On a hot summer day, there is nothing more perfect than a bowl of cold sesame noodles. When we decided to cook up a batch of cold salads last weekend, these were at the top of my list!
I turned to Nigella Lawson’s recipe over at the food network, because it seemed simple and fresh, and it did not disappoint.

Lawson’s recipe called for actual vegetables, which was one of my favorite things about it! I couldn’t find snow peas, and my supermarket was fresh out of bean sprouts, but sugar snap peas made for a refreshing substitute and what sesame peanut sauce couldn’t stand to include garlic? Add a little red bell pepper, cilantro, scallions and things start to get interesting.

We made a few extra noodles than the recipe called for, but ended up nearly doubling the amount of sesame peanut dressing, and it certainly wouldn’t have hurt to add more. If you make the recipe yourself, I’d recommend doubling the dressing recipe and adding it to the noodles little by little until you reach a noodle to sauce ratio that looks good to you.

Serve your first bowl of this with a little cilantro and a sprinkling of sesame seeds. Then abandon all decorum and spend the rest of the week sneaking forkfuls out of the tupperware every time you open the fridge. If one batch of noodles makes it past the 3 day mark, we will applaud your restraint!

This May has been CALIENTE you guys. Too much for us to be in the kitchen for eight hours whipping up fried chicken, something grilled, or ANYTHING that requires the oven. So this past weekend, we made a bunch of recipes that require minimal heat, and are delicious cold, so you can make them at the beginning of the week and then have them around for evenings when you just.don’t.want.to.cook.

And so, in honor of this hot summer, we are introducing Cold Salad Week! This week, we’ll be bringing you three easy to prepare cold noodle salads that we hope you’ll enjoy all summer long. Get ready for sesame noodles, tuna macaroni salad, and a couscous that you can make with any vegetables you happen to have in the kitchen. Each day, we’ll bring you a new recipe. This is Garlic, My Soul’s first ever themed week, so let us know what you think of the format! We might be bringing it back real soon.

Happy Friday everyone! Now that the month is finally wrapping up, it’s time to look ahead to June. One thing I’ve had looming over me for the month of June is the impending loss of Google Reader.

For those of you that don’t use Google Reader, it’s an RSS feed service that compiles all the blogs you follow into one easy to read location which tracks your reading history as you go. It is the only way I manage to keep up with all the blogs I read, because checking them individually would take far too much memory and patience. Unfortunately, Google recently announced that it would be closing down Google Reader on July 1st. In addition to striking panic into the hearts of Reader users everywhere, this leaves us only one more month to transition to a reasonable alternative.

Luckily, the internet is on top of this situation. The three front-runners to inherit your Reader data seem to be Feedly, The Old Reader, and Newsblur. Personally, I’ve opted for Feedly, but I’m giving myself the month of June to take it for a test drive.

Each of these options seem to offer something very similar to the reader experience, and some have the added benefit of a mobile-app which Google Reader never offered. But please don’t take my word for it. There are some very helpful articles floating around that break down all the options so that even I can understand them.

The folks at lifehacker put together a basic introduction to the top 5 Google Reader alternatives complete with their findings about user preference and popularity. It’s a quick read and will give you a basic overview.

To go a little more in-depth, or if you’re just looking for a direct recommendation, check out this article on The Verge. They offer their recommendations while also commenting on all contenders in the ring.

So, if you use Google Reader to catch up on Garlic, My Soul or any of your other favorite blogs, take a few minutes to pick an alternative and transfer your information over to another service sometime between now and July 1st. Or if you have no idea what an RSS feed is, but you’re looking for a way to stay up to date on GMS, you can go lo-fi and subscribe to our updates by email in the “Want GMS in your Inbox?” section on the right-hand side of the page.

It’s been around 90 degrees around these parts, which means getting home, opening every single window in my house, and dreaming of a house below 85 degrees and air conditioning. It also means juicing all of the citrus and making myself some kind of -ade. Preferably with vodka. Hence, yesterday afternoon coming home, making my house a breezeway, and whipping this up.

Here’s what you need: a citrus, water, an alcohol, and some sugar. If you’re into recipes, here you go:

Simple Syrup

1 cup sugar
1 cup water

Lemonade

Simple syrup
2 cups lemon juice or half and half lime juice or add a splash of orange juice
1 – 1 1/2 cups vodka (to taste really)
4 cups water

Mix the sugar and water together over medium heat, until sugar dissolves and the liquid becomes clear. Now, you have simple syrup.

Juice your citrus, whatever you choose to use. I used lemons and limes, and even an orange, because that was what I had.

Mix your citrus juice, simple syrup, vodka, and four cups water. Stir and taste, and adjust to taste, adding more water, or vodka.

Serve in a glass with a ton of ice, and you’ve got yourself an afternoon drink that’ll make you want it to be 90 everyday (just kidding, no one would ever want that.)

What is your go-to summer drink that you look forward to after a long day?

Stonewall Kitchen was sweet enough to send us some new mixes to try, so to get back into the swing of things after Memorial Day, I made these gluten free pancakes yesterday. Only, because I went crazy at Trader Joe’s with produce, I decided that they needed to have apricots in them.

Apricots are a magical little fruit you guys. They are full of vitamin A, and have vitamin C and the ever-wonderful fiber. They are the first sign of stone fruit season, which means summer, which means days full of sun and smiling and the beach and all the fruits your heart could ever possibly want.

So, of course I whipped up the pancake recipe on the canister (1 cup of mix, 2/3 cup + 2 tablespoons milk, 1 egg, and 1 tablespoon melted butter) and went to work. The major things I noticed about this mix?

1) It smells INCREDIBLY sweet, but it doesn’t taste that way, I promise. Which is kind of awesome, if you think about it, because your kitchen smells like cake batter but you still get savory pancakes out of the deal.

2) You have to mix the batter until smooth, which is different than normal batter that you’d mix until just combined, leaving lumps.

Other than that, these pancakes were delicious, and not at all gritty like some GF mixes can be – you could hardly tell (read: couldn’t tell at all) that they were GF.

Did I mention I added apricots right to the batter? This makes each pancake sweet enough that you don’t need any honey or syrup (although you CERTAINLY can still add it!)

I couldn’t resist eating with some of the other fruits that remind me that summer is around the corner…cherries are just showing up, and blueberries are tart and perfect as the season starts!

Enjoy with your friends or family and have the perfect summer breakfast (or brunch). Are you guys looking forward to any specific summer fruits or veggies??