Sunday dinner (10/7): homemade pizza edition.

Option #1: pesto, mozzarella, fennel, caramelized onion, bacon
The pesto was made from leaves I gathered in my backyard basil patch. I also snipped the fennel for these pizzas from the accidental fennel jungle that grew next to our tomatoes.

Option #2: ricotta, mozzarella, oregano, garlic, mushroom, bell pepper, tomato
Minced garlic and fresh oregano were mixed into the ricotta—along with some salt and pepper—before spreading it on the dough. The bell pepper and tomatoes were fresh from our garden.

Dessert: peach-custard pie (Martha Stewart Living, June 2011)
A great and fairly simple pie one could probably make with pears or apples. I wish the peaches I used were a bit more ripe; it would’ve made the pie easier to eat.

Sunday grilling (19/6): kebabs two ways edition.

1. Flank Steak Kebabs with Peanut Sauce (Everyday Food, June 2011)
The peanut sauce on these wasn’t my favorite, since it was coconut milk based, and I don’t actually like the taste of coconut. >_> I figured that the peanut butter would take over, and I was mostly right, but there was just enough coconut taste to make the sauce kinda meh for me. The kebabs were pretty standard.

2. Mozzarella-Stuffed Turkey and Tomato Kebabs (Everyday Food, June 2011)
I made a fail substitution on these by using chicken breast instead of turkey. The chicken just wasn’t big enough to wrap the mozzarella completely, which resulted in it melting and leaking out on the grill. :( But it was heavenly in the few pieces it managed to hang onto.

3. Salad
Along with lettuce from our garden, this also included our first cucumbers!

4. Lemon Meringue Frankenpietart
I call this the Frankenpietart because I took three different Joy of Cooking recipes—one for the filling, one for the crust, and another for the topping—that weren’t meant to go together and used them anyway. The filling is for a lemon tart, but the crust is made of graham crackers, instead of the pâte brisée you would normally use in a tart. Basically, this is what happens when you have a giant bag of lemons and leftover boxes of graham crackers from Costco, as well as eggs that need to be used up ASAP. Overall it was fine, but I overbeat the meringue, so it didn’t brown as nicely as it could have.

5. Arnold Palmer
Self explanatory. Half homemade lemonade, half freshly brewed black tea!

Sunday grilling (12/6): Balinese chicken edition.

1. Balinese Grilled Chicken (Food & Wine, June 2011)
Although I didn’t include the fresh bay leaves—couldn’t find any at the store—and don’t know how that affected the dish, it still tasted great. The chicken was moist, smoky from the grill, and had an Asian flavor courtesy of the ginger and turmeric.

2. Potato Hobo Pack (Martha Stewart Living, June 2011)
This was a bit of a failure. I didn’t include the beer (too weird) and just put some oiled, salted, and peppered baby potatoes in some foil with a couple of garlic cloves. Sadly, we didn’t grill the pack long enough and the potatoes ended up a bit… crunchy.

3. Salad
A simple salad made with the first harvest of lettuce from our backyard!

4. Strawberry-Lemonade Icebox Pie
This was so gooooood. I love lemon and I love strawberry and I love graham cracker crusts—though not necessarily trying to cut them—and this pie had everything! It also had meringue, which meant I had the excuse to bust out my propane torch from Home Depot and go to town toasting it. :D

5. Iced Tea
Self explanatory.

I had a big bag of lemons, a box of strawberries, and extra powdered gelatin lying around, so I decided to experiment and make:

Strawberry Lemonade Gelatin Dessert

2 envelopes (½ oz) gelatin
1½ cups freshly squeezed lemon juice
~1 pound strawberries
½ cup sugar
2 cups water

Wash and hull strawberries, then purée in a food processor or blender. Using a spatula, press purée through a fine mesh sieve—you should have about ½ cup—and combine with lemon juice in a medium bowl. Sprinkle gelatin over the mixture and let stand for a couple minutes, until expanded. Meanwhile, bring water to a boil and add sugar. Stir to dissolve. Add hot water to bowl and stir constantly for about 5 minutes, until gelatin has completely dissolved. Ladle into four or five 8 oz. ramekins. Refrigerate until set, at least two hours, preferably overnight.

Yields four or five servings.

Sunday grilling (29/5): “we will grill this weekend even if I have to stand in the pouring rain” edition.

By the end of May, I was exasperated with the uncharacteristic cold and rain we’d been having, and determined to grill for Memorial Day no matter what. Thankfully, the weather decided to cooperate and bring forth sun and warm temperatures, so I busted out my collection of grilling themed magazines and settled on the Club Med menu from the June 2011 issue of Bon Appétit. Since the original cake in the menu and its ingredients looked too complicated to be worth bothering with, I replaced the dessert with a cranberry cake.

1. Grilled Yogurt-Marinated Leg of Lamb
There are no words to describe how amazing this was, but I’ll try anyway. This had a smoky flavor from the grill and the tabil spice blend in the marinade, and it was so soft, it practically melted in my mouth. Makes me drool just thinking about it now. Bit pricy, but so worth it. Great for sandwiches the next day too!

2. Cucumber, Tomato, and Feta Salad
A fresh salad with that yummy feta cheese bite.

3. Tunisian Vegetable Salsa
The sweetness of the roasted peppers and onions really came through in this. If I could stand to eat spicy food, I would’ve kept the chile seeds, and it probably would’ve been a nice counterpoint to the sweet vegetable taste, but… I don’t like having my mouth feel like it’s on fire.

4. Grilled Flatbreads with Tabil Spice Blend
Mmmmmm breaaaad. I love bread as it is—which probably isn’t very healthy—but homemade bread is the best. It just took a while because the grill could only fit two flatbreads at a time.

5. Cranberry Upside-Down Cake
I didn’t have the patience to go search for the weird ingredients that the orange cake originally part of this menu needed, but I did have bags and bags of frozen cranberries. Since you can only find them around Thanksgiving, I went a bit overboard last year and stoked up. Majorly. To the tune of about a dozen bags. But this cake is quick to make and tastes great, so using up all that cranberry shouldn’t pose too big of a problem. I do double the ingredients for the batter, though it still doesn’t turn out as high as the recipe photo.

6. Mint Tea
Simple and refreshing. I dumped two tablespoons of loose-leaf tea, a handful of mint, and ¼ cup honey into two cups of boiling water and brewed until very dark, then diluted it with three more cups of water, and added about ⅓ cup of lemon juice.

Sunday lunch (15/5): “why the f is it so cold?!” edition.

I’m a couple or so months behind on updating Sunday lunch/dinner, so there will be a bit of a deluge of food pictures in the coming weeks.

We had an unseasonably cold spring this year, and after I officially declared grilling season open the first weekend of May, temperatures plummeted for the next three weeks, which meant all the magazine issues devoted to grilling in my mailbox would have to wait.

Bummed out and shivering, I decided to warm up by baking two kinds of pizza (one pizza isn’t pictured).

Option #1: tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, plum tomato slices, bacon, and arugula.

Option #2: ricotta, grated Fontina and Parmesan mix, caramelized onions, black olives, and salami.

Having not given up entirely on summer though, I made Frozen Lemon Soufflé and a pitcher of Cucumber Cooler from the June 2011 issue of Everyday Food Magazine. The soufflé turned out amazing—it was almost exactly like lemon ice cream—though I had issues making the extended mold border out of parchment paper. It turns out that tape doesn’t actually stick to baking parchment, so I had to get a bit creative and line the outside of it with foil.

The cucumber drink tasted… strange. Skipping the mint probably didn’t help either. I think I’d rather put my cucumbers in a salad, rather than using up so many of them and ending up with dubious results.

I haven’t entered the Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge in a while, but this month is the final contest! I was actually going to make two cupcakes, but after baking the first kind, I ended up with 36(!) cupcakes and no room in my fridge. Oops. But I’ll most likely make the second kind anyway, just to see how it’ll turn out.

This month’s theme is FIZZY, which was certainly à propos since I got a case of Mexican Coca-Cola at Costco just days before it was announced. For those who don’t know: Coca-Cola imported from Mexico is made with real cane sugar, rather than the high fructose corn syrup in its American counterpart.

My result: the Cherry *POP* Cupcake. The idea was to make a Coca-Cola flavored cake base, with cherry frosting, and a “secret” ingredient: Pop Rocks candy sprinkled on top for that ultimate fizzy feeling.

The good news is that the Pop Rocks worked wonderfully; provided you ate the cupcake quickly enough that they didn’t have time to dissolve in the frosting. I also came across really cute Wilton “Sweet Dots” baking cups that fit the theme really well. The bad news is that the cupcake tasted nothing like Coca-Cola + cherry. :( I tried soaking the cake with Coke syrup (a bottle that’s just been boiled down), but it didn’t really work, though the syrup itself was deliiiiiiicious. >_> The frosting was half butter/half cream cheese, with a puree made from fresh cherries mixed in. However, I think I would have been better off using artificial flavoring; the cherries didn’t really add much to the frosting, besides color.

Oh well, the cupcake still tasted really good—it’s difficult to go wrong with cake and frosting! It just sadly wasn’t the way I wanted it to/thought it would taste.

The winner of June’s Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge will receive prizes from:

• Angela’s Images; a selection of handmade crafts
• Bake It Pretty; a $5 online gift card
• Beanilla; a $7 online gift card
• cupcakewrappers.com; 2 packs of cupcake wrappers
• Miss Kitty Creations; a handmade cupcake charm of your choice
• Simply Caked; 600 brown greaseproof cupcake liners
• Sweet Cuppin Cakes; a $5 online gift card
• Tundra Books; 3 children’s books

Thank you to all our prize sponsors!

Sunday dinner: May Day edition, aka I declare grilling season officially open! Temperatures were in the 80s that weekend with not a cloud in the sky; perfect day to bust out the charcoal.

1. Turkey Burgers with Spiced Tomato Chutney and Cajun Grilled Onions (Real Simple, June 2009)
Homemade burgers are the best ever. I’ve also realized that mixing cheese into the patty, at least in this combination, is a lot more tasty than putting the cheese on top. The chili in the patty combined amazingly well with the spices on the onions and the cinnamon in the chutney to create a delicious, smoky-sweet flavor. Note to self: label random bags of leftover spices. At some point last year I was cooking a recipe that involved making my own spice mix, and I had a couple tablespoons left over, so I figured I would use it up on these onions. It turned out so damn good, but I have no idea what it was! Definitely some kind of mixture of chili powder, paprika, oregano, and salt. Maybe onion and garlic powder as well?…

2. Potato Salad with Bacon and Parsley (Real Simple, June 2009)
Fairly simple potato salad, though the Dijon and vinegar are a deviation from your standard creamy dressing. I think I still prefer creaminess and lots and lots of chives. The bacon for this recipe was cooked on the grill, since it was fired up anyway.

3. Strawberry Icebox Pie
The strawberry train continues! I ended up putting a whole stick of butter in the graham crust because it refused to stick together otherwise. I also replaced the cranberry juice with a handful of frozen cranberries from my Thanksgiving stash.

4. Raspberry Lemonade
My classic lemonade recipe with an added pint of mashed raspberries passed through a sieve. After the experience of a past lemonade batch ending up incredibly sour, I’ve learned to adjust the sugar by taste rather than rely on my previous ratios. I had wanted to try this with Meyer lemons, but as Murphy would have it, this was the week they were no longer in the store.

Sunday dinner: Easter edition! We don’t actually celebrate Easter, but I’d never baked a ham before, so I figured it was as good an excuse as any to try.

1. Marmalade Glazed Ham
The darn orange slices refused to stay on the hunk of ham, and the glaze seemed to mostly run off and burn onto the baking pan—thank goodness for aluminum foil. I also realized that I prefer ham better cold than straight out of the oven. We had a ton of it left over, despite trying to pick the smallest ham in the store. I ended up chopping a good portion of it—as well as the leftover potato and onion from the side dishes—into a salad Olivier for lunch the next day.

2. Tomato-Onion Casserole (Everyday Food, May 2011)
Tasty, roasted veggies that worked quite well. Next time, I would shove a bit more slices into the dish; I didn’t anticipate them shrinking quite as much as they did.

3. Scalloped Potatoes with Leeks
First, I halved the recipe to avoid massive leftovers taking over the fridge. Then, I nearly screwed it up because I thought it only needed to be baked for 30 minutes. I originally figured I’d just bake the potatoes while the ham is resting… and then I saw it needed to bake an additional 45 minutes. Whoops. Since the oven was otherwise occupied by the ham, I tried to cook the gratin in the broiler (ours is a compartment just under the oven that gets to about the same temperature) at the same time. It sort of worked, but the bottom layer of potatoes was slightly undercooked and the liquid didn’t absorb/thicken as much as it should have on account of the dish being heated mostly from the top. Note to self: read recipes more carefully next time.

4. Cranberry-Orange Sparkler (Everyday Food, May 2011)
Yummmmmmmm is all I have to say about this. You really can’t go wrong with cranberry juice, orange liqueur, sparkling wine, and ginger ale.

5. Raspberry Mousse Pie (Everyday Food, May 2011)
This quickly turned into a strawberry mousse pie when I saw that raspberries were something like $6 a pint, and I needed a pound and a half. o_O The strawberries, however, were 3 pounds for $5 and substituted beautifully. This mousse was soooo good, though slightly heavier than it should be, since I may have over-beaten the whipped cream a tad. Sadly, it uses gelatin, so it isn’t suitable for vegetarians. But if that’s not a consideration, this recipe would work super well as filling between layers of chiffon cake.

Italian Chocolate Mousse from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)

This is the sort of thing that almost makes me want to raise my own chickens: the recipe gets most of its fluffiness courtesy of raw egg whites. Nothing like eating delicious, chocolaty goodness while wondering if you’re getting salmonella poisoning.