a newspaper over twenty years ago so I apologize for not being able to attribute it properly. I have simplified the instructions somewhat.

I’m not sure why I love throwing summer garden parties so much. It may be because I like to cook barefoot, or because using china and silver in the yard seems both reckless and retro…It may even be because I still love Ricky Nelson’s 1972 “Garden Party” song…even though it’s not about a real garden at all. But the biggest reason is probably because, for a cook, garden parties are the easiest to throw.

Cold dishes like Almost Orzo are welcome on warm summer nights… And grilled vegetable dishes are fine hanging around for a couple of hours without being chilled or re-heated… Even some meat dishes can sit for a bit before being served.

Which means you can make almost everything ahead, set out a bountiful spread on the buffet table as the guests arrive, and then enjoy the party, rather than work it.

When you start shredding napa cabbage an amazing thing happens. It explodes. Napa cabbage grows so densely that a relatively small or medium head of cabbage not only weighs a ton, it seems to expand when you cut it up. So after shredding two heads there was no room to fit the already shredded red cabbage in the mix. I also realized there might be someone who didn't like cilantro and making two batches would allow for a little more choice of flavors.

The red cabbage cole slaw included shredded red and yellow peppers and carrots. The napa cabbage cole slaw included slivered green onions and cilantro. Both were quite tasty and tasted different though the Asian inspired dressing was exactly the same.

I like to make the cole slaw the night before I serve it. It tastes better if it has some time to mellow out a bit and soften. The other trick to making cole slaw is to add things like cilantro and green onion at the last minute, right before serving, because neither of those ingredients improve the longer they sit around.