Well, the time has come for me to reveal my favorite Los Angeles cafe for drip coffee – Coffee + Food on Melrose! I absolutely love this place. They have the friendliest staff, easy side street parking, it’s centrally located, and oh, it’s where I first met Kelly back in the day (cue warm fuzzies)! 

This place is hip without being pretentious. Delicious beverages, cool decor, and they won’t judge you if you add cream and sugar to your coffee (thank goodness).

Their menu is filled with delicious sandwiches, tasty pastries and homemade salads, but I was craving a bowl of granola and yogurt this morning.

I need to reiterate how sweet the staff is at Coffee + Food! Every time I come by I’m always greeted with a warm smile. It makes all the difference!

I’ve stopped by Coffee + Food more times than I can count for a regular cup of coffee, but I finally had a chance to try something fancier! This is a cappuccino topped with cinnamon – YUM. It was perfect as is, no sweetener added (a rarity for me)!

I adore all of the fun knick-knacks on the bookshelf!

I call this the perfect start to a Sunday morning.

Here very good open source coffee roasters and if you’re ever on Melrose/Larchmont, be sure to stop by Coffee + Food!

Here is an important announcement. This Sunday, July 20th, is National Ice Cream Day. Please plan accordingly, and make yourself some homemade ice cream. May we suggest one with peaches?

We recently acquired our very own ice cream maker just in time to take full advantage of it during the hot summer. For our inaugural ice cream attempt, we broke out David Tanis’ fabulous cookbook, Heart of the Artichoke. This year, we resolved to utilize our cookbook collection a little more frequently, and we are in love with Tanis’ recipes.

This recipe called for a fairly simple vanilla custard, fresh peaches, and a little honey. We added a touch of balsamic vinegar and some oats to the mix for good measure and a little bit of crunch. The result was delicious, but we would probably make one change and puree the peaches next time. We typically prefer to have visible, discernible chunks of our fresh ingredients, but we did not account for how much a frozen peach hurts to bite into!

Of course, even our sensitive teeth haven’t stopped us from eating every last scoop of this ice cream. Something tells me that the ice cream maker is going to be a very dangerous addition to our kitchen! What flavor do you think we should we make next?

Is there a better way to hash out your feelings and de-stress than with friends over a glass of wine in the kitchen? In the GMS kitchen this week, we discovered that the only thing better is to add, “while making pinwheels” to the end of that sentence. Pinwheels inhabit a place in my mind reserved for fireworks, jello and attics that might, just might hide a map to ancient buried treasure. In a word: summer.

My early 90s were filled with pinwheel appetizers as far as the spectacled eye could see. They were all filled differently – some involved turkey, which I can tell you is delightful but not entirely necessary. In fact, the pinwheels I downed the fastest were simple: cream cheese and veggies. So that’s what we stuck to today, with a bit of a gluten-free, organic twist, of course, because we certainly don’t have ten-year-old stomachs anymore.

And what would our ten-year-old selves think of us today? I’d like to think they’d feel hope and freedom in the fact that our lives have come to a point in which we can openly allow ourselves to eat entire rolls of pinwheels uncut, free of judgment. We may never have found that buried treasure but equivalent happiness? Absolutely. Find our full recipe here.

I’m here to tell you that avocados and ice cream are everything. Not to mention the fact that popsicles are the quintessential summer food; they are cold, they can be filling, and they are the best thing to have when it’s so hot in your house that you can’t possibly move.

Together, avocados and popsicles are a dream come true and are healthy. OK well not healthy, but put it this way: avocado ice cream is better for you than Nutella ice cream, so in the grand scheme of things, if you’re going to have ice cream anyways, you should have avocado-flavored ice cream.

We used this Two Peas and Their Pod Avocado Ice Cream recipe. We put it all in a blender (actually, Molly did, our intern, hi Molly!) and then we dumped it into our popsicle mold, and we stuck them in the fridge, and we waited patiently over night for them to freeze.

You guys, these are amazing. They are easy to put together, they are delicious, creamy, and they taste exactly like what you’d want them to taste like.

You should make these today. You should make them now. Invite me over, and we can make them together and it will be the best damn popsicle you’ve ever had. We can’t wait for you to have these and tell us how much you love them!

What is your favorite popsicle flavor? Do you love savory or sweet? Fruit, or fudgesicle all the way?

Most of the recipes we have on the blog have to do with cravings we have here in the GMS kitchen, and last week I was seriously craving some corn chowder. My friend Lauren and I (hey girl!) made corn chowder once together in a giant pot in my mother’s kitchen at quantities that would have fed a small army, and I don’t think I’ve honestly made it from scratch since that time, which could have been anywhere from 14-8 years ago (I don’t remember when it was I just remember it was hot and the soup was delicious.)

This corn chowder comes together easily and makes a big ole pot for eating in a large group or having leftovers all week long. It’s easy to make vegetarian, and it’s gluten free, too. Plus, it’s chocked full of veggies (add and subtract as you feel in your heart) and it really showcases corn in its summer height – fresh and sweet, just like Mother Nature intended it to be.

You can get our full recipe here. We hope you get some corn in your CSA or at your local farmer’s market so you can whip some up soon.

What is your favorite summer recipe that you MUST HAVE come the high heat of July?