Happy stone fruit season to all who celebrate (I hope all of y’all)! At least around these parts, we are in the thick of it– the farmers’ market is row after row of perfect little quarts and pints of peaches, plums, apricots, and every hybrid thereof with a confusing name of which you could ever dream. And I JUST. Want to eat them all the time. For breakfast (with yogurt! On a buttermilk biscuit with some homemade ricotta!), for a snack, for dinner (in a sandwich! In a salsa! On a salad! In a salad dressing! Grilled!), for dessert (also grilled! With ice cream! Cooked into a caramel! Straight up the way nature intended!). There is no losing. There is only winning to be had in this tiny, stone fruit-sized pocket of life. And let’s just take that and be glad of it, eh?
August Faves
#1: The peach focaccia sandwiches. Making all the accessories over the weekend made this a super quick, no-cook weeknight meal, and there are enough flavor bombs going on in there that you don’t miss having a meat in your sandwich even a little bit. I will preach the gospel of the superiority of homemade ricotta til the day I die!
#2: The tarte tatin– my first! Who says tarte tatins are only for dessert? (Not me, in case I failed to make that clear.)
#3: Truthfully, the shrimp cocktail. Nobody on earth loves shrimp cocktail more than I do, except the man I married. We weren’t even done with dinner before he started asking when we could do this again. Highly recommend! My two personal pro tips: 1) Start small so you can add more, but make that cocktail sauce nice and spicy with the horseradish. 2) When poaching the shrimp, remove the pot of boiling water from the burner, then add the shrimp and cover for a few minutes to poach. Gentler poaching = more tender shrimp!
Honorary Mention: Oh, what’s that, another Erin McDowell recipe? Who could’ve seen this coming. But seriously, these plum cobbler bars are just sososo delicious. And though they aren’t difficult to make as written, they’d be absurdly easy if you opted to skip a few steps and not make your own jam…just saying! (Though if you go this route, maybe try to use a jam on the less-sweet side.)
- Sheet pan kielbasa with cabbage and beans
- A very very oldie but goodie: Gnocchi with summer squash, corn, basil, and goat cheese
- Shrimp cocktail (yes, that was really the whole meal. It was glorious)
- Potato and kidney bean tacos with lime crema
- Buttery tomato and cinnamon-spiced rice with crispy tofu and salty lime yogurt
- Soy-marinated grilled flank steak with grilled foil packet miso potatoes
- Leftover fried tomato rice with zucchini, peas, crab, and egg
- My favorite focaccia sandwiches with peaches, caramelized onions, homemade ricotta, and pesto
- Lobster BLTs on focaccia with roasted tomato jam
- BBQ tofu, corn, and black bean quinoa bowls with basil and honey-lime vinaigrette
- Green leaf lettuce salad with grilled shrimp and asparagus, bocconcini, pistachios, and basil vinaigrette
- Tomato, peach, caramelized onion, and kalamata olive tarte tatin (if you’re using leftover onions like I was and made the pastry dough ahead of time, this is actually a pretty easy weeknight meal!)
- Grilled chicken with parsley-olive sauce, grilled corn on the cob, and grilled nectarines
- Grilled flank steak and foil packet potatoes (for once I omitted my favorite marinade from the steak and made it super simply, and omitted the miso from the potatoes too. The steak was still delicious in its own way and I *might* be willing to do that again someday; the potatoes were fine but you know what would have made them better? Miso. Lesson learned!)
- Castelvetrano olive, pea, and leftover potato frittata with saffron and smoked paprika, with special sauce (read: mayo/ketchup/sriracha)
- Romaine salad with cucumbers, gorgonzola, and peach jam vinaigrette, and sourdough topped with butter, sliced radish, and flaky salt
- Romaine salad with grilled honey-lime shrimp, radish, cucumber, pistachios, and peach vinaigrette, with grilled sourdough
Law and Lentils 