Summer

With summer drawing to a close, I'm still not ready to say goodbye. My garden, though less productive, has a lot of vegetables that are still ripening. But, alas, the cooler weather and shorter days will bring an end to summer's bounty. But with all the beautiful late summer produce that's currently available at farmers' markets, like squash, peppers, tomatoes, and more, there's a lot of summery cooking that can still be done.

Take the opportunity to make a tomato sauce, a soup, saute or stir-fry. I love stir-frying because it's such a fun and easy method for cooking up a meal quickly. Plus you can pack it with vegetables. For this summer stir-fry, I use zucchini, bell peppers, and oyster mushrooms. And one of my favorite herbs, Thai basil, makes an aromatic and flavorful addition. What could be a better dish for using up summer vegetables than this?

With Thai flavors, much like Pad Thai, I use sweet tamarind paste and savory fish sauce to flavor the dish. Soy sauce, garlic, and ginger round out the flavor profile. It's all served over rice noodles. But there's one thing to keep in mind. The secret to a well-made stir-fry is cooking the dish in smaller portions so that everything stays crisp instead of steaming under the weight of a full wok of vegetables. Take a few minutes to toss together this healthy and colorful dish. You won't be let down by these summer flavors.

Backyard Farms is a 38-acre greenhouse located in a very small, central Maine town that raises the best tomatoes in New England! I have the good fortune to cater their important board meeting luncheons and dinners. They are all great eaters and a few are real epicureans. I love to dazzle them. My motive is always to show them all the possibilities of the fruit that they work so hard at making perfect. Every course is created around the tomato and sometimes it gets very challenging to top the last meal that I have created for them.

Last spring I wrote tomato tarts for dessert into the menu without having a clear idea how that would happen. I had 5 varieties to work with, all colors and shapes to inspire me. I ‘slept on how I would create this’ every night for two weeks until it was show time. The night before I slowly baked ½ thick slices of all five varieties of tomatoes on buttered parchment paper-250 degrees, slow enough to dehydrate them but not too long that they became leathery. It took 2 hours and I let them sit in a cool room overnight because refrigeration would make the texture change for the worse.

I gathered my French tin tart pans out of the back of my kitchen cabinet, buttered them and preceded to take this dessert from the drawing board of my mind to the dessert table. I imagined that every component of this dessert should be seamless, meaning - not any part would dominate the other. So, I made a pastry crust with homemade tomato paste, finely ground and toasted pine nuts and dried basil. Why, dry basil? It is dried already, stable, not over powering and perfect. I know, a bit too much thinking, but this dessert was going to rock!

Poke Cake was created by Jell-O in 1969 to help increase sales of their product. I saw this recipe on a cooking show a couple of months ago, and they had updated the method to include real strawberries (and less Jell-O) which made the dessert more appealing to me.

Although it’s great summer dessert, you can make all year round because it uses frozen strawberries. Note: The top of the cake will look slightly overbaked—this keeps the crumb from becoming too soggy after the gelatin is poured on top.

I’d flown to New York for too short a time and then extended my stay because I had too many things to do and then flew home. Crowded/full flights both ways, a little delay, and by the time I reached L.A., I was flat on my back. Jet lag. No. Fever.

And for me a completely curious thing - since I think the cure for the stomach flu is a chili dog or a hamburger please with French fries - absolutely no appetite. None. I was nervous about that.

I didn’t eat anything for two days – don’t discuss my metabolism, two hours is a long time for me.

But by the third day, I still didn’t feel like I could eat anything.

Unaccustomed to any processed food, maybe blame it on the “cheese plate” if you can call it that that comes packaged on the plane if they put enough on and you can in fact purchase one, I felt only the freshest thing would do. Not even chicken soup. (I have a theory by the way that chicken soup is not a curative but quite the opposite, but that’s another story.)

All I wanted was some kind of broth, no, something slightly more substantial. Home-made vegetable soup. The easiest thing in the world.