I always find it amazing when I talk to people about cooking and find out that they’ve never cooked up a fresh vegetable in their life. I’ve run across more people than I can count who only rely on frozen veggies or canned. I’ve found that, with most of these people, it’s not a dislike of vegetables holding them back, it’s that they are intimidated by the work involved in cooking up something fresh.
Tomorrow morning, the girls and I are heading home after a two week long trip up to the Midwest. Namely, Michigan and Indiana. We were hoping to escape the heat in Georgia, and that worked for the first half of our trip, but wow…did it get hot! Despite the heat wave, we’ve had a wonderful visit.
We packed a lot of activity into those two weeks, but best of all, we got to spend a lot of time with family and friends that we don’t get to see often enough.
It’s been a fantastic trip.
This salad may go down in history as the prettiest salad I’ve ever made. Even better? It was delicious. If you’re heading to a 4th of July party and have been asked to bring a dish, this is the perfect thing! The ingredients all need to hang out in the bowl and marinate for a while before diving in, so you can put it together at home, hang out with your friends for a bit and then, just have the salad whenever you want.
It’s beginning to look a lot like cookout season! I love sunny weekends where we can get together with family and friends, enjoy each other’s company while the kids play outside, and enjoy a great meal together. There’s nothing better.
I’m sure you’ve been just dying to know what I used the rest of that gigantic bag of asparagus for ever since I wrote about it last week. No? Well…hmmm. I guess that’s just too bad, because I have a great recipe to share with you today because of that giant bag of asparagus!
You may not have known this, but May is actually National Asparagus Month! There’s no better time to inundate the blog with asparagus filled recipes then, right?
What is it with the weather this week? Just when I think we’ve settled on a season, it starts snowing in the Northeast and we’re left snowless down here, but chilly. I’ve had enough of the back and forth, but I’m pretty sure those of you up north have REALLY had enough of it. I was downright cold, and I know I really shouldn’t have been. In the grand scheme of “cold”, it really wasn’t. I grew up in the Midwest. I know what cold is, and this wasn’t cold. It was brisk, though. Windy enough and chilly enough that I had cold toes all day long. (No, I wasn’t wearing flip flops!) By noon, I knew that we’d be having soup for dinner.
Emily, my oldest, loves broccoli. She loves broccoli so much that on her third birthday, she asked if I’d serve a big bowl of steamed broccoli alongside the chicken fingers I had out for the kids at her birthday party. Avery, my youngest daughter, who would rather eat my shoe than try most vegetables, also (surprisingly) loves broccoli. Since both of my girls will gladly devour a serving of steamed broccoli, we have it with dinner a lot. I realized recently that we may have it a little too often. Emily walked in while I was cutting up some broccoli to steam the other night and said, unenthusiastically, “Wow…broccoli, again? We eat a lot of broccoli. ~sigh~” and then she sulked off.
Happy Friday! The weekend is almost upon us again, and assuming the weather is as nice as it has been, that means we’ll most likely be grilling up something before Monday rolls around. I figured that you might do the same, so here’s a quick and easy side to have with whatever you might grill up this weekend. We had it alongside the BLT Turkey Burgers I wrote about last week, but it would certainly go well with just about anything else, too.
Before I begin this week’s post, I’m thrilled to announce that the amazing folks at OXO have sent me another wonderful kitchen gadget to give away to one lucky reader! I’ll feature the fantabulous (and I’m not just saying this because they gave me one) Hand-Held Mandoline Slicer in today’s post and then before the recipe, I’ll give you the scoop on how you can win one of your very own! (This giveaway has ended. Thank you for your entries!)
Before you say, “Christine, I just read the name of this recipe and it sounds disgusting”, just hear me out. I know that when most of us think of kale, we think of the green stuff that’s occasionally floating around in a pot of soup or, most often, the curly stuff that’s used as a garnish when we go out to eat. After years of sitting on the sidelines, kale is finally being recognized as the super-good-for-you-food that it is! Kale is one of the healthiest vegetables you can eat and one you should really try to “force” upon your children. For more on that, click here. Thankfully, because of this recipe, I don’t have to force mine anymore!