"Summer on a Plate"

Apparently, the most cliché thing you can write about as a food blogger is caprese salad and how it reminds you of your summer. Honestly, I am not above being a cliché, and my food blog is ever so humble compared to the one who called it a faux pas. I think that as a beginner, if I ever were to become rich and famous and have a movie made about my exploits, my naïve yet nobly intended post of caprese salad adulation will become a deleted scene, if the director is kind, or simply overlooked as the wistful ramblings of a novice. Hmm... I wonder who would play me in an Abstemious Epicure movie.

Many summers have come and gone for me without friendships to help pass the long months between obligations. Some summers have been filled with obligations themselves. But every few years, I'm lucky enough to have a June-July-August that revolves around friends and food. Those summers are the ones that stick in your memory, and this summer was like that.

I can't remember what the reason for the gathering was, but it resulted in the lot of us out in my friend Jonathan's massive garden at twilight, picking whatever we could get our hands on and shoving it into our greedy mouths. As we tried to decide what sort of "real" food we could make from what grew in Jonathan's backyard, one of us suggested caprese salad. You may have eaten caprese salad before, but if you have never eaten it made from homegrown tomatoes and basil and fresh whole milk mozzarella, you will never understand how magical it is. Each bite is an explosion of perfectly-matched flavors. I didn't do much... sliced cheese, halved cherry tomatoes, tore basil and arranged them prettily. Jonathan's garden really did all the work. There's just something about homegrown tomatoes that grocery store tomatoes can never touch. They taste like an accumulation of sunlight.

Within seconds, the plate was destroyed. All that remained was tomato carnage, scattered basil flowers, and blissful, contented expressions on the faces of my friends. When I look back on my summer and remember it fondly, I will remember this salad. I hope those multitudes of other food bloggers who write about "Summer on a Plate" have memories as happy as mine. Can you really fault 'em for immortalizing them?

Food of the Gods

Is there anything in this world more beautiful than bacon?

Soup's On

I am unabashedly "a winter." In terms of fashion, winters are people with very dark or very light hair and pale skin who look good in jewel tones, which is true of me. But winter resonates with me in other ways too. Cold, quiet, solitary, brittle, desolate, radiant.

And, it's a good time to make soup. I love soup.

I've been playing around with the idea of a stock-based soup with grains, leafy greens and sausage for awhile. There are lots of similar recipes out there, and I'd been thinking of doing one for awhile, when yesterday's issue of Food Day provided basically the exact recipe that I was looking for. This one called for kielbasa instead of ground sausage, which was welcome. I used a turkey kielbasa for its low fat content. The leafy green in this soup is Kale. It has potatoes, pearl barley, Hungarian paprika, and a base of chicken stock.


You really can't eat a hearty soup like this without a good, crusty loaf of bread. This is a harvest wheat bread from Trader Joe's.

The stock of the soup was so flavorful, and this bread is a perfect vehicle for sopping up what's left after all the chunky and leafy bits are gone.

Hazel loves bread. Hazel thinks she loves kale too, but she doesn't. She'll pick it up and spit it out over and over, until you take it away from her. Bread gets inhaled, though.

The soup was extremely flavorful. It was also both filling and low in calories, which is awesome for my purposes. And yes, that is real butter on my bread. A little bit of real butter never hurt anyone.

Can you imagine a more perfect winter meal?