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

Super Simple Fruit Cobbler

Picking blackberries involves nasty gross summer heat and prickly bushes. It was not my favorite way to spend summer Saturdays at the lake as a kid. But my mom loves to dress head-to-toe and slave away amongst thorns for tart berries. That's where you'll find her these days while I am a lazy bum at the house or dock. She'd rather pick her blackberries, and I'd rather buy them, even frozen; but for the record, she'd rather buy her bakery cake and I'd rather bake one myself.

What mother and daughter do have in common is that we both make this shortbread-crumble-top cobbler and have been since I was first forced to pick blackberries.

It's super simple:
Sprinkle berries with cinnamon in a pie crust. Use a pastry cutter (or two knives) to cut together flour, butter and sugar.

Sprinkle shortbread topping over berries. I like to sneak some of this mixture to snack on, mmm, buttery, sugary yum.

 Bake it. And boom, you have a crumbly crust-topped gooey warm berries to delight.

And some vanilla ice cream, and it's golden (really cheesy pun intended).

A theology of cooking creativity

Sometimes creativity, even culinary creativity, feels selfish. Sometimes it is selfish for me.

But Wayne Grudem, in his giant volume of Systematic Theology, helped reorient my thinking last year: we delight in creativity because it comes from God, and we should be worshipful in it.

I have amazing, culinary-creative friends who turn out potluck feasts like this beauty of a backyard barbecue, complete with homemade iced brownies and whiskey sours made with homemade sour mix.

"God has so made us to enjoy imitating, in a creaturely way, his creative activity. And one of the amazing aspects of humanity—in distinction from the rest of creation—is our ability to create new things. This also explains why we take delight in other kinds of 'creative' activity: many people enjoy cooking, or decorating their home, or working with wood or other materials, or producing scientific inventions, or devising new solutions to problems in industrial production. Even children enjoy coloring pictures or building houses out of blocks. In all these activities, we reflect in a small measure the creative activity of God, and we should delight in it and thank him for it." -Grudem, page 272

Like all things in life, I want each moment of my creation to be intentionally done out of gratitude and delight in the ultimate Creator, to glorify him and make him known.  That is why I cook, or why I want to want to cook.

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.

Chocolate Waffle Bar

When I told my brother about having friends over for a "ladies lunch for (birthday) dinner," he commented on what a "crazy party" a salad party would be. And crazy it was with a special kind of bar, a chocoholic's dream.

A waffle filled with cocoa and chocolate chips tastes like warm dark chocolate cake and begs for a lighter sweetness to top its holey surface.

The bar: fresh whipping cream, chocolate chips, pecans, sprinkles (it was a birthday!), strawberries, the best chocolate sauce (a Lebovitz recipe), caramel banana topping. 

Not pictured above is the crown jewel: Cinnamon Ice Cream homemade in brilliance by Hannah. Really, you didn't even need the other toppings once you marry dark chocolate waffle cake with creamy spiced ice cream. Oooh.

Also, there was singing and other beauty of gathering the ladies who are a constant source of encouragement, inspiration and companionship to me. The only thing that tops that is presents of snickers salad (only really!), caprese salad, oriental slaw, chicken salad, fruit salad, potato salad, strawberry-pretzel salad, green salad with yogurt ranch dressing, vino, and, of course, cinnamon ice cream! (And lots of other sweet people thinking of me on my birthday, including (home) blog love from Amy.) Thanks, birthday crew. Y'all rock.

Meeting the chefs behind the latest fresh food concepts in Birmingham

All of a sudden, there is farm-fresh food coming in everywhere I look in this Magic City I have been reclaiming as my own. New farmers markets have come to the city at Railroad Park on Wednesdays and even at suburban concrete chain store mecca The Summit on Thursdays to add to the Saturday market spread at Pepper Place, East Lake, Homewood, West Homewood, Valleydale and Mt Laurel. Not to mention that Freshfully's storefront just opened in Avondale to complete a triumvirate of brewery-barbecue (or even better, Pork and Greens plate served over grits topped and topped with onion rings!)-market on 41st Street, marrying my East Birmingham love with food love.

Also, there are restaurant dudes in my papers' areas doing uber cool things with fresh food. I got to chat with these guys and take their pictures over the past month, because my job rocks.

Little Donkey
Homewood
Josh Gentry

Josh, Chiliquiles (fancy nachos), fresh veggies and the corn grinding machine. Photo for The Homewood Star.

Josh Gentry insisted I drink a Corona and munch on Queso Fundido ("cheese dip's" far superior cousin: sausage and veggies topped with a thick layer of cheese you "grab" with a corn tortilla) while I interviewed him. I like to think I know about food, but  Gentry opened the door to a world I don't entirely know when he went through a who's who in the chefs who endorsed Ideas in Food (the guy who wrote it advises Little Donkey as they create new dishes) while we chatted. He and the other masterminds behind the restaurant know how to cook pulled pork (they are the Jim N Nick's guys), but here they mix it with authentic Mexican flavors and, best of all, lots of fresh avocado. I'm still dreaming of their slow-cooked meat, and their fish taco.


Food Studio B
Chelsea
Sean Butler 

Photo for 280 Living.

My mom met me for lunch at Food Studio B after my interview with chef and owner Sean Butler, and she insisted we go back the next week when we were driving by on our way out of town. The following week, I talked with my hairdresser about how Sean delivers healthy yet awesomely delicious meals to their salon, a different meal for each day, as a part of how he caters to the Paleo (meats, veggies, seeds — loved by Irontribe enthusiasts and others, too) diet around town.

I loved hearing him talk about how important his son, the business' namesake is, and his dreams to have like 15 restaurant concepts (bakery, cafe, caterer, snack food creator, wine dinners, market, ice cream parlor, cooking class host) in one — all fresh, healthy and mouthwatering — in his new space in Chelsea. And, he has an excellent baker on staff, whose yellow cake with fudge icing was unbelievably from-scratch, real-butter tasty.

Shindigs
Mountain Brook/Everywhere
Chad Schofield and Mac Russell

Prideful point: Mac (left) called to tell me he liked my picture of "Mountain Brook Mondays"; yay. Photo for Village Living.

These guys make vegan meatballs ("L.A. balls") taste better than meat. And anything that comes from their truck is fresh fist-full of flavors that make me say "wow" every time. Every time. They now park in Mountain Brook on Mondays, making it super convenient for me to drop by from work; it's dangerous.

Conclusion: As much as my friends and I tend to talk of the idealism of moving to a farm in the country one day, I am quite content with the farm coming to me at markets and in restaurants that so respect where their food is grown.

Blueberry-Lemon Layer Cake

A is for Amy, who likes fruity, fluffy desserts and hence inspired me to bake a cake that wasn't chocolate.

 

A is for apartment, which we christened with a celebration of Amy's birth.

Blueberry cake layer, lemon cake layer, blueberry cake layer, all covered in a creamy lemon frosting.

 And A is for appetizers, of which we ate plates full before moving onto dessert.

Evidence of a tart with caramelized onions/tomato/goat cheese and pull-apart sausage bread sit behind the almost-blown-out-candle-topped cake.

 Cake verdict: Butter-y, subtly lemon-y. berry-y, pretty darn scrumptious for not being chocolate.