What's Cooking This Weekend? Weekend of July 10-11, 2010

What's cooking this weekend? We are thinking about mozzarella toasts, and perhaps some fresh pasta with grilled eggplant from the garden. What about you? Here are some ideas from the past week at The Kitchn that may help inspire you.

• Want a bumper crop of recipes ideas? Try these Italian or Asian favorites, or one of these stay-cool dishes.

• A lovely light-filled Carroll Gardens kitchen.

• Ingredient perplexities solved: Red currants, olive oil, instant corn flour, and BPA-free canned tomatoes.

• Better homegrown rhubarb, and homemade rhubarb vodka.

• Our readers' favorite cookbooks for international cuisines.

• Sliceable popsicles! (Not SPAM.)

• A great cheese from Texas and a tasty beer from Colorado.

• Bakeware for your toaster oven and a favorite food processor.

• A colorful lunch tiffin.

• Going on vacation soon? Pick up one of these food-related souvenirs in your travels.

Happy weekend! Stay cool, and don't forget to tell us what you're cooking. We'd love some fresh ideas to carry us through the weekend.

(Image: Liz Vidyarthi)

Comments (19)

It's hot, it's humid, my dishwasher is broken, and God I am sick of cooking. But I'm also broke, have a fridge full of produce, and...I'll be cooking. Spanish tortilla, ratatouille, pesto, risi e bisi, hummus. I'm still trying to make a hummus that can rival Sabra. I am so not there. So there's something to look forward to: maybe THIS is the weekend I nail a really great hummus!

I'm going to the County Fair so forget cooking (at least for Saturday). I'm going with the Holy Trinity of corn dog, beer, and funnel cake!

No cooking for the weekend. Tomorrow, lunch with dear friend Ann, sit outside with the French guy, you know, Al Fresco. Sunday, try out a catfish joint with another friend.

And, cmcinnyc, broken dishwasher, oh bummer, time to brush up on utensil and dish minimization eatery.

We made pear butter, our tree is loaded. Figs are next. Shrimp on the bbq tomorrow and movies all weekend.

Brunch on Sunday, with eggs, bacon and fresh rolls. Keeping it simple.

I can't believe the weekend is here already. Weekends are wonderful, of course, but time is just moving as fast as gods must perceive it.

Tonight, arroz con pollo. Yes, it requires a lot of heat, but I was just filled with desire for it. (America's test kitchen recipe, a bit doctored with more vinegar and garlic, though.) Tomorrow night, pasta alla Norma. Sunday, my husband's week of meal planning starts, so it's a mystery!

lawoman--pear butter sounds fantastic.

I'm currently cooking a saute of fava beans, onions, and fennel. It is hot, we have no air conditioning, and fava beans are a frigging pain, but after two hours of shelling, they'll taste great.

So far it's been a bitchin' salad nicoise and a hybrid of the tortellini-spring-veg salad featured here earlier. We're doing the hoisin pork in the slow cooker with a doctored up version of asian-y peanut slaw later. Plus some brown butter rice krispy treats (Smitten's recipe) for a World Cup/Housewarming party for friends. And somewhere in there is a grilled ratatouillee with the CSA produce. Whew!

Although it's humid as hell in the Midwest, my sympathy goes out to the folks in the Northeast! May you all find a cold pool and a colder cocktail.

It's hot, sticky and 2 of us are fighting a virus with fevers... All I want is chilled watermelon (don't even have the energy to go to the store and get the fixings for a watermelon gazpacho) and interesting salads...

Alas, the 6 year old (who persuaded us to buy her a copy of The Silver Spoon for Children when we were at Eataly in Torino) got up this morning, put on a shirt and tie (? her father's Bugs Bunny tie) found the 00 flour, and commenced making fresh pasta. Oy... This is what happens if you send 'em to Montessori and teach 'em to read... just stand back... I sense there is a rolling pin and a pot of unpleasantly boiling water in my immediate future...

(by the way, nobody, but nobody here has air conditioning... not even window units exist... and today it is already sweltering...)

I'm making the awesome tomato tart you guys posted from David Lebovitz! We're having friends over later today and it will be perfect. I also just started mixing up my third batch of four-hour baguette so far this week. They are going like hotcakes, as fast as I can make them. Hubby made some pate de campagne the other day so we're still enjoying that too.

I also want to make an almond cake, maybe tomorrow. Also from David Lebovitz.

I'll be making World Cup inspired cupcakes from the Root Beer bundt cake recipe. I'm going to make them look like little soccer balls with white fondant and black icing in hexagon patterns.

For real food, I'll just be making some chicken salad croissanwiches from some leftover chicken I have lying around. :)

Picked green walnuts from my friend's tree a and ready to start Nocino. The Vin de Noix from last year is finally nice to drink and no longer like cough medicine. Excited to experiment again but am having second thoughts about the 190 proof Diesel the ABC manager said was best for extraction. Might take it back for a vodka to reduce the astringency and bitterness extraction powers or maybe just forge ahead and see what happens two years from now.

So far, the best I've done is wildly spontaneous apple-cheese turnovers. I've tried twice to leave the house to buy ingredients, and it is WAY too hot and humid.

We were having a couple over last night, and I wanted to make the meal a bit special and also not have the oven on right before they came, so the house would be cooler. I baked a Lemon Olive Oil cake in the morning (Gourmet's fantastic fail-proof recipe) and made lemon sorbet--dessert done! We grilled marinated chicken breasts (lemon juice, olive oil, and a bit of cumin), and also did Caprese pizzas on the grill. (It was raining lightly while the grill was on, so mercifully it wasn't so hot outside.) As my guests dug into their first bites of the cake and sorbet, I received the greatest compliment I ever got for my cooking..."This is what we'll be eating in heaven!!"

So far we've had salads, a summer squash frittata, and this black raspberry tart: http://brooklynsupper.blogspot.com/2010/07/black-raspberry-tart.html

Tonight, burgers and fresh mint ice cream!

Despite being in the midst of a heat wave in Philadelphia, I still turned on the oven to bake with fresh, seasonal berries and stone fruit - http://coldcerealandtoast.com/2010/07/11/a-plum-rescue-blueberry-plum-crumble/.
Tart and crunchy - perfect summer dessert (or snack!). Tonight, we are grilling some New Jersey flounder.

My husband made an awesome grilled peanut chicken, which we wrapped up in pita with lettuce, cheese and avocado. Saturday I put the slow cooker in the garage and cooked pot roast in it. The house stayed cool!

I had some strawberries, blueberries and cherries wasting away from the farmers' market a couple weeks ago, so I grabbed a pie shell from the freezer (yeah, I know... I don't make pie dough) and flattened it out so I could use it for a crostata. Haha... "rustic tarts" work better for me because they don't need to look nice. I wanted to use up some slivered almonds I had in the pantry, too so I made a crumble topping for it.

**WOW**

I'm not usually a "dessert/pie person", but it came out great!