Category — Recipes

I had a couple of extra busy weekends with Harmony Board orders. So far this first summer of Harmony Boards has been exactly as expected, slow! But for some reason, the first and second weekends of August exploded.

With that in mind, I may have been a tad overzealous about stone fruit season. First I went to Costco and bought huge clamshells of peaches, red & Rainer cherries, and red plums.

A day or two later I was at Sprouts shopping for purple (a purple soup recipe coming for you soon) and orange cauliflower for Crudités Harmony Boards.

It was then when I saw the extensive variety of stone fruit in season and on sale.  There were pink, red, and black flesh plums, yellow plumcots, Jupiter peaches, nectarines, white peaches, etc.

As my vacation to Canada with Kim drew near, I knew I had more stone fruit on hand than I had orders… oops. I was eating overripe plums for breakfast and snacks. Then it was cherries and peaches for lunch and after-dinner dessert.

While I was finishing up my final orders on the weekend before my flight, I knew I had to do more than snack on the quickly ripening fruit. I invited Connor and my dad over for dinner and made this salad.

* In my next post I’ll show you what I did with the remaining bits and pieces of fruit, cheese, and veggies before I escaped the heat.

Until it cools off, I am going to be lucky to get one post up each week. Between my work on Harmony Boards, driving around town with deliveries and family commitments, I have zero energy or desire to cook. That’s the greatest thing about living alone, you don’t have to cook if you don’t want to!

With that in mind, I haven’t cooked for weeks, so I had to go back nearly two months to Father’s Day to dig up this recipe and photos.

Of course, there was a Father’s Day Harmony Board. I kept light and fairly healthy since steak was on the menu.

I wasn’t certain what I was going to make for Father’s Day dinner until I went to Costco and saw the special Father’s Day Roadshow they had in the meat section. It was there that I found this beautiful U.S.D.A. Prime cut of meat.

To be honest, I’d never seen or heard of a Beef Ribeye Cap Steak before but it looked beautiful and impressive, so I snatched it right up.

The helpful and kind butcher told me it was his favorite cut and recommended that I grill it over medium-high direct heat for about 7 minutes for this thickness. “Thank you, will do!”

Remember: Be sure to always rest meat before cutting. Especially when using it in a salad like this was. Resting the meat gives time for the juices to get back into the meat. You will lose less juice when you cut it and when you eat it the meat will be juicier and tastier. If you cut it too soon, the juices, which will look like blood, will flow out and that is not a nice look on a salad!

I haven’t been cooking much. It’s just too hot! But over the weekend, I put my big-girl pants on, braved the heat and hit the stove. I’ve made this pasta before and added shrimp to it. It is refreshing and tasty both ways.

Of course, dinner was served inside. I can not wait to eat al fresco again. October can not get here soon enough! How are you all coping with the heat? If you have any fun ideas or tips, please leave them in the comments, I really need ’em.

This recipe was supposed to post last week two days after the Peach and Pluot Caprese Salad recipe. I thought I had it correctly scheduled in the queue but turns out I dated it for 2020. Oops!

Oh well, although the peaches from my tree are long gone, at least there are still peaches in the markets. You’ll notice in the photos that I was using very small peaches that were just cut in half and pitted. That is what my tree produced this year. I’ve written the recipe to reflect using regular size peaches and cutting each into 8 wedges.

TIP: You have probably noticed that when you are reading a recipe, it often states to cut an ingredient into 1-inch, 2-inch, or some other size pieces. Maybe you get out a ruler or maybe you just guess. I have another way for you to do it and get the correct size without fishing around for a ruler. I use my finger as a measurement tool. For instance, for this recipe, the onions are cut into 2-inch pieces. I know that the length of my pinky is 2-inches. So I use it as a marker to cut the first piece and then use that piece as a guide to just the rest. Yep, it’s as easy as that.

It was about 15 months ago that I had a new little peach tree planted. No, that is not it in the photo above. That is the peach tree from my last house that got so large and so loaded down with peaches that nearly all the branches broke off. That tree was removed when we remodeled the backyard and a new smaller tree was planted.

It was a dwarf peach and as little as it was, it was mighty. It produced the most lovely perfect peaches.

This is my newest peach tree. I stripped it clean of all the ripe peaches over the weekend.

As you can see, the peaches were very petite for this first harvest.

But there were lots of them! I decided that there was too much skin to flesh ratio to be used in desserts, so I used them in savory dishes instead.

The first dish is a salad. A twist on the classic Caprese. I threw in some apriums, also known as pluots. Apriums and pluots are hybrids of apricots and plums.

A pluot is mostly plum, it looks more like a plum than an apricot. The flesh is soft and grainy, unlike the firm flesh of a plum. The aprium, on the other hand, has skin covered with slight fuzz and tastes like a sweeter apricot with a hint of plum.

Two recipe notes: I used balsamic vinegar for my vinaigrette, but I strongly suggest using white balsamic vinegar instead. The dark dressing made the salad less attractive than it should have been. It tasted great, but the dressing covered up the beautiful colors of the fruit, tomatoes and basil. It did nothing for the mozzarella either. I also had a log of sliced fresh mozzarella on hand, so used it instead of the mozzarella balls listed in the recipe. If you have to go out and buy the cheese, get the cute little rounds.

I believe this is the last of the recipes from Anne’s birthday dinner. Don’t you love dragging out birthdays for a month!?!

The peas I used are the same that I used in this recipe for Easter. I found them in the fresh produce section of Trader Joe’s. Since they are only available for a limited time, I bought a few packages and froze them for the long hot summer.

Berries and lemon curd are one of my absolute favorite desserts. And the red white and blue of it all make for the perfect patriot dessert. Mixing whipped cream into the curd mutes the yellow color and passes for the white needed for that RWB combo. I made this trifle for my final series at Les Gourmettes. I was not able to snap a photo of the finished product, so above is a similar photo I swiped (and gave credit for) from the internet.

Tip: When whipping cream in a standing mixer, place a towel over the mixer to prevent splattering.

When I went in search of a prepared pound cake, I found this package at Costco. I used both the lemon and the raspberry for my recipe. Usually, I use a plain pound cake so this was a fun and tasty twist.

I made this as the starter for Anne’s birthday dinner early this month. I could honestly eat this for breakfast, lunch or dinner on a daily basis. It’s That Good!

Grilled Asparagus Toast with Poached Eggs

• 4 large slices sourdough bread
• Olive oil
• 24 asparagus spears
• 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon ground Allepo pepper
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 4 large eggs
• Parmesan cheese
• Maldon sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Bring a pan of water to a boil, then reduce water to a simmer. Brush one side of the bread slices with olive oil.

Heat a grill pan over high heat and toast the bread. Move each slice to its own serving plate and drizzle with olive oil.

Snap the woody end off the asparagus, then place it on a plate and coat the spears with olive oil.

Using the same grill pan, grill the asparagus for a few minutes on all sides, sprinkle with the paprika and Allepo pepper, then divide between the pieces of toast.

In 1993, Barbara Pool Fenzl began writing her first cookbook, Southwest The Beautiful Cookbook. It was published in 1994. In the space between, I was her recipe tester. Barb would develop the recipes and then give me a stack of recipes for me to test, make suggestions, corrections, and such.  My family vividly remembers it because the batches of recipes came not as a menu, but in groups of the same type of dishes. So one week I’d be making 6 or 7 salads, the next week it would be 5 or 6 desserts, and so on. Honestly, we loved it.

Barb also gave me the opportunity to develop and contribute a recipe of my own to the cookbook. I decided on Tortilla Soup. The only prerequisite was that the soup should include a sauce Barb had developed for the sauce section of the book.  So this recipe uses Barb’s Red Chili Sauce. If you would rather just buy red chili sauce or red enchilada sauce, please take that shortcut. But by all means, make the soup, it is a family favorite.

The recipe also calls for four cooked chicken breast halves. You can substitute shredded rotisserie chicken if you’d like. Use 5 to 6 cups of shredded rotisserie.

Lastly, there aren’t as many in-process photos as I usually post with a recipe. That is because I made this for my final series at Les Gourmettes Cooking School, so I was only able to take photos of the pre-prep I did at home before loading it all up and taking it to the class.

Tortilla Soup

Soup

• 2 tablespoons corn oil
• 3 corn tortillas, cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
• 3 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
• 1 jalapeño chili, cored, seeded, and minced
• 2 Anaheim chilies, roasted, peeled, cored, seeded, and finely chopped
• 8 plum tomatoes, seeded and diced *see photo below
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 5 cups chicken broth
• 1 cup red chili sauce (recipe below) or use store-bought red enchilada sauce
• 2 whole cooked chicken breasts, shredded
• 1 ripe avocado, pitted, peeled, and diced

Garnish

• 4 corn tortillas
• Pam
• Salt and chili powder
• 1/2 cup grated Monterey jack cheese
• 1/3 cup chopped fresh cilantro

Soup: Heat the oil over medium-high heat in a large pot. Add the tortilla pieces, reduce heat and cook until they are golden and brown, and slightly crisp.  Add the onion and cook for 3 minutes, then add the garlic and jalapeño and cook another 2 minutes.

Add the Anaheim, tomatoes, and tomato paste; cook for 10 minutes. Stir in the cumin and cayenne; slowly whisk in the chicken broth and the red chili sauce and simmer the soup for about 20 minutes, or until slightly reduced. Add the shredded chicken and avocado and heat until warmed through.

Garnish: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Stack and cut the tortillas into julienne strips. Spray a baking sheet with Pam, place the tortilla strips on a baking sheet and spray them with more Pam. Cook in preheated oven for 10 to 15 minutes, or until brown and crisp.

Remove from the oven a spray with Pam one last time and then sprinkle generously with salt and chili powder.

To serve, ladle soup into bowls and garnish with the grated cheese, cilantro, and baked tortilla strips.

Serves 6

When I originally made this dessert for Anne’s birthday, I was winging it, I hadn’t tested the recipe beforehand. It needed a little tweaking. I used too much brown sugar and too much brandy that first go-around which made it runny and way too strong in the alcohol flavor. It doesn’t spend that much time under the broiler to burn off all the brandy I originally had in there.  I made it again and got it just right. The photos were taken when I remade it as a single serving for my do-over, but the ingredient portions in this recipe serve four.