Look at those gorgeous potatoes! In honor of our nation’s birth aka the Fourth of July, my LA friends and I celebrated with a BBQ. I was tasked with potato salad. My first stop was the Hollywood Farmer’s Market! There I picked up white and purple potatoes (purple is my favorite color!) The shopping list also included fresh dill and green onions. Potato salad here we come!

Prep time: 25 minutes
Yields: a whole lot!

Ingredients:
10-12 potatoes of various size and color
1 cup green onions
½ cup fresh dill
3 tablespoons butter
¾ cup sour cream
Salt and pepper

Boil a large pot of water with a generous amount of salt. Add potatoes. Boil until the potatoes slip off a fork or knife when inserted. Allow potatoes to cool.

MASH! Mash away. I left my potatoes a bit chunky, but still bite size. Add butter.

Chop green onions and add to mashed potatoes. Add dill. YUM.

Add sour cream (I used about ¾ of cup), salt, and pepper to taste. Chill a few hours, or overnight. Serve to hungry guests. Voila!

Summer, for me, means macaroni salad, potato salad, hot dogs, and mason jars of lemonade or vodka sodas. But my mom (hi, mom!) always has made macaroni salad with tuna, which I love, love, love, but my vegetarian friends can’t seem to just enjoy. So I had to come up with a vegetarian friendly alternative, and I thought a caprese macaroni salad would do.

The recipe is as follows:

1 lb macaroni (elbows welcome)
1 log of mozzarella (fresh but not too fresh)
1 pint (or so) of cherry tomatoes
basil (to taste)
balsamic vinegar
olive oil

Boil your macaroni to al dente. This should take about seven minutes.

Cube your cheese. Sample to make sure it’s good.

After you’ve let your macaroni cool (run cool water over it — that helps — then strain throughly.) Add your halved cherry tomatoes.

Add your cheese in.

Add your basil — I julienned most of it, and put whole little basil leaves in. Mix well, then add salt/pepper/olive oil/balsamic, and mix again.

Serve alongside a hot dog and some potato salad, and you’re in heaven!

What is your go-to summer recipe?

Becca has been asking forever that we make our own polenta, so one day recently we did just that. It was so easy and delicious that I think I’ll just continue making it homemade, thank you very much!

We used Alton Brown’s Savory Polenta, using vegetable stock in place of chicken stock.

Here’s what you need: onion, garlic, corn meal, stock, olive oil, butter, salt, pepper, parm cheese. Basically most things you may already have on hand.

Start with an onion, of course! We used about half of this red onion.

And, obviously, garlic. It called for two cloves, so obviously I used three.

You take your red onion, and you stick it in your medium-heat olive oil, with the salt. I thought this was strange, but maybe I’ve been sweating onions wrong all these years. (Liz, hello, help us out?)

So let them sweat about four or five minutes, and then you’re going to add your garlic for about two minutes.

Then, add your stock. Not pictured: me adding the stock. Not sure why we missed that, but alas, we did. (Maybe because we were making macaroni and potato salad, too?) Bring that to a boil. Then, you’re going to add the main ingredient: corn meal.

Add a cup of it, whilst whisking your concoction. Do not stop whisking, or it’ll get lumpy, and no one wants that.

Now you’ll have something like this. Stick it covered into an oven for about forty minutes, but make sure to stir every ten so that you prevent any lumps from forming! At this point, add butter and parm cheese, and then pour into a 9 x 13 dish, lined with parchment (you’ll see why, soon!)

Stick this in your fridge (covered) to cool (about thirty minutes, or so.)

When you take it out, it’ll look something like this — gelatinous, delicious, polenta!

Cut it up, and serve with veggies! Or you can cut it up and pan fry with some olive oil, and then serve with veggies. It was good fried or not, and we ate it several times over the next few days. You could easily double this recipe and fit it into the same pan, and have some on hand for lunch and dinner!

Have you ever had polenta? What is your favorite polenta dish?

Ever since hearing about this book on olive oil, I’ve been obsessed with where olive oil comes from, what makes it delicious, and how to find better olive oil to stow in my kitchen.

And so, recently, Rebecca and I purchased a olive oil flight, if you will, from Groupon, in an attempt to find some delicious olive oil to have in our wheelhouse. The olive oil was for four varieties and some balsamic vinegar, and was from Olea Bella.

Then, we went to Paso Robles with some friends, and I found myself purchasing some Olive Oil from Daou Wineries. This particular olive oil is made in Lebanon.

Then, a few weeks later, Barbra and Bryant gifted Jeff and I olive oil and balsamic vinegar from Williams Sonoma for our birthdays. So obviously, six olive oils in hand, Becca and I decided we needed to have one-boule’s worth of olive oil, to taste them all!

Here are our bowls of olive oil, with their bottle close at hand (for easy ID.) Not pictured: the entire boule of bread Becca and I ate in an attempt to find out what olive oil was best.

So here’s a breakdown, based on our joint tasting notes. (Just writing tasting notes sounded so snotty, but I assure you we really just wrote things like “awesome!” and “spicy” in Expo markers on my white board, don’t worry.)

We had the following six olive oils:

1. House olive oil from Williams Sonoma. This was a thick olive oil that had a spicy kick at the end. The thickness made it not ideal for dipping, but it definitely tasted delicious, and was something we agreed would be a great cooking olive oil.

2. Oleo Bella’s basil infused olive oil. This was VERY basil-y, but we both agreed was delicious for dipping. It was a lighter olive oil that soaked into the bread quite nicely, and wasn’t spicy.

3. Oleo Bella’s lemon infused olive oil. The lemon was QUITE overpowering in this olive oil, and I could see how it’d be AMAZING with pasta and clams…and cream, perhaps? It was also good for dipping, but might be better served in a recipe.

4. Oleo Bella’s Arbequina olive oil. This olive oil, which is made from Arbequina olives, was spicy, spicy! It definitely had a quick, and for that we were BOTH thankful. It was a delicious, amazing dipping olive oil that we had to restrain ourselves from finishing the entire sample bottle.

5. Daou Wineries’ Lebanese olive oil. We had tried this at an olive oil tasting at the winery when we were in Paso (I know, olive oil tastings should be everywhere!), so we knew we liked it. It is lemony and smooth, and has almost no bite to it. I definitely think it is versatile, and can be used for cooking or dipping – whatever you feel like in the moment!

6. Oleo Bella’s garlic infused olive oil. This was DELICIOUS, obviously. It was garlicky in a way you want all the time, every minute, and we even used it that very moment for our vegetables we were sautéing (for a dinner we never ate because we were full of bread!) Definitely something that I want to try making on my own to have in my cabinet all the time.

Overall, I think I liked the Arbequina for dipping and the house olive oil from Williams Sonoma for cooking. I can’t wait to use the lemon one in pasta, and look forward to dipping away in the Lebanese, too.

What is your favorite kind of olive oil? Do you just grab whatever is at the grocery store, or do you have several kinds for different things in your pantry?

It has occurred to me over the past few weeks that a) it is stonefruit season and b) many people don’t know about that classification and c) I’ve only ever written about peaches. Peaches! When there are nectarines and plums and apricots to have (cherries too.) And out of them all (with the exception of maraschino cherries, once) I’ve never written about any of them!

But, what is a stone fruit, you ask? The stone fruit is a group of fruits from the Prunus genus, and are closely related. The ones I’ve listed above I can find locally, although there are other fruits in this group (think mango.) Peaches, nectarines, plums, and apricots are high in vitamin A and C, and also have many antioxidants. (Peaches and nectarines are technically the same fruit, they just come in fuzzy and bare, so to speak.) They also have a bit of fiber to help with digestion, and are high in calcium!

Peaches originated in China, apricots in Armenia, and plums mostly came from Armenia, too. They spread the world and grow well in California (yes!) They grow on trees, and they’re in season usually from June to September.

I’ve taken to eating cut up stone fruit with my breakfast in place of the berries of earlier in the spring, and I’m loving it. Nectarines and peaches cut well, and usually I just eat plums straight (so juicy!). I plan on exploring the gamut, ranging from grilled fruit to sweets to soup.

Fun fact: did you know almonds are related to the stone fruit? Therefore, if you’re allergic to stone fruit you are ALSO allergic to almonds! Almonds are actually the “stone” of the almond fruit. In Italy, the stone (kernel) of apricots are sometimes used the same way almonds are!

What is your favorite stone fruit recipe? Which stone fruit is your favorite?

(Sorry Ky, I know this is not going to be your month.)