Too hot to cook! Shrimp with Arugula, Pea Pesto

When the weather is sweaty and your AC is in the basement turning on the oven is not an option. Grilled shrimp, grilled polenta and a no-cook pea and arugula puree seemed like the perfect dinner to not heat up my kitchen and use the quickly wilting spicy greens in my fridge!

Before I get into the how-to let me tell you that, yes, I understand that what looks like pureed green mush might not appeal to everyone. But this isn't mush - the spicy arugula, sweet peas, and walnuts when properly seasoned with a good pinch of salt and fresh cracked pepper and whirled in the food processor with a drizzle of olive oil turn into something YUMMY.

The shrimp was simply grilled with salt and pepper. I made the polenta last night and spread it on a small pan to chill so I could grill it today. If your shrimp and peas are defrosted this meal could come together in 20 minutes flat.

Crabfest 09!

Our buddies MB and Otis put on quite the Crabfest! Otis and Mike drove down to Maryland the morning of the party to pick up these guys:




Steamed crabs and Jersey fresh corn on the cob (thanks Mark!) were the stars of the show. Messy and delicious!

There were some great sides too - couscous salad with veggies by MB, an awesome potato salad with buttermilk dressing by Rita, jersey peaches, and fried plantains with dipping sauce. I didn't snap a picture of Katie's butter cake but, as you'd guess with a name like that, it was really good pretty darn rich.

Sea Bass with Garlic Scape Pesto

I know, I know - garlic scapes? Their season came and went a long time ago. My computer has been a little under the weather and I'm obviously VERY behind on my blogging. But this was so tasty I felt I had to share! The sea bass was seasoned with olive oil, salt and pepper - I put it under the broiler flesh side up for a couple minutes then I flipped it over and broiled it until the skin was crispy and the fish was cooked through.

The pesto was garlic scapes, olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon and parmesan cheese all blended up in the blender. The lentils were cooked in salted water while I sauteed onions and garlic, when the lentils were done I mixed them with the onions and garlic and added a little white wine and dijon mustard.

You should make this - just replace the garlic scape pesto with maybe some green pea pesto or broccoli rabe pesto. Yum.

Raw Tuna, Grapefruit & Avocado Salad

Have you seen Mark Bittman's 101 salads article? It definitely inspired me to create something different from our norm. We eat a lot of vegetables but not a whole lot of salads but it's the perfect time of the year for them. This one was a combo of a few that I saw in Bittman's article.

I mixed raw ahi tuna, jicama, napa cabbage, grapefruit and avocado with a little bit of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a squeeze of grapefruit and red pepper flake.

This came together really quickly, was super fresh and, best of all, didn't require any heat. I meant to add chopped salted peanuts on top but I forgot - I'll definitely top my next bowl with them!

Striped Bass, Beans and Greens

This was a quick and easy weeknight meal.

Ron sauteed some purple spring onion from Greensgrow and added cannellini beans, salt, and pepper. I sauteed the kale (also from Greensgrow) in olive oil with garlic, salt, pepper, red pepper flake, and some red wine vinegar just until it was tender but still bright green. Ron seasoned the bass with olive oil, salt and pepper and threw it on the grill. I topped mine with a few cherry tomatoes from our tomato plant.

That's it! Quick, easy and super good for you.

A Clammy feast!

I'm a lucky girl. My parents came for a visit this weekend and they brought a whole cooler full of these beauties:

My dad raked all 140 of these on Friday! Fresh clams straight from Long Island. Imagine a 12 dozen clams for free - all I had to do was figure out what to do with them! Steamed clams and stuffed clams sounded perfect.

Ron separated them into steamer size and stuffed clam size. My mom and dad opened the big ones and I made the stuffing - it was quite the family affair!

I sauteed some diced shallot, red pepper, onion, and celery. After the vegetables were soft I added the chopped up clams. I chop my clams in a mini food processor and they always look really gross. I'm only posting the picture so when you make these at home (which you should) you'll know that if the clams look like gray vomit - it's okay!

See? Yuck right? After you add the gross looking clams to the softened vegetables add some bread crumbs, parsley and chives. I seasoned the mix as I went with salt, pepper and old bay.

My dad cleaned the shells to fill. These are better looking than those clam shaped foil things. I mean the clams come with their own perfect size container for this filling - use it! But I guess if you're using canned clams you can use those foil things or you can use this stuffing as a filling for stuffed shrimp or fish - that might be what I do with the leftovers!

Stuff the filling into the clams - I made two dozen. Here they are right before they baked at 350 for about 20 minutes or until the tops get brown.

These ended up being part of a feast at Ron's parents' house. Ron steamed the little guys to serve with melted butter and lemon, Ron's parents went salad crazy and made a tomato mozzarella salad, green bean salad, cucumber salad, potato salad and a tasty green salad with apricots, baby shrimp, cucumbers and a jalapeno vinaigrette. There was BBQ chicken too, although by the time it came out I was too full of salad to have any!

Peach pie with ice cream or angel food cake with berries and whip cream for dessert. Not a bad Sunday huh?

Update: I didn't post an individual picture of the steamers - you can see them in the spread above. We ate them all with butter and lemon in like 3 minutes.

Glass Noodles!

This recipe is a variation of Jaden's recipe over at Steamy Kitchen. I've never used glass noodles before and I had a little bit of trouble finding them in the noodle isle of my Asian Market. None of the labels were in english but, luckily, the ingredients were. In Jaden's post she says that glass noodles are made from potato starch so I just searched for that in the ingredient lists!

See - tricky huh?

I sauteed thinly sliced onions and carrots with chopped garlic, red chile, and ginger. Once the onions and carrots where soft I added the sliced bok choy, de-stringed snap peas, raw shrimp, cooked noodles (just boil them for 5 minutes) some soy, honey and chopped mint. Just stir everything together until the vegetables are heated through and the shrimp are light pink and that's it!

I was hungry and scarfed this down but probably should have followed the recipe more closely. You're supposed to toss the cooked noodles with some sesame oil before you mix them into the veggie. I wish I had done this - it would have made the noodles less sticky.

Check out this neat trick! My julienning skills are less than great but I wanted my carrots sliced really thin for this dish. After peeling the outside of the carrot I continued to peel fat strips with a vegetable peeler - so thin you could see through them - see?

Side note: what do I do with all that sage in the background? It seems like a winter herb to me and I can only think to use it with roast chicken or something involving pumpkin - but it's so full now! What's a summer sage dish?

Anyway, I just cut the strips into thin pieces so they cooked quickly. They ended up being sort of noodle-like in the dish. I use peeler slices of carrot and zucchini like this as a healthy way to bulk up pasta dishes.

This was an easy dish, it just took some time to chop, slice and dice all of the ingredients. It's a great dish to use up all of the about-to-go-bad veggies in your fridge. You could even add leftover chicken or beef instead of the shrimp.

Fish Tacos

Soft tacos are one of my favorite summer dishes. They're along the line of the grilled protein, grilled vegetable and bean summer routine I've talked about before - in this case you just throw the grilled protein in a corn tortilla and add some fixin's and you're done.

I think fish tacos are my favorite, they're a perfect light meal. We normally use whatever white fish is least expensive that day - preferably something firm. This time we used cod, but halibut is also delicious. We dressed the tacos with slaw, a spicy sauce, and some pico de gallo.

I made the slaw with red and green cabbage, lime juice, a touch of oil, honey, salt and pepper - I over limed which is why I added the honey but it was good with it. The spicy sauce was just equal parts mayo and sour cream (in this case both low fat because that's what we had in the fridge!) a bit of the adobo from a can of chipotles, chili powder, cumin, salt and pepper. Ron made a pico with chopped tomatoes, a jalapeno, red onion, garlic, lime juice, salt and pepper.

The fish was just seasoned with s&p and baked - there was a lot going on in these tacos and we didn't want to over do it! I know a lot of fish tacos come with fried fish - I'll like to get these when I go out but at home it's so much easier to just grill or bake the fish.

I made "refried" beans - not really refried because it was just a drained can of pintos, a chopped plum tomato, chipotle, cumin, chili powder, salt, pepper and parsley all mixed together and smashed with a fork. If the beans start to dry out just add some stock until they're the consistency that you like. I make this all the time and LOVE it - it's not refried in lard but still has the refried texture. Refried bean connoisseurs might scoff at these but I think they're delicious! We also grilled some red peppers and zucchini's with olive oil, s&p.

This sort of turned into a feast - I was half way through my second taco and had to give up. And I'm positive it had nothing to do with the fact that I'm still getting home from work and immediately making a B line for this.

*I forgot to mention that this dinner would be awesome with a Michelada - have you tried them? I haven't yet but they're on my "To Make" list. Check out this recipe and picture over at Food Woolf.

**Update: Last night Ron made Micheladas and I think they are gross - I really wanted to like them but I couldn't take a sip without making a I-want-to-spit-this-out face. Bummer.

Switching it up

During a recent trip to Reading Terminal I bought a whole rainbow trout and some little neck clams. We had the clams with some semi-homemade pizzas (the dough was whole wheat from Trader Joes). We made a caramelized onion, ricotta and prosciutto one and a pear, gorgonzola and arugula one - fancy right? I was inspired by Deb at Smitten Kitchen (as I often am) and Jaden at Steamy Kitchen.

Anyway - about that trout. I sauteed a couple of cups of assorted mushrooms (I used shitake, oyster and leftover enoki) with celery, onions, thyme and parsley in a bit of butter and oil for about 15 minutes until vegetables are soft. Then I mixed in two slices of diced prosciutto.



Open the fish up like a book and squeeze lemon all over the inside. The Bon Apettit recipe said to let the filling cool before stuffing the fish - I didn't have the patience to wait and it was fine!



Fold up the stuffed fish, put the extra stuffing on the bottom of an oiled baking dish, and place the fish on top. The original recipe calls for lots of extra butter at this step which I'm positive would be delicious but for the sake of my waistline I left it out.





I had an extra piece of prosciutto so I wrapped it around the fish. Why not? Pop it in the oven for 30 minutes at 350 and it's done! I made what was probably too much stuffing for the two of us but it sort of served as a side dish as well. I served a standard caesar salad on the side and we were stuffed!


This dish is a little out of the norm for us. Normally we eat a grilled protein, grilled vegetables and beans for dinner all summer long. It's a rut we get stuck in every summer - but it's a comfortable, delicious rut. I can't really blog about grilled meat every day so we switched it up a little bit and this ended up being really good - enjoy!

My Love-Hate Relationship

I'm stuck in the airport in Denver after my last shoot of the season. Ugh - flying never doesn't suck. I meant to blog about this love hate relationship last week but ran out of time. I figured now was a good time to write!

As you know I recently had a kick ass tailgate/4th of July party. The food was all really good and everyone ate way more "real" food than they did junk food which left me with this little problem:



I LOVE party mix! Are there people that don't? If there are I don't think we'd get along. I normally don't keep junk in the house because I lack self control. But I also hate to throw food away - I'm often outside begging the neighbor kids to eat my baked goods so I don't eat a dozen cookies in one sitting. I'm hoping when I get home that this giant tub of party mix will be gone. But, if it's not I'll probably pick all the good stuff out until it's just a tub of pretzels.
(**I wrote this in Denver but couldn't post until I got home. Bad news...it's still here taunting me!)

I should probably share an actual dish with you - this one is so simple and delicious. Ron made these bay scallops with shallots, garlic, butter, lemon and parsley tossed with whole wheat linguini. I topped mine with some halved grape tomatoes. I don't eat pasta often but when I do I like to have it nice and light just like this.