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

Caramel Brownies

Let me start with a confession: I judge blog posts that start like this one does, with a picture of a collection of baking goods that includes a box cake mix and candy.

I  hesitated to make these brownies for the first time in years, since my baking philosophy has evolved to make me turn up my nose up when I know caramel and cake such as these add that slight chemical taste I now find in packaged foods. They are not pure. Not pure!

BUT then I remembered how a thick, buttery German chocolate dough encases melted caramel and chocolate chips, and remembered how its gooey chocolateness is richer than a chocolate bar.

Most of all, I remembered my time was somewhat limited, and with this recipe I wouldn't have to experiment with a caramel sauce and chance a brownie recipe that was too dry or too over-the-top rich. Convenience products are just so convenient (imagine that).

These convenience-baking-with-a-twist morsels of sweentess garnered many compliments at a large group function, and also prompted this conversation:

Roommate in our House of Sweets: I want you to make these for my birthday.

Me: I think we can find an excuse to make these again before your birthday.

Roommate: No, you don't understand. I want the entire pan to myself.

(Roommate got them for her birthday, and she even shared them.)

Flag Fruit Tart for the Fourth

The Fourth of July started with a flurry of butter, sugar, butter, cream and butter: a White Texas Sheet Cake; a vanilla custard base for ice cream; and most festively, a shortbread cookie topped with thick, vanilla pastry cream and carefully placed blueberries and strawberries.

And then I had to take advantage of the greenery around me on the lake and play with my brother's fish eye lens. It makes everything a little funky.

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.