summer

Grilled Polenta and Fried Eggs

I love a great bowl of breakfast-brunch – the kind of weekend meal that keeps you going all day because it’s filling, deeply satisfying, and delicious. This recipe makes use of leftover polenta (if you’ve never made polenta, it’s as easy as making oatmeal), and involves the frying of a couple of eggs and a quick sauté of whatever veggies and herbs you have on hand. The polenta had been part of dinner the night before, and I spread it […]

Grilled Shrimp Corn salad with Garlic Bread
summer

Grilled Shrimp Corn Salad with Garlic Bread

One bowl dinners – especially one bowl dinners that can be grilled – are about the easiest summer meal there is. I especially love this one because the corn salad can be made ahead, and then it takes less than five minutes to grill the shrimp and the garlic bread. It’s the perfect meal when you want something simple but delicious, and you don’t want to pay too much attention to the cooking – maybe you’re having friends over and […]

Grilled purple potato salad
summer

Grilled Purple Potato Salad with Cilantro Pesto

Potatoes may not be the first thing on your list to throw on a grill, but potatoes and grills belong together.   This is just the kind of salad I would have wanted for a White House Congressional Picnic menu: it’s colorful, unusual (purple basil, purple potatoes, almonds, cucumbers, and cilantro pesto), and it doesn’t have any ingredients that would spoil as it sits on a buffet in the brutal Washington heat. The annual Congressional Picnic is an enormous outdoor party […]

food

Red Wine Slushie

This is the drink for a Friday afternoon at the end of a long, hard week. (It’s also an excellent way to sneak alcohol into the movies. Just save your slushie cup. Not that I would ever do such an un-social-secretary-like thing.) A red wine slushie is a fabulous party cocktail. I think that if you showed up at a summer party with a big Ziploc bag full of red wine slushie – because that is the best method by […]

food

Switchel

You may have heard of Switchel; it’s having somewhat of renaissance among the Brooklyn hipster set, or so I’ve been told. I don’t know many Brooklyn hipsters, so I can’t take an accurate poll to see if this is the case, but I did come across Up Mountain Switchel in the New York Times and thought it would be a great thing to try.   It’s an apple cider vinegar-ginger-molasses combination that is tart, light and refreshing. You can make your […]