You might be an overly poshy food blogger when, whilst making deviled eggs during a global pandemic, you think “oooh, I may have stashed smoked salmon in the freezer for an emergency!”
For the record, there is no such thing as a smoked salmon emergency. Ever. No matter how delish it is.
But, the deviled eggs are yummy. And my chives survived the winter.
Ahh, summertime when veggies are fresh and you really don’t want to eat hot food anyway, right? Right. So I made this lovely Lemon-Dill Salmon Pasta Salad with Cucumbers and Peas for lunch. Made it up on the fly as I had salmon for dinner last night. In the end, it turned out to be more “northern” influenced… these flavours remind me of Scandinavia, though I doubt this would be authentically Swedish or Norwegian. At any rate, it *is* delicious. I have plenty of leftovers so it may turn into dinner as well as lunch.
And now for something completely different! I’ve often been asked to bring Ranch Dip/Dressing Mix over to Germany for friends as they don’t have the packets of Hidden Valley Ranch, but it’s really easy — and I think better — to simply make your own. So here it is, a recipe for Ranch Dip and Dressing Mix. The full recipes for Salad Dressing and for the Dip are actually written here too. Lasts about a year, if you actually don’t use it up in the first weeks that you have it in the pantry!
Last Weekend, I went on a picnic to Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. In typical me fashion, I volunteered to bring the food, and decided to make a few salads, in addition to wraps and fruit and cookies. I’m going to combine them all here into one blog post. The types are:
Walnut Pesto Ditalini Pasta Salad
Springtime Potato Salad
Cucumber Radish and Feta Salad, and
Middle Eastern Barley Salad with Pomegranate and Pistachios
They were all a big hit and I would definitely recommend them for any picnic or BBQ potluck that you might be having this summer. None have mayo, so no chance of them going off, although the Cucumber Radish and Feta Salad does wilt fairly quickly. The Middle Eastern Barley Salad with Pomegranate and Pistachios is a very unique one and may not be to everyone’s taste but we all thought it was yummy.
Here is a riff on both pasta salad and caprese, the tomato-mozzarella-basil salad that I eat normally when the local tomatoes come into season. I used mini-everything for this recipe: cherry tomatoes, perlini mozzarella and orecchiette pasta. Orecchiette meand “earlobe” which I think is just funny and somewhat appropriate.