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.
Sides
Flavored Salt Trio:
Ramps (Wild Garlic), Spicy Chili and Meyer Lemon
And now for something completely different… it started out because I found some ramps (wild garlic, ransom, bear’s garlic … whatever you want to call it, in German, it is bärlauch) and wanted to be able to preserve them, given that the foraging season is so short. So I made the Wild Garlic Salt. Then I thought, what the heck, I’ll try to make lemon salt. And then I bought the habaneros. All turned out really well and the flavors are nice and bright. Great for sprinkling on just before serving / eating. All very fresh. And they look neat!
One of my guilty pleasures is Guacamole. OK, it could be worse — avocado is good for you right? — but I could eat it by the bucket. On Toaste. On potatoes. As salad dressing. On a burger. Whole Foods makes some yummy stuff (which I buy and freeze — that works surprisingly well — but when I go make it myself, here is the recipe.
So, if you’re noticing a tread in the last couple of weeks, yes, I am indeed really getting into this “bread baking in a dutch oven” thing. In fact, so much so that I bought a second — smaller — enameled cast iron pot. I really wanted the Le Creuset one, but the 3 1/2 quart one there was $290 so I bought a “knock off” which was only $50. My standard 6-quart dutch oven makes amazing loaves, but I am a single person and I would die of carb overload if I ate that much bread. So I am making smaller loaves, for now, by cutting the recipes in half. You can do the math to get it back to “normal sized”.