Looking for recipe ideas for your July 4th celebration? Here are a number of our favorites from the Blue Kitchen archives.
JULY 4th IS AT THE APEX OF GRILLING SEASON IN THE UNITED STATES. It’s practically written into our constitution that every household shall cook out of doors on this day. So I’m going to start this post with ideas for the meal’s centerpiece. Continue reading “Recipes for a delicious 4th of July”
Disks of Crottin, a classic French goat cheese, are baked on buttery toasts, then placed atop a simple salad of mixed greens and Dijon mustard vinaigrette to produce a classic bistro dish. Recipe below.
Terroir, the idea that a “sense of place” flavors agricultural products, is most closely associated with wines. But increasingly, the term is being used with coffee, tea, chocolate, hops and, germane to this story, cheese.
We were recently asked to sample a number of French chèvres, cheeses made from goat’s milk, each produced in a different region. They beautifully illustrated for us just how deeply place is ingrained into French agriculture. And how complex the notion of terroir can be. Continue reading “Tasting a sense of place in French chèvre: Salad with Baked Goat Cheese”
The last peaches and blueberries of summer combine with shaved fennel bulb, just hitting its seasonal stride. The resulting salad is crunchy, sweet and tart, with a refreshing hint of licorice. Recipe below.
The changing seasons are pulling us in different directions. Marion is looking forward to cooking with the apples and pears beginning to appear in growing varieties in the market. I, on the other hand, am thinking wistfully of the summer berries and stone fruits that will soon be gone.
This salad bridges seasons, combining the last of summer fruit with fennel bulbs, just coming into their autumnal own. Usually, fennel is braised or sautéed, often as part of an Italian dish—such as our current go-to weeknight pasta dinner. Here, it’s sliced thin and served raw, making the most of its sweet crunchiness. Continue reading “Summer mixes with autumn: Fennel Salad with Peaches and Blueberries”
A fresh, flavorful take on the ubiquitous summer salad. Shaved Brussels sprouts are dressed with lemon juice and olive oil, then tossed with pistachios, thyme and blue cheese. Recipe below.
Leave it to us to find vegetarian inspiration in a hot dog joint. Not that Chicago-based Franks ‘n’ Dawgs is your typical joint. Their housemade artisan sausages (lamb, spicy beef, jerk goat, turkey & date, bay scallop…) are topped with everything from pickled green papaya to duck confit, giardiniera, Mako shark bacon and kimchi.
Besides delicious, inventive dogs, they serve up sublime sides. Lyonnaise fries (with braised pig cheek and poached egg). Truffle mac ‘n’ cheese. Creole red beans with blackened shrimp and jalapeño cornbread. And the subtle, citrusy Brussels sprouts salad that inspired this one. Continue reading “Change up your summer salads: Brussels Sprouts Salad with Blue Cheese”
Peaches and apricots each play parts in six breakfast, lunch and dinner recipes that run from sweet to savory and first course through dessert. Recipes below.
Summer is under way, and stone fruits are filling produce shelves. Peaches, apricots and numerous varieties of plums beckon with their rich colors and heady aromas. Sure, they’re delicious to eat out of hand, their juices running down your chin. But they’re also great to cook with. Here are a half dozen recipes from the Blue Kitchen archives that do just that. Continue reading “Six peachy (and apricot-y) recipes for summer”
Adapted from a restaurant staff meal recipe, cannellini beans, tomatoes, shallots and basil combine to create a side dish that’s almost too robust to be called a salad. Recipe below.
A handful of well-chosen ingredients, simply, perfectly put together. For me, this is cooking at its truest and best. Sure, there have been culinary high wire acts as long as there has been royalty and, later, haute cuisine restaurants. Molecular gastronomy is the latest version of designed-to-dazzle cooking. But put that up against what happens every day in a French or Italian farm kitchen—or indeed, traditional kitchens around the world—and it’s no contest.
This simple salad is a perfect example. White beans, tomatoes, shallots, basil, red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper—toasted bread crumbs if you feel like it. Let the shallots marinate in the vinegar while you pull the other parts of the meal together and assemble the rest at the end. Continue reading “White Bean and Tomato Salad: I’ll have what the kitchen’s having”
Fingerling potatoes and cherry tomatoes tossed with a lively mustard vinaigrette—something this easy shouldn’t taste this good. Recipe below.
Summer is drawing to a close—we have a real blanket on the bed, we are wearing sweaters in the evening, and we are casting around for ways to use the bits and bobs that we harvest here from our apartment garden. The nation’s corn crop may have gone to hell this year, but our tomato crop is record-breaking. Outside, we have just a tiny scrap of ground under cultivation, but it is giving us a quart of cherry tomatoes every day, on bad days—and that is to ignore the big tomatoes, which are coming in with a vengeance. Continue reading “Tastes like… victory: Quick, delicious Potato and Cherry Tomato Salad”
This warm, garlicky potato and green bean salad is bursting with summery flavors of mint, arugula and lemon juice. Recipe below.
We’re trying to eat less meat these days. It’s healthier for us, some would argue, and definitely healthier for the planet. We sometimes do it by having meatless days. And we eat smaller portions of meat when we have it; this is an approach Mark Bittman urges us all to take, to use meat as a flavoring or move it to the side of the plate, with vegetables taking the starring role. In an interview this spring on NPR, he envisioned a scenario in which meat “could resume its proper place in our lives, which is as a treat rather than as something we can eat whenever we feel like it.”
I’ll admit I’m not there yet. When I go more than a few days without eating meat, I miss it. A lot. So when author Michael Natkin told me he’s been a vegetarian for 30 years now, it was almost more than my brain could take in. Marion and I were at a book tour event for Natkin’s excellent new vegetarian cookbook, Herbivoracious: A Flavor Revolution with 150 Vibrant and Original Vegetarian Recipes. Continue reading “A Herbivoracious side dish: Potato and Green Bean Salad with Arugula Pesto”
With temperatures hovering around 100º for the foreseeable future, I’ve dipped into the Blue Kitchen archives for some no-cook and minimal-cook recipes.
The recent heatwave has the Cole Porter classic “Too Darn Hot” running through my head—as sung by Ella Fitzgerald, of course. What the heat doesn’t have me thinking about, despite my best intentions, is the kitchen. Here are a few ideas for some cool foods that require little or no cooking. A couple are complete meals. Others can be paired with sandwich makings—cold cuts or a store-bought roast chicken, for instance—so you can eat well without overheating.
Take advantage of abundant berries now in the market. Blueberries and raspberries team up with watercress, butter lettuce, blue cheese and a simple vinaigrette for the salad shown above. Every ingredient plays a role, from the fresh, tart berries to the peppery watercress and earthy blue cheese, in creating a lively summer salad. Here’s the recipe. Continue reading “It’s too darn hot: Six cool recipes for when it’s just too hot to cook”
Chunks of fresh fish are poached in butter and olive oil over very low heat with fresh thyme, salt and pepper and served over a simple salad for a quick, cool summer meal. Recipe below.
Summer didn’t just arrive in Chicago this year. It squeezed its big, hot, sweaty self between us on the couch and settled in, kicking off its shoes, radiating heat and acting like it had no place else to be for a while. In weather like this, you don’t want to heat up the kitchen cooking a big, hot meal that no one feels like eating anyway. Poaching in butter isn’t necessarily a hot weather cooking technique, but in this case it was perfect for the heat.
I stumbled on the technique when I was looking for more traditional fish poaching methods that I figured might involve white wine and broth. When I read Melissa Clark’s informative and charmingly confessional piece on the topic in the New York Times, I was hooked. Continue reading “A barely warm dinner for hot nights: Butter Poached Tilapia with Thyme and Mixed Greens”