Monthly Archives: August 2011

Perfect Summer Snack Times Two

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What do you do when you are hungry for a snack and you have a fresh baguette and all of the ingredients for the two perfect summer salads to go with it?  Well if you are almost incapable of avoiding complication in the creation of even the simplest of summer snacks (like me), you make both.

Today’s summer afternoon snack started with a caprese.  I think an insalata caprese would be in the top 3 contenders of foods that I’d want to have to eat on a desert island.  I love them so much that when our garden is kicking out tomatoes and basil like mad, I’m eating them in as many as three meals a day.  They are summer’s loveliest flavour and texture combination.  A luscious tomato, cut thick, with generous slices of fresh mozzarella and just-picked basil leaves floated down upon them; finished with the lightest drizzle of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, salt and maybe a little pepper.  I’m no stickler, but I will mention that these things taste like a million bucks if you’ve grown your own tomatoes and basil, or bought them very fresh from friendly farmer who has.  And the mozzarella-it must be very fresh, milky and on the watery and porous side.  I think the cryo-packed balls can often be as good as the packed-in-water in plastic containers from the grocery store.  So many people love good fresh mozzarella that it is becoming very easy to find and cheap to buy.  Enough about my caprese obsession.  How about a picture of the golden tomato caprese that launched a thousand word paragraph?

This on its own is the perfect summer snack, but there are two hungry people in this house,  and, I’ve also got some lovely dill, fresh eggs and lettuce, so I can’t stop with just the caprese.  I boiled the eggs, or, if you are a student of Martha Stewart –hard cooked them.

Check out these gorgeous fresh eggs that I bought from a man named Fernando who raises them in the little town where I work.

For egg salad, eggs are boiled, peeled, sliced in half and ready to be chopped and combined with a little light mayonnaise, mustard, diced onion and celery and a little pepper and salt to taste, then piled on top of some lettuce and garnished with dill, both from the garden.

There isn’t much more to do then to place the plate between two hungry people to eat with baguette, or on their own.  I put salt and pepper, olive oil and vinegar on the table, to adjust flavours, as needed.  We dove in.  It was fresh, flavourful and satisfying; the perfect summer snack.

Chicago Dog Days of Summer

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If I were a followed blogger, I’d have to apologize for the long silence.  Some day!  For now, it’s a good thing to have zero followers.  Summer arrived, and I started filling my free moments with being outside, gardening, cookouts, trips to the lake and general summer fun and relaxation.  I got re-inspired to return to our blog by an article I read recently in the Summer Made Easy Special Issue of Everyday Food Magazine called Bask Country about a tapas party with food prepared by Aran Goyoaga, a pastry chef, blogger and cookbook author, written by Jean Lear, photographed by John Kernick.  I read the lines “She started blogging as a way to keep track of the baking she was doing at home….Soon her serene, light-filled aesthetic–captured by her photographs as well as her prose found a loyal readership.”  Now, that is what I was thinking of when I started this blog.  I immediately jumped up and grabbed my camera and my laptop.  And then I encountered a bunch of boring computer and camera problems and had to save this post for another day.  Problems solved…  Here is my first attempt at recreating a close approximation of an authentic Chicago-style hotdog.

First, I had a little shopping to do in order to top the dogs properly.  Chicago dogs come with sliced tomatoes, mustard, onions, a dill pickle spear, a funny little pepper called a Sport Pepper, and a sprinkling of celery salt on a poppy seed bun.

Its been a hot summer, so an advantage to the Chicago dog is that it can be made on the grill.  I brushed the buns lightly with butter in order to help adhere poppy seeds to the top.

The meat version, served with a side of grilled sweet corn, with butter, pepper and salt, of course, and a few strips of bacon, for good measure.

The veggie version, is a close approximation of the classic chicago dog, except with with a vegetarian dog, and of course, all of the essential chicago dog fixings.  I enjoyed mine with a cob of grilled corn, a slice of watermelon and cukes & onions with dill, vinegar with salt, pepper.  A tasty escape to the Windy City!