My fabulous vacation to the Howard’s Deer Lake in Canada is coming to a close. On one hand, I hate to be leaving so soon, but on the other, I can’t wait to get home to my kitties. That sounds like crazy-cat lady talk, I know, but I hate leaving them home alone for so long.

How about I share images from my trip in today’s post?

You’d like that! Yay, here we go.

Seriously, this is the only photo I really need to post. So GORGEOUS! Kim woke up early last Friday morning and caught the full moon over Deer Lake. Absolutely Stunning!

We visited a variety of markets during my visit, here are my favorite images.

On another day we drove into Montreal and visited the Marché Jean-Talon.

After one afternoon of being out for the morning, we came home to find that two birds had flown into the sliding glass doors along the back of the house.

As I mentioned in THIS POST, I do a lot of the shopping for veggies for the Crudités Harmony Boards at Sprouts. My favorite produce available there is the orange and purple cauliflower.

I had one last crudités and one final fruidités board to make the weekend before I left town. (Fruidités is a word I coined to mean a half crudités and fruit Harmony Board)

I store all the cheese, meat, and fruit for Harmony Boards in my kitchen refrigerator. I store the vegetables in the garage refrigerator. I keep a list in my brain of what vegetables I had on hand, which in hindsight is a mistake.

Anyhow, I went to Sprouts and bought a load of vegetables, including a head of purple cauliflower. Then I came home, pulled out the stock from the garage refrigerator and there was a nearly full head of purple cauliflower. Usually, that would not be of concern, but since I was only 48 hours from hopping on a plane… a problem it was.

In my opinion, there is a nearly perfect way to use up extra vegetables and that is in SOUP! Happily, I also had a few leftover purple potatoes. All these purple vegetables made me excited about purple soup.

Of course, I’ve made cauliflower soup before, but never purple soup. Some of you might be thinking, “What about borscht?” Nope, never made borscht, because I despise beets! Sorry, you’ll have to find a recipe for borscht elsewhere.

Roasted Purple Cauliflower and Purple Potato Soup

Ten years with 2,037 posts! That is nearly 204 posts per year – and yes, I know, that calculation required the most basic and easy math. But that adds up to a big bunch of typing, talking, thoughts, cooking, memories, recipes, stories and photographs. I believe this occasion is worthy of a contest! Before I share with you exactly what it is that you have a chance to win and how you can win it, how about a few fun facts from the last 10 years?

Although I’ve had my blog since August 16, 2009, the platform I have it on, WordPress, reset the statistics in April 2013. I’m not sure how or why that happened but I no longer have the stats from August 2009 through March 2013.

With that in mind, here are the stats I have for LesPetites Gourmettes.com:

The most visited post: February 3, 2014

The recipe in that post is for Homemade San Tung “Dry-Fried” Chicken Wings. These are the absolutely scrumptious and addicting wings from San Tung Restaurant which is in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. That is where my darling daughter, Marissa, first lived in when she moved away after college.

• Total comments: 5,782 comments left by you wonderful people. Thank you for each and every one! Comments are what keep me motivated to keep on blogging.

• The most commented-on post: “Lost” from 2011 This post is about the death of my younger brother, Andy. Thank you for all the kindness, compassion and comfort you provided to me during not only that sad time but throughout the ups and downs of life that I’ve shared here.
• The person who has commented the most: Marissa <3
• The most visited year: 2015
• The most visited month: March 2015

OK, enough with the stats, let’s get to what we’re all here for … CONTEST TIME!

PRIZE: Five (5) Lucky entrants will join me for a Harmony Board Class. You will learn all the tips and tricks on how a Harmony Board is made. Plus each winner will make a mini-board of her/his own to take home and share, or not share, this is a judgment-free zone!

Tomorrow is the 10th birthday/blogiversary of LesPetitesGourmettes.com. There will be a contest. So you really should come back and see what you could win!

In the meantime, I have a couple of random things to share. I am currently in Canada with Kim at the Howard family compound known as Deer Lake. It is situated between Ottowa and Montreal in the Province of Quebec. This time we flew into Montreal. The large structure on the left in the photo above is the Olympic Stadium from the summer games of 1976.

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I would show you what I did with the bits and pieces of fruit, veggies, and cheese that were in my refrigerator before I left town. Here is a peek inside my carry-on bag.

We had to change planes in Minneapolis, so we found a little lounge table and chairs in the airport and put together our own mini-size travel Harmony Boards to enjoy on the second leg of our flight.

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.