Arugula-Corn Salad with Feta and Pecans

My friend Amy always tries to claim she had nothing to do with a recipe being amazing because she "just found it online" or "just got it from a friend." What she obviously doesn't understand is that finding an awesome recipe like a corn salad with feta and nuts is feat in and of itself. And she didn't just find it; she made it. And she put pecans in instead of walnuts, and that was brilliant.

In the age of Google and 17 billion food bloggers, no recipe is really original. There's just a bunch of us finding food combos we like, mixing them up and sharing them with people in our real life and internet life. Cultivating recipes in the digital age is still an art best created in community, my friends. 

Anyway, Amy's corn salad has been spreading in-person meme style amongst the original cookout crew that feasted on it last summer.

As for me, I added some green and protein, tweaked a lime vinaigrette recipe (thanks, Google), and poof! had an innovative farmer's market-fresh meal salad to share with yet another friend, for a weeknight dinner on the porch this go-round. 

And then I made it again the next night. Because pre-prepped leftover ingredients rock almost as much as corn corn and feta cheese.

Alabama Tomatoes

When I came across the passage below in The Well and the Mine, a case of writer envy set in. Novelist Gin Phillips is just that talented at conveying imagery in the context of developing scenes and characters in Great Depression-era Carbon Hill, Ala. And so I bring you a tribute to Alabama tomaters in her words with photos from moi.

Albert, the father of the main character, narrates:

Heirloom Tomatoes, Pepper Place Farmer's Market

 My mouth watered at the look of them, insides about to burst through the skin. I plucked one and bit into it like an apple, juice running down my chin...

I pulled another one off and handed it to him, still tasting summer in my mouth, seeds stuck in my shadow of a beard...

Jones Valley Urban Farm Tomatoes in a Tomato Pie-In-Process

 I smiled at them all (his children), chattering and slurping, teeth and tongues and hands and arms covered in tomato innards.

"They're happy vegetables, aren't they, Papa?" asked Tess, chomping great chunks of hers. "Cheerful and excited. Like lemons are pouty and peaches are flirts."

Cherry Tomatoes Growing in Backyard Garden (Thanks to roommates who garden)

Virgie took tiny bites, bending over to hold the tomato away from her dress. But her's was the best, fuller and redder than the others. "Tess thinks they all have personality," she said.

"If she can eat it after she makes friends with it, ain't nothing wrong with it," I said.

We all picked beans until supper time, sticky and sweating, licking our fingers and hands and tasting tomatoes and dirt. When I swung Jack and Tess up the steps on the way in, our hands didn't want to come apart.

-Gin Phillips, The Well and the Mine, pages 52-53

Publix pizza crust with olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and fresh basil

Summer Veggie Brunch Bake + Strawberry Scones

Why top eggs with veggies when you can top veggies with eggs, and lots of cheese too of course? Maybe we've been getting this eggs-first priority wrong.

Brunch started with sauteed fresh summer veggies plus fresh mozzarella and basil.

Top it with an egg and more cheese, Parmesan this time, and then more basil, bake it, and voila, you have a pretty+healthy summer breakfast.

Recipe verdict:

+Fresh and summery taste

+Veggilicious lightness as opposed to heavy brunchy eggs-meat combo

+Ramekin presentation elegance

+Individual portion cuteness

-Veggies gone runny...maybe strain veggie mix or leave out tomatoes next time

-Time intensive to cook veggies, put it all together and then bake it

Overall: Make again for a small group but prep the night before and skip tomatoes to avoid liquid in end product

Cheesy!

But the best part of this meal was a more decadent strawberry scone.

Once upon a time I though scones were always dry pastries. And then I had one that tasted like a fluffy, buttery, sweet biscuit. Now when I make them I can't stop eating them, especially warm out of the oven and filled with summery-fresh berries.

Recipe verdict:

+Fresh and summery, yet lightly decadent, taste

+Delicious

+So delicious

+Pretty wedges of pastry

-Time intensive to cut butter into a flour mixture and then play  with sticky dough to fold in berries and get it in a decent shape for baking

Overall: Make as often as possible when I have the time to dedicate to it

Serve veggies eggs+scones with milk in mason jar, plus a lake view and a conversation/food sharing partner, for full effect.

Bookends for a perfect summer Saturday

Start the day at a farmers market, or two if you are racking up a photo collection for community newspapers.

Homewood Farmers Market photos taken for The Homewood Star.

End it cooking up farmers market booty with friends.

Publix pizza dough with olive oil, garlic, green and yellow zucchini, fresh mozzarella, squash blossoms courtesy of my horticulturally talented roommate's garden, and turkey bacon.

Also, drink wine and eat cupcakes.

Tomato-Cucumber Bruschetta

Thought One: Make something snacky for people coming over Saturday night.
Thought Two: It's summer. It should taste like summertime.
Thought Three: Ocean serves that tomato-cucumber stuff with crostini. It's like better than their entrees.
Thought Four: Hey, I just bought cucumber and tomato at the farmers market.
Thought Five: Mad's remake of Ocean yum was totally meant to be.

I never cease to be amazed when vegetables can be this refreshing tasting and addictive. Those who partook agreed.

The spread for an evening in the backyard for my friend Jennifer to share about her work in nonprofit architecture serving global missions with 100 Fold Studio: the aforementioned bruschetta masterpiece, mini peach cupcakes, grapes, mixed nuts, limade and vino.

The bruschetta is definitely making future appearances at the lake.

Arugula-Sweet Potato Salad with Blackberry Vinaigrette

October for me meant stopping, a reprieve from travels or otherwise packing a weekend full of activity. It meant going into Saturday with no agenda, which for a planner is kind of scary for some odd reason, and discovering the riches of down time and spontaneity: going for an impromptu Saturday hike, listening to my roommate animate the characters of a children's novel as she read it aloud,  actually sitting down and watching a movie I have been meaning to see since I got it for Christmas last year, creating invitations for a neighbor potluck, reading (oh reading books!), returning to the simple pleasures of cooking for fun.

One particular weekend, this meal evolved with fall favorites sweet potatoes and pork tenderloin, with a lingering taste of summer (frozen blackberries) in a balsamic vinaigrette and bitter arugula, which I paired with my first experimentation with the fig (Sourdough Toasts with Goat Cheese, Figs and Honey --> —delightful).

Best of all, it was shared on the porch with a friend, and then continued as fancy food leftovers for yours truly later in the week.

Hannah's Homewood Summer Yummies

My friend Hannah and I are slowly figuring out this food styling photography business, at least enough to be slightly better than we were when we first started blogs. We were always in charge of words and the intranets, not photos, when we somehow got food magazines on our resumes. So now we are trying to tap just how the magic works in food photo shoots.

Here is a very rough formula:
Natural light all the way
Plus fancy camera
Plus garnishes where needed
Plus different colored cloths
Plus lots and lots of playing with your food
Equals a million photos from which you might pick a couple that look kind of cool

Somehow I managed to take advantage of Hannah's expertise as culinary student and knowledgable foodie to get her develop some summer recipes for the newspaper in the community where she grew up, a.k.a. #2 best area in Birmingham after where I live, a.ka. Homewood. (I happen to be partially responsible for filling pages of said paper, how convenient).

Check out her creations and the results of our afternoon of food play in her backyard.

Red Mountain Fireworks Cookies

Blueberry Limeade

Strawberry Lemonade

Farmer's Market Pita Pizzas

Blueberry Yogurt Pops

Peach Salsa, Summer Squash with Cheese and Panko: A market-inspired dinner

Roommate-I-Got-To-Keep-from-Last-Year: I feel like we just ate a restaurant dinner.
Me: This is better than a restaurant dinner.

This, my friends, is how we welcomed new roommates 3 and 4 to our home of calm and inspiration (and dream kitchen!), to the land of Pepper Place market and Chilton County peaches, to a new season as ladies of the Court on which we live.

My dinner scheming partner and I also had inspiration from the quinoa salad from Shindigs (her) and the light-yet-cheesy squash casserole on the veggie plate at Urban Standard (me).

Over our summertime fare, we chatted about our "home dreams" and plotted for how this would be the first of many house fellowship dinners and the first of many hospitable welcomes to the home of R+A+H+M. Backyard movie night next, anyone?

A Market-Inspired Menu

Chardonnay

 Grilled Chicken Breasts with Chilton County Peach Salsa (recipe below)

Red Quinoa with Pesto and Heirloom Cherry Tomatoes over Mixed Greens (roommate creation)

Zucchini and Zyphr Squash with Cheese and Panko (recipe below)

Butterscotch Chip Cookies

Crostini with Lima Bean Hummus and Simple Corn Relish

I bought corn and lima beans on a farmer's market hopping trip with the intention of boiling them and eating them, a nice simple summery side dish for the week.

And then I went for a bike ride and somehow came up with a different idea, because when I have free time I tend to busy myself with random projects instead of doing whatever else I meant to do.

These babes were more dainty looking, outside-the-box, blog-worthy, entertaining-worthy, and therefore worth more of my free weekend time where I was actually in town.

Corn Relish: sweet and vinegary condiment; way to cook corn that stretches it to many uses over many weeks; the best part of this fancifying my food idea. 

Lima Bean Hummus is good, but the texture is coarse and hard to get to spreadable consistency, much more so than other beans I usually use for hummus. It is a pretty color for summertime, fresh, and in season though.

Autumn Pasta with Butternut Squash, Greens, Bacon, and Brown Butter

Tastes-like-fall butternut squash pairs well in pasta dishes, as I learned last year at this time thanks to some fancy food dinners around Birmingham.

There was the herbed goat cheese ravioli with butternut squash, onions, bacon, shaved parmigiano-reggiano, sage, brown butter and sauteed mustard greens at Satterfield's.  And then a similar butternut-bacon-greens pasta at Bottega Cafe. Both were obvious choices in my order-something-unique-while-I'm-eating-out menu quest and more than pleased my palate.

Butternut squash and mustard greens came home with me from the farmer's market a few weeks ago, and while pondering what to do with my attempts to eat like fall, I remembered how badly I wanted to make my own version of the butternut pasta delight. Delish.

Three Things: Farmers Market Veggies Make Easy Meals

This is a tale of my Pepper Place farmer's market veggies, some of the last tastes of summer, from last week. The idea was to prep veggies on Sunday and then make fast, veggilicious meals throughout the week.

Step one: Cook  yellow quash and pink-eyed peas. Chop bell pepper and tomatoes (they didn't make the photo).
Step two: Put 'em in a container.
Step three: Play with 'em for a little meal variety.

1. Tortilla Pizza
Crisping up a tortilla and throwing toppings on top is one of my favorite quick, one-person meals because it tastes like something from a restaurant. My veggies tasted all the better with some Parmesan and basil. No sauce needed.

2. Lunchtime Salad
Toss veggies with Greek spices, red wine vinegar and olive oil for insta-salad. I brought it for lunch at work with a half of my new PBJ cousin, Big Sky raisin bread with almond butter.

3. Veggie Scrambled Eggs
I had grand ideas of trying to make a frittata for my final meal of the week, but on a late weeknight scrambling some eggs and cheese had all the same flavor and texture. One bowl, one pan and 10 minutes later, I was eating my dinner. I need to make eggs into dinner more often.

Succotash

Succotash is summery Southern combo of  beans, corn and other fresh goodness. With sherry vinegar, butter beans, cherry tomatoes, and fresh basil, this version from Gourmet  transforms veggies into something you something you can't help but eat every bite of, even if you're a meat and potatoes guy like one of my taste testers. 

Maybe it was the bacon grease in the cast iron that worked the magic, true Southern style? Maybe it was how I accidentally tweaked the recipe to include more bacon grease than called for and  cooked the veggies to still be crisp and hence fresher tasting than true, true Southern style?

Whatever it was, it on plates with grilled (err, slightly charred but still not dried out on the inside) salmon for a Friday night lake house dinner. There was some wine and some talk. And then it was gone. 

The succotash inspiration came from the Stone Throw Bar & Grill chef who keeps the "simple and Southern" side on his menu served with fish all summer. I had the pleasure of chatting with him about how he prepares locally grown produce for a casual-fine dining hybrid menu for an upcoming issue of 280 Living a few weeks ago, and I left with determination to make just that, succotash with my favorite piece of seafood, salmon. 

The end product confirmed that restaurant inspiration with magazine recipes cooked in the company of friends with no time table is quite the perfect way to spend a night, one I prefer to eating out or grabbing a meal that requires no prep and cleanup work.

Dinner: Corn Cakes with Chicken

Stuffed with fresh corn kernels, cornmeal, cheese, and green onions, corn cakes are savory dinner pancakes. The taste reminded me of corn puddings and souffles, but the texture was more firm and bread-like. I wanted to display their flavor as a main dish instead of a measly side dish, so I spiced up some pulled rotisserie chicken to put on top along with a dollop of sour cream.

There are so many summer dinners I want to try before the produce shifts to winter squashes and greens and sunlight tragically disappears at 5 p.m., and this one was totally worth prioritizing.

Dinner: Grilled Veggie Pasta

Marinated summer veggies on the grill. Colorful red pepper, zucchini, red onion, and mushrooms. I could make a meal of just those beauties.

But in order to make it a "real" meal, I served it with the simple, fresh flavors of penne pasta, Parmesan, and fresh basil. The addition of a grilled chicken breast was optional depending on how much you like meat. Leftovers are fantastic cold; I chopped some chicken to toss into the pasta for lunch the next day.

I recommend chopping the veggies in advance so that all you have to do to prep is grill, cook pasta, chop basil, and put it all together.

Also, this picture isn't all that pretty, but it was pretty darn attractive in person.

Recipe: Tomato Pie

I came across this tomato pie recipe just after I'd eaten a delectable one at Kerby Lane Cafe in Austin, so of course I had to try making it myself. Baking layers of fresh tomatoes topped with cheese in a buttery crust created a meal whose wondrous taste we spent half our dinner conversation discussing.

The base of the pie is the kind of tomatoes that are unbelievably colorful and juicy this time of year.

Layer those guys with sauteed onions and what would have ideally been fresh basil (although dried basil worked when the real stuffed had all tragically wilted) and salt and pepper, and seal it all in with gruyere and parmesan. That plus a side salad equals a meal so very full of fresh veggie flavors.

Oh, and I made my first-ever homemade pie crust, which I found to be quite a beautiful thing. True, it took extra time, but a five-ingredient food processor action followed by rolling it out wasn't all that bad. It was plenty worth it for that buttery, flaky crust that you can only get in the homemade version (all-natural crusts from Whole Foods crusts the second best though). I failed to follow the instructions for pie weights and such and just baked it plain, so it  shrank down from the edges but wasn't too bad. Next time I will try the pie crust fitting tips I produced at work this week.

But what really inspired me to go scratch was wanting to add basil to the crust like my tomato pie at Kerby Lane. Yet another reason it's worth the effort.

Three Things: Pink Eyed Peas

I haven't played with local produce much this summer, which makes me sad, so when my summer of weddings concluded last week, I stopped at my favorite produce stand after work, picked up some pink-eyed peas and other veggies, and entered culinary creativity mode.

1. Boiled Pink-Eyed Peas
Peas+Peas+Peas
I just boiled them plain because I wanted to mix them with other veggies, but if you want them to actually have decent flavor, try some onion and garlic in the mix.

2. Pink-Eyed Pea Succotash Salad
Peas+Corn+Tomatoes+Onion+Garlic+Lemon Juice+Olive Oil+Salt+Pepper
This is a loose cousin of the traditional hot bean-and-corn medley that is succotash. I love how veggies have so much fresh flavor that they just require a tad bit of oil and vinegar (or lemon juice) to make a lettuce-free salad. We ate it with grilled chicken for dinner, and then I chopped some of the chicken and mixed it with the salad for lunch the next day.

3. Pink-Eyed Pea Salsa
Peas+Prepared Salsa
I like to mix pink-eyeds (or black-eyeds) into salsa to add texture and taste. It also makes it heartier so that I can eat chips and salsa with a salad and feel like I had a full meal.

Recipe: Heirloom Tomato Caprese Salad

When I told a friend I had written an article on heirloom gardening [July/August Cooking with Paula Deen — check it out on newsstands, friends], she guessed that it meant "inheriting a garden and keeping it up." She was close on the inheriting idea. An heirloom plant is one whose seeds have been passed on for more than 50 years. 


Each fruit or veggies had a unique color, shape, and taste, which are typically more complex than your standard grocery store variety, and it likewise comes with its own story (and anything with a story gains cool points in my book). I had no idea just how big heirloom gardening was until I saw firsthand an heirloom gardening festival last spring where hundreds of people trekked to middle-of-nowhere Missouri (near Laura Ingalls Wilder's house) in the rain to buy seeds and plants of hundreds of varieties.

While the endless varieties of melons, tomatoes, squash, and more inspired me to plant my own, I have excused it off for now with the uncertainty of long-term housing and resorted paying a little extra for tomatoes available for sale. Those above actually came from Fresh Market; ideally, I would have shopped for some at the farmer's market but leaving town literally every weekend tragically makes that task a little cumbersome.


Anyway, I showed off the colorful fruit in a caprese salad layered with mozzarella and topped with fresh basil, olive oil, and vinegar. The simple combo dressed up the flavor profile of tomatoes so that my usual sliced-tomatoes-are-ok stance became an I-should-eat-this-as-a-whole-meal-not-a-side-dish. It made such a purdy presentation with little hassle. 


I would have preferred super-soft white fresh mozzarella to the more dense yellow variety, but I was trying to use up what was in the fridge. I learned that my dad, who usually goes more gourmet in preference, prefers the more flavorful basic kind; plus, it is cheaper.

Recipe: Parsley Pesto

Because parsley has a less pungent flavor than basil, its pesto allows the nuts and garlic mixed in the spread to shine more in the flavor combo. Parsley was cheaper for me to buy a whole bunch than basil, too.

I tossed the pesto with bow tie pasta to go with lemony grilled artichokes and asparagus. It was an ideal combination for a refreshing summer meal outdoors with a friends who came to visit, perfected by a little wine and strawberry cake for dessert.

I love to make pesto because you can put it on anything and everything. We spread it on goat cheese and tomato sandwiches the next day. And if I had made more, it would have gone on a pizza or creamy pasta salad.

Monday Sweets: Pound Cake with Strawberries

Dessert Math:

Pound Cake {homemade by someone else}

+Sliced fresh strawberries {sweetened with powdered sugar}

+Reddi Whip

___________________________________________

Easiest, Freshest Standby Summer Dessert

This particular pound cake-berry combo was a particular winner because I used local strawberries—possibly the most succulent I've ever tasted—atop bake sale sour cream pound cake. Thank you, East Lake Strawberry Festival.

Recipe: Creamy Pesto Pasta Salad

The mission: Pesto pasta salad for picnic.

The ingredients: At first I toyed with putting in pesto and mozzarella and tomatoes because I knew it would be good. But then I saw a recipe from Sweet Savory Life with creamy pesto and artichokes and peas. I don't really like peas, but the appeal of creaminess and artichokes would cover them up enough, I figured. And they did. I just tweaked my recipe to use yogurt, because in my book yogurt>mayo and Greek yogurt>plain yogurt. The end. 

The result: A flavor-packed cold pasta that got me on a kick of mixing vinaigrette-type dressings with yogurt to toss in my salads.

Creamy Pesto Pasta Salad

1/2 recipe pesto

5.3 oz. Greek yogurt (1 package)

1 package penne pasta

1 1/2 cups peas, cooked

1 can artichokes, chopped

Cook pasta. Stir prepared pesto with Greek yogurt. Mix pasta, pesto-yogurt mixture, peas and artichokes.  Serve cold.