Summer

Summer
Page 34
Summer Foraging: Fennel Pollen
A few days ago we were passing by a field of wild fennel and made a mental note to return and collect some of the yellow, anise-flavored flowers. Now we’re really keen on going back after reading yesterday’s article in The Atlantic on growing and harvesting your own fennel pollen and seeds.Here in California, fennel is considered a weed, but it’s a delicious one!
Emily Han
Jul 30, 2010
Quick Tip: How to Quickly Trim a Big Pile of Beans
Let’s face it: trimming green beans is a chore. Laboriously snipping the tops and tails off of each bean with a paring knife definitely gets old after a while. Particularly when you’ve still got most of the pile left to go. Here’s what we do to make the job go by a little more quickly.You can use a chef’s knife or a paring knife for this, whichever you feel more comfortable using.
Emma Christensen
Jul 19, 2010
Weekend Meditation: Summer is for Ripening
Today’s meditation is a wish for you*: may you be thoroughly, completely, absolutely in the middle of Summer. May you notice the hot pricks of sun on your skin (maybe just a little too hot but not too too hot.) May you wear big fat sunglasses and little patches of sweat here and there on your body. I hope your pace has slowed, even just a little. You can even be a bit cranky, but not so much that it completely spoils the fun.*with apologies to folks in the Southern hemisphere!
Dana Velden
Jul 18, 2010
Crisp & Refreshing: 19 Fabulous White Wines for Summer
It is hot out there, and while I do love a full-bodied red wine with dinner, these days I am all about refreshing whites, rosé or lighter reds that I can serve slightly chilled. This week let’s talk about the whites that are great for these hot summer days.
Mary Gorman-McAdams
Jul 15, 2010
Recipe: Grilled Pork Loin
I cook for a big crowd of people at least once a week — sometimes twice. And lately I have been relying on the grill, since it doesn’t heat up the kitchen. But sometimes I get a little tired of grilling individual pieces of chicken, or individual burgers that have to watched and tended. It’s nice to have some bigger, simpler options. This pork loin is one of those: Slap it on the grill, walk away, come back, feed a crowd. Well, that is a little deceptive.
Faith Durand
Jul 14, 2010
The Perfect Summer Dessert Recipe: Melon with Lime-Chile Syrup
This dessert is dedicated to those of you who have seen triple digits on the thermometer this week and cannot imagine firing up the oven under any circumstances. Here, slices of melon provide a cool, silky texture while the syrup punches up the sweet and adds an exciting bit of heat. The lime balances the flavors and refreshes the palate. But best of all, this dessert is quick and simple and leaves the oven resolutely turned off.
Dana Velden
Jul 9, 2010
A Traditional Polish Drink with Rhubarb and Honey
We love rhubarb and always appreciate a new, refreshing way to use it. Here’s one that’s sure to appeal to you during this summer season. It’s a cold, non-alcoholic, elixir from Poland that includes rhubarb and honey:Here’s a link to one recipe that’s basic and without alcohol. Our searches around the internet turned up other versions with rum, gin, or even with the rhubarb and honey infusing wine! But we like this basic version for a thirst-quencher in this heat.
Regina Yunghans
Jun 28, 2010
Summer Recipe: Celery and Grapefruit Salad with Parmesan
Meet my new favorite salad. I looked in my fridge a few weeks ago and found nothing but celery hearts and grapefruit. Hmm. Was that enough for a salad? Did I need any other vegetables? Those are a couple of strong-tasting things, on their own! But you know what? It all works — so simple, so crunchy, so cold and refreshing!This is a very punchy salad; there is a lot of flavor, and a lot of crunch.
Faith Durand
Jun 25, 2010
Serving Trays for Outdoor Dining
Getting the meal from the kitchen to an outdoor table is often our biggest challenge when it comes to dining outside. To help with this, we have large, round plastic trays. They’re roomy enough to make the job much easier, and stackable so they store away without taking up much space when they’re not in use. While ours are nothing pretty to look at, here are some options that are:FIRST ROW: • 1 A galvanized tray like this one from Cooking.
Regina Yunghans
Jun 22, 2010
10 Things To Eat — Even When it’s Too Hot to Eat!
When the summer temperatures start climbing, we often don’t feel especially hungry. The temperature extremes of the hot blasting outdoors and freezing air conditioned indoors sometimes takes away our appetite. Here, though, are ten good snacks for for when you feel like it’s too hot ot even eat!1. Chilled Hard Boiled Eggs: They’re small, easy to consume and pack a punch of protein. Add a sprinkle of salt and you’re all set. 2.
Sarah Rae Smith
Jun 21, 2010
Gooey and Caramelized: Strawberry Tarte Tatin
When we find fresh strawberries at the market, we tend to envision them being eaten in their simplest form– sliced into something like this, preferably, or maybe macerated with a bit of sugar. But this changed our mind. A bright, glossy, caramelized layer of strawberries baked with a puff pastry crust. Yum.This beautiful treat comes from Anita Chu at the blog Dessert First, and the recipe is adapted from Donna Hay.
Elizabeth Passarella
Jun 15, 2010
Recipe Review: Improvisational Cherry Vinegar
Most fruit-flavored vinegars that you can purchase in the grocery store are too sweet and fake tasting for me. So in the summertime, when fruit is abundant and cheap, I like to put up a bottle or two of fruit vinegar. Nothing could be easier or tastier. It’s cherry season here on the west coast, so this week it was cherry vinegar!I had a handful of leftover fresh cherries after last week’s cherry roasting experiment, so I thought I would try making some cherry vinegar.
Dana Velden
Jun 14, 2010
Crazy for Arugula: 9 Recipes to Inspire and Satisfy
How much do we love the sharp, zesty flavor of arugula? Answer: a whole lot! Arugula is really one of our favorite greens to come out of the early warm months. It seems to add just the right touch of fresh summer flavor to whatever we happen to be making, whether it’s salad or pizza or pesto!1. Arugula with Orzo and Garden Tomatoes – Very simple no-cook pasta for a warm summer evening.2.
Emma Christensen
Jun 8, 2010
Vodka Watermelon! How to Fill a Fruit with Booze Sweet Paul
So, you’re at a picnic, and you bring out what looks like an average watermelonboozy popsiclesThis tip comes from Sweet Paul (who has a beautiful online magazine), and he makes it look ridiculously easy. Cut a hole in the watermelon, stick in a funnel, fill with vodka, let it sit for a couple of days in the fridge.Even better, he uses lime-infused vodka. Yum. • Get the full instructions at Sweet Paul Has anyone ever done this? Does it work? What does it taste like?
Elizabeth Passarella
Jun 3, 2010
How To Make Umeshu (Japanese Plum Liqueur)
The other day, I posted about Japanese ume plumsThis sweet, fruity liquor is super easy to make, requires few ingredients, and when it’s ready to drink, you can eat the plums, too! It’s terrific on its own, on the rocks, or mixed with a little sake or sochu.Rock sugar is used because it dissolves more slowly than table sugar, and it flavors the alcohol more proportionally.
Kathryn Hill
Jun 3, 2010
What’s the Difference? New vs. Fingerling Potatoes
New potatoes, another teeny tiny vegetableNew PotatoesThese are immature potatoes that get thinned out early in the season order to make room for the rest of the potatoes to mature. New potatoes aren’t a variety by themselves, but are simply the baby version of any potato a farmer grows. In fact, those being sold as “baby” potatoes are the same as new potatoes, or slightly more mature.
Emma Christensen
May 28, 2010
Best Picnic Knives
At some point before I became a real adult, someone older and wiser told me I should always have a good knife in the car. Not for safety, but for picnics. So with summer knocking at our doors, it’s time to make sure we’re all prepared for eating out in the wild.Last weekend, I gathered eight hungry picnickers together to test eight knives.
Sara Kate Gillingham
May 27, 2010
Tipsy Affogato: You Must Try This Soon!
Hey, it’s Friday, everyone! If you weren’t already excited for the weekend, we have one more reason for you. It’s called a tipsy affogato. That’s “tipsy,” as in “containing alcohol,” and “affogato,” as in “we don’t know what, but it’s something frozen and Italian and delicious.” Hellooo, favorite new summer treat!
Emma Christensen
May 7, 2010
Seasonal Fruit Desserts: From Orchard, Farm, and Market by Deborah Madison Book Review
I think of dessert as a curtsy to the meal; a nod of thanks; the “peace be with you” of the church that is dinner.We’re honoring that final course of the meal with a site-wide, week-long celebration of dessert at TheKitchn.com.Earlier I spoke of David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert. Another new dessert book that stands out is Seasonal Fruit Desserts (Broadway Books) by Deborah Madison, who I consider to be one of a few grand dames of the farm-driven cooking movement.
Sara Kate Gillingham
Apr 30, 2010
Docking vs. Pie Weights to Blind Bake a Pie Crust
We’ve been flipping through our recipe file dreaming about summer pies – one can never start planning these things too early, after all! One instruction we frequently come across involves blind baking. This is a technique that always seemed intimidating to us until we finally jumped in and figured it out.Blind baking is really just another way of saying “pre-baking.” It simply means that you bake the pie crust on its own before adding the filling.
Emma Christensen
Apr 28, 2010
Dessert Recipe du Jour: Plum Crumble
Have you seen the latest irresistible recipe making the blog rounds? We’re speaking about plum crumble, a dish that Molly of Orangette just put on the menu at Delancey, and a dish that has a quite impressive lineage going back through Luisa Weiss and Marian Burros. But sources aside, this dish speaks for itself. It’s freaking fantastic.We love plums; they are one of our favorite fruits in late summer and early fall.
Faith Durand
Sep 25, 2009
Ingredient Spotlight: Cucuzza (“Googootz”)
In the last episode of The Sopranos, Tony asks Carmela, “Where’s googootz?” “Googootz” is an Italian term of endearment; Tony was referring to his son, AJ. “Googootz” is also the Italian slang for “zucchini,” and refers to a squash-like vegetable that Italians and Italian-Americans grow called cucuzza. Cucuzza is an Italian summer vegetable that is eaten and prepared like a zucchini.
Kathryn Hill
Sep 1, 2009
Sweet Wines That Are Cool With Ice Cream
August is Stay Cool! month at the Kitchn. As the temperatures have been rising, so has our frequency of serving ice cream for dessert. This always brings up the question of what are the best wines to serve with ice cream. Of course, you don’t have to serve wine with ice cream, but if you do here are some of my favorites.First, a handy rule of thumb is to remember that for desserts the wine should be sweeter than the dessert. As ice cream is very sweet you need an extremely sweet wine.
Mary Gorman-McAdams
Aug 27, 2009
How To Make State Fair Nachos At Home
Fair food nachos aren’t like any nachos we’ve had anywhere else. No fancy sauces or piles of extra toppings. No impressive presentation or attempts to win us over. We’re simply handed a paper tray of corn chips that have been drizzled with the creamiest, saltiest, and most strangely addictive cheese sauce imaginable.Wandering between booths with the sun on our faces, this is heaven.The secret ingredient to that extra-oozy, gooey sauce is our old frenemy, American Cheese.
Emma Christensen
Aug 14, 2009
How To Make Funnel Cakes At Home Street Fair Food Week
If we had to name the ultimate Fair Food, hands down it would have to be funnel cakes. The sweet smell of fluffy, frying bread in combination with powdered sugar is enough to make even the strongest go weak in the knees.Well, lucky for you, they aren’t difficult to make and are perfect for a party or just a weeknight snack.Not wanting to disappoint anyone’s favorite childhood (or adult!
Sarah Rae Smith
Aug 12, 2009
Street Food Recipe: Elote (Roasted Sweet Corn with Cheese)
Sweet corn is the perfect thing to eat right now – seasonal, fresh and perfect with almost nothing added to it. But just in case you’re ready for something new, let’s load it up with lots of rich and delicious toppings. What do you say? You may be familiar with elote, a Mexican sweet corn treat.
Joanna Miller
Aug 11, 2009
How To Make Lemon Shake Ups at Home Street Fair Food Week
It’s the middle of August, and you know what that means? It’s fair time! County, state, and street fairs are happening all over America right now. We admit to secret cravings for fair food: the fried dough glories of funnel cakes, and the once-a-year indulgence of a hot corn dog on a stick. But we don’t feel like braving the crowds this year, so instead we’re bringing you fair food for your own kitchen!
Faith Durand
Aug 10, 2009
An Easy Hot-Weather Soup Recipe: Finnish Summer Soup (Kesäkeitto)
Many years ago my aunt gave me the Sunset Complete Vegetarian Cookbook, which contained a recipe for Finnish Summer Soup. It was an easy-to-make concoction that contained potatoes, onions, carrots, and green beans swimming in a creamy broth. Later on I learned this was known in Finland as kesäkeitto (don’t ask me how you pronounce that) and the Finns use more vegetables than the humble Sunset recipe did.
Kathryn Hill
Aug 7, 2009
How Cold Should Beer Be Served? Beer Guide
Cracking open an icy cold beer on a hot afternoon is as much a part of summer as cook outs and frisbee. Or is it? As refreshing as a cold beer can be, we recently learned that we might be doing some of those beers a real disservice!In talking to the bartender at a local brewery restaurant, we learned that they serve all their beers at around 42° Fahrenheit, which is significantly warmer than is common in the United States.
Emma Christensen
Aug 5, 2009
Cool Recipe: Michelle’s Sparkling Strawberry Lemonade Stay Cool!
We asked you how you’re staying cool this August, and your answers are already coming in! Here’s our first reader Stay Cool! recipe.Name: MichelleLocation: PennsylvaniaHow are you staying cool? Lots of icy cold fruit drinks keep us cool on summer days. Sparkling strawberry lemonade recipe below!Sparkling Strawberry Lemonade4-6 lemons, enough to equal 1 cup of lemon juice1-1 1/2 c. simple syrup (recipe follows)16 oz.
Faith Durand
Aug 5, 2009
Seasonal Pairing: Peaches and Tomatoes
Peaches and tomatoes – it wouldn’t be summer without them, but up until recently, we’d never eaten them at the same time. Hurrah for new taste discoveries! The golden sweetness of ripe peaches and rich, tangy flavor of heirloom tomatoes are wonderful together. Have you ever tried this combination?
Emily Han
Aug 3, 2009
What Is Malabar Spinach?
Did you know that salad really isn’t a summer food? Yes, we can find tidy greens in the supermarket year round, but most lettuce varieties — as well as our beloved arugula — really don’t like summer heat. Unless grown under inside or under cover, most greens bolt, wilt, fail to germinate, and basically pout all summer long until the cooler weather of early fall arrives. So the real stars of summer salads and sautés are found elsewhere. Enter Malabar spinach.
Faith Durand
Jul 30, 2009
Food Science: Why Salad Greens Wilt
On a hot summer evening, a big leafy salad for dinner sounds just about perfect. That is, until the greens start to wilt and the dressing gets all watery. We always figured this phenomenon had something to do with the liquid in the salad dressing, but it turns out the culprit is a different ingredient!In his book, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman explains some of the science behind wilting greens.
Emma Christensen
Jul 21, 2009
Recipe: Peanut Butter Ice Cream with Trader Joe’s Chocolate Covered Mini Peanut Butter Crackers
OK everyone, here is an ice cream mix-in you do not want to miss. While at Trader Joe’s last weekend, stocking up for a lunch with family, I spied these milk chocolate covered peanut butter crackers on the shelf of new releases. These aren’t the sort of thing I normally buy, but I had ice cream on the brain.Wouldn’t these be perfect for my peanut butter-loving guests, I thought. And yes, yes they were.
Faith Durand
Jul 8, 2009
Seasonal Spotlight: Pattypan Squash
The flying saucers have landed! With their disc-like form and scalloped edges, pattypans are among the most distinctive of summer squashes.Known by a multitude of names including pattypan, cymling, scalloped, custard, or sunburst squash, they range in color from white to green to yellow and size from one to several inches in diameter. Smaller squashes are the most tender, with a delicate, buttery or olive oil-like flavor.
Emily Han
Jul 7, 2009
How To Turn Watermelon Into a Full-Blown Dessert
Early watermelons are starting to appear at the markets, and I was excited to get my hands on one of my favorite fruits this past week. I wanted to serve it as a light, refreshing dessert at a mid-week meal. But when I cracked it open, I found it disappointingly pale in color and flavor. What to do? Well, there are a few things you can do to jazz up a weak watermelon and make it vibrant enough to stand on its own as dessert for any meal.
Faith Durand
Jul 6, 2009
New Favorite Cheese for Summer: Forme di Formaggio
We had plans to make a big batch of pasta salad for weekday lunches, but we’ve been getting tired of our old cheese standbys. We wanted something new for summer. Something fresh, light, and mild. The woman at our favorite cheese shop recommended this forme di formaggio, and we’re glad she did!Forme di formaggio is a kind of fresh milk Italian cheese made simply by separating the curds and whey.
Emma Christensen
Jun 26, 2009
Quick Dessert Recipe: Poached Whole Plums with Brown Sugar Syrup
After writing about this cherry recipe from The Atlantic yesterday, we decided to try the leave-the-pits-in method with another fruit: plums. It was so easy and fast, and we love the way the whole, pudgy plum looks nestled in a bowl with some ice cream. Get the recipe, below…We followed a similar technique as in the cherry recipe, stewing our fruit in a mixture of water and sugar. But because we used so little liquid, we really could call this steaming rather than poaching.
Elizabeth Passarella
Jun 23, 2009
Wait! You Don’t Have to Pit Those CherriesThe Atlantic
We get pretty wide-eyed at the cherries that are showing up in the market. We think of all the things we could make with them… and then we remember that we’d have to pit them. And we don’t own a pitter. Well, cookbook author Sally Schneider over at The Atlantic‘s food channel cooked whole cherries into a sweet, saucy dessert—pits, leaves, and all.
Elizabeth Passarella
Jun 22, 2009
Eat Outside This Weekend: Five Outdoor Breakfasts
Do you love breakfast? How about weekend breakfast outdoors on the front stoop, the porch, or the back deck? What about brunch on the balcony, if you’re so lucky as to have one? Here are five photos to inspire you to eat breakfast outdoors this weekend. • 1 A modest breakfast – Looks like bread, jam, tomatoes, butter, cheese, and juice. By Flickr member Szili licensed for use under Creative Commons. • 2 Fruit on a Berlin balcony – What a splendid spread of fruit!
Faith Durand
Jun 5, 2009
Recipe: Strawberry-Arugula Salad with Ricotta Topping
A couple weeks ago several of the writers and editors of The Kitchn gathered in New York for a late spring brunch. It is always wonderful to be face-to-face with the fellow writers that we usually only “see” virtually! And of course food had to be included, right?Here is part of my own contribution: a quick twist on a strawberry salad, with arugula mixed in for a spicy, savory touch, and a creamy dressing of fresh ricotta and lemon. But there’s more: see photos of Nora S.
Faith Durand
Jun 1, 2009
How To Build A Better Burger
We’ve always been real sticklers for the manner in which we build our burgers. We change up the ingredients going into the patty quite often, but today we’re talking about the physical order in which the ingredients are layered. By stacking your burger in a certain manner, you can actually help tame the rogue condiments and escaping vegetables (we’re looking at you tomato) and enhance the flavor of your burger!
Sarah Rae Smith
May 27, 2009
Favorite Fruit: Abate Fetel Pears
Look at this tall, slim pear. Do you recognize it? We found it at our little organic food co-op, nestled between the oranges and beets. We had never seen this particular variety, so we scooped one up and brought it home. Well, now we know: if you see these, buy more than one.The abate fetel (pronounced ah-BAH-tay fuh-TEL) pear, from what we’ve read so far, was bred by monks in Italy several hundred years ago. It is very slim and long; some people describe it as banana-shaped.
Faith Durand
Apr 30, 2009
In Season: Italian Prune Plums
What are those little baby-fist-sized plums that have been in the markets for the last month? They’re called Italian Prune Plums and I adore them. Sometimes also called Empress Plums, they are the European-style plum (Prunica domestica) – small, dense, egg-shaped fruit with blue or purple skin, freestone pits (they separate easily from the flesh) and yellow flesh. These are the plums that are made into prunes.
Sara Kate Gillingham
Sep 10, 2008
Food Science: The Best Place to Store Tomatoes…and Why
In our review of Creamy Creamless Tomato Soup last week, we accidentally divulged that we’d been storing our fresh tomatoes in the fridge – a big no-no that many of you were quick to point out!You were right to slap our hands, and here’s why…Tomatoes are surprisingly delicate, we’ve discovered!
Emma Christensen
Sep 2, 2008
Recipe: Peach, Plum, and Ginger Jam
You may remember our last attempt at this jam, when it turned out a wee bit hard. But because the flavor was so good, and because we were determined not to let the jam win, we gave it another try…This time, we made a couple of changes. We peeled the peaches, making the jam a little paler than our last batch.
Elizabeth Passarella
Aug 26, 2008
Recipe Recommendation: Fried Green Tomatoes
I grew up in Florida and Georgia. Now I live in California, where some things related to Southern cooking are hard to find. Unripe green tomatoes for frying aren’t sold in the supermarkets; to obtain them, one has to go to the farmer’s markets and hope one of the tomato vendors has some unripe green ones, or one has to grow their own.Another thing, Californians seem confused as to what “green tomatoes” are.
Kathryn Hill
Jul 24, 2008
Recipe: Fried Squash Blossoms
Every summer, we anxiously await the arrival of squash blossoms so we can make one of our favorite dishes: fried squash blossoms.It’s a little time-consuming to prepare as you have to carefully remove the pistil from the center of the flower without ripping the delicate petals, but the work involved is worth it. I first had fried squash blossoms when I lived in Italy. In Italy, they’re usually dipped in batter and fried, and then served with salt and pepper.
Kathryn Hill
Jul 22, 2008
Top Five: Things To Do With One Pint of Berries
As Kathryn pointed earlier today, it’s berry season! Who can resist picking up a pint of perfectly ripe berries and popping one (or three) in your mouth before you’ve even left the farmer’s market stand?But a pint of berries bought as a splurge can sometimes present a conundrum back in the kitchen. Many recipes call for more than you’ve purchased or maybe you’re just not in the mood to go all out with your great-grandma’s prize-winning blueberry pie!
Emma Christensen
Jul 15, 2008
Recipe: Lemon Verbena and Orange Blossom Fizz
Fizzy, cold and herbal – that’s what we want out of our drinks this time of year. We’re trying to break out of our gin and tonic rut, and for our spread of Memorial Day cocktails (all summer cocktails! all day!) we played around with our favorite lemon verbena syrup and a touch of orange blossom water. Orange blossom water is one of those dividing factors, in cocktails.You can either hate it or love it. It has an intensely floral and citrus taste – almost like perfume.
Faith Durand
May 26, 2008
Recipe: Lemon Verbena Simple Syrup
Lemon verbena is one of our favorite herbs. It’s a tall, spare, long-leafed plant with slender leaves and a fragrance to die for. It’s not hard to capture that fragrance in a simple syrup.We grow lemon verbena out on the patio; we clip the top leaves regularly and so far it’s doing beautifully.This simple syrup is a snap to make.
Faith Durand
May 26, 2008
Poll: Do You Salt Your Watermelon?
In our watermelon thread last Friday, a commenter asked a question we were thinking about too: who puts salt on their watermelon? This was a very strange and foreign concept until recently when we tried it, and the piquancy of the salt did indeed bring out a little more of the melon’s sweetness, concentrating the juices .
Faith Durand
Jul 2, 2007