In warmer weather, outdoor kitchens offer home cooks the opportunity to prepare a wide variety of foods without the heat and lingering odors that can be problematic when cooking inside the house.
Nemo and I are huge fans of Great Lakes smelt. Here, I'm preparing a batch on an outdoor cooktop designed for camping. Set up in grass or on a paved surface with cardboard underneath, small oil droplets and odors aren't nearly as problematic as when cooking indoors.
A simple flat surface provides the cook with a place to set foods that are ready to cook or have just finished cooking.
"Before" shot of Nemo anxiously awaiting a smelt.
"After" shot following a tasty diced smelt tail.
Harissa olive oil is infused with spices to give it a lively kick that accompanies a range of foods from hummus and bruschetta to chicken and fish dishes. This lovely bottle of harissa olive oil was a graduation gift from Evan Anderson. Not having cooked with it much before, I wasn't anticipating such a bold flavor but found it to be absolutely outstanding in some pesto that I made this week.
After blending black walnuts and grated parmigiana cheese with coarsely-chopped basil and several garlic cloves in a food processor, I drizzled a generous amount of harissa olive oil into the mix and pulsed a couple of additional times.
The resulting mix was phenomenal on toast points and I can imagine would be outstanding if tossed with a whole wheat pasta to make a carb-friendly pasta with pesto diablo.
Thank you to my good friend and master gardener Dan who gave me several tomato seedlings in late Spring. They're starting to produce some tiny, but flavor-packed tomatoes.
Several food magazines and recipes are starting to highlight these minute, flavor-packed cherry tomato varieties on salads, pizza, or as a garnish to other dishes.
I wish to send out a special thank you to Mariah, my student who was kind enough to bring cupcakes to our scheduled final exam period this week.
The students were writing final reflections on their growth and development as writers over the course of the short summer term and the cupcakes were a perfect accompaniment.
Mariah said that she substituted eggs with cinnamon applesauce and I noticed two things:
- the hint on cinnamon was a perfect accompaniment to the chocolate cake
- they stayed moist for a really long time (I took several at the end of class and hid them in my office so that I was able to enjoy wonderful breakfasts for several days afterwards)
