Tomatoes, spinach, and dill, ready for the hot rice

On the warm days of summer, the last thing I want to do is spend a long time—or really any time—cooking in a hot kitchen. But sometimes a purely cold, uncooked meal just doesn’t cut it, you know? This quick meal combines the light, fresh flavors of summer with the sole cooking requirement of making rice. The hot rice gently wilts the spinach and dill, slightly softens the feta cheese, and provides a warm, savory contrast to the sweet little tomatoes and tart lemon. I’ve made this rice salad at least a half-dozen times over the summer because it’s so simple, healthy, and tasty. Paired with a crisp chardonnay or sauvignon blanc, it’s a perfect summer meal!

Warm Rice Salad with Spinach, Dill, Tomatoes, and Feta

Gluten-Free Berry Tart

For a recent celebration, I made my berry tart again—this time with more crisp pictures from my awesome new camera!—and it continues to be a favorite. I’ve learned that the gluten-free tart crust is definitely easier to make consistently the right consistency (heh) using the food processor rather than the mixer. It’s easier to notice the transition from crumbly to sticky with the food processor, whereas the mixer makes a tougher crust if you let it mix just a tad too long (which is not at all difficult to do). Though really whichever implement I use to make the crust, either for the berry tart or the citrus one, people have gone back for seconds!

Mustard-Roasted Potatoes with Dill

These potatoes are perfect hot with eggs for breakfast, room temperature for a picnic or party, or cold, straight from the fridge when you can’t resist their siren call!

Sticky rice with mango (plus festive umbrella for our Mother's Day luau)

This recipe is on par if not better than the best I’ve had served at any Thai restaurant, and I’ve found it surprisingly simple as long as I have the ingredients on hand. Here are a couple of hints about the ingredients:

In the United States, it’s easiest to find Tommy Atkins mangos in the grocery store, which are the plump, roundish ones that turn a purplish red when fully ripe. Don’t be afraid to stick them up near your nose, because the tastiest ones do smell nicely of mango. (Underripe ones don’t really have any scent.) A ripe mango of this type is super sweet and will definitely taste good with the salty/sweet rice. For a special treat, though, it’s worth trying to find Ataulfo mangos. Also known known as manilla or Champagne mangos (among other names), they have yellowish orange skin when ripe and are most closely related to the variety that is common in Thailand (although the ones we find here are primarily from Mexico). Based on a highly scientific taste test with Caitlin (not really, I just happened to have both on hand!), the Ataulfos are just slightly more tart but counter with a lot more depth of flavor and a silkier texture that has the extra bonus of being way easier to slice away from its thin pit.

Palm sugar is my new favorite sweetener. On its own, it already somehow tastes like sweetened condensed milk, so it seems inevitable that palm sugar is perfect mixed with coconut cream for an amazing sauce. If you can’t find it, I’m sure you could substitute regular granulated sugar; but if you have an Asian grocery store available, it’s worth it to find the palm sugar (sometimes found in a jar, but preferably found in a block that you can just cut small slices off with a large knife).

Be sure to get a can of regular coconut milk for this recipe (not light), and do not shake it. Once you open it, the coconut cream can be scooped out from the top with a spoon, leaving the translucent coconut milk at the bottom. The proportions in one can should be pretty much exactly the right amounts of cream and milk for one recipe.

For Mother’s Day, my family threw a luau for my mom, and sticky rice with mango topped off the whole affair. If the food truck thing ever happens, I’ll guarantee that the sticky rice with mango will be served—by vehement request from my sister—with extra coconut sauce on the side!

Clockwise from bottom left: Turmeric root, galangal, Vietnamese coriander, serrano peppers and bird's eye chili peppers

At the start of the class, our instructor, Jen Knapp, gave us a great intro to the standard South Asian ingredients we’d be using, including Vietnamese coriander, turmeric root, shrimp paste, lemongrass, dried shrimp, tamarind, and palm sugar, just to name a handful.

Following Jen’s intro to ingredients and assignment of recipes, a temporary span of organized chaos ensued when she set us free with, “Okay, find your ingredients and a work space!” I’ll admit this was daunting at first (huh? where are the knives in this kitchen I’ve never been in before?), but we all figured things out pretty quickly with the help of Jen and her assistant. Throughout the class—incidentally, the speediest passing of five hours I’ve experienced in a long time!—Jen called everyone over to watch techniques that weren’t necessarily obvious from the recipe (e.g., rolling spring rolls, deveining shrimp, making tamarind pulp, the quick succession of Pad Thai stir frying). Even though we all only made one or two things ourselves, I feel confident about attempting any or all of the recipes at home.

As one might expect, eating the food we cooked was the highlight of the day. Every dish that was prepared was distinctive, yet contained all of the elements of the region’s cooking (salty, sweet, sour, hot) that makes southeast Asian food so intensely flavorful. After all the cooking was done, we all sat down, poured some wine, and tried all of our food creations, finishing off with my favorite Thai dessert of sticky rice with mango. We sat there stuffing ourselves, dreaming of starting food carts, and wishing we had more room in our stomachs…

Pad Thai

Pad Thai was the recipe I ended up being responsible for in the class, I think because I mentioned that my husband has been on a quest of his own to make perfect Pad Thai. Since the name basically means “Thai noodles” there’s no definitive recipe, I suppose. I can say for the record that this recipe is by far my favorite, and I have tried many a version at excellent Thai restaurants (and some excellent attempts by Dan!). I’ve now made this three times on my own, even transporting the difficult-to-find ingredients to North Carolina to make it for my mom and sister! I’ve tweaked it just a little from the recipe in class, but everyone I’ve made it for thus far has been pretty smitten with it. My friend Jon, who experienced my first home attempt (in which I even forgot the bean sprouts), said that he never orders Pad Thai at restaurants, not because he doesn’t like it, but because he enjoys other Thai dishes more. This version, however, he says he’d order!

Meyer lemon tart

The fall and winter, though, are when so many other amazing tart citrus fruits are in season, so my family has adapted this pie to be perfect for all seasons. In November, I jumped on a Freecycle offer for someone’s excess calamansi fruit (I grew up knowing them as calamondins), juiced a ton of them, and made my mom’s version of this tart. Unprompted, my husband decreed that it was “what Creamsicles bow down and worship as a god.” Perhaps it’s an exaggeration—or perhaps Penzeys’ double strength vanilla extract has mystical powers—but I’ll take it!

Today was my first attempt at making a Meyer lemon version as part of my quest to keep my Meyer lemon tree from thinking that its overflow of fruit isn’t appreciated. I tried infusing the lemon juice with a bit of rosemary, but in my attempt to not overdo the rosemary, the herb pretty much went undetected. (I’m going to try again though!) The resulting tart had a perfect blend of sweetness and tartness, though, and the Tahitian vanilla extract I used was a bit more subtle than in the calamondin version. (I also carefully peeled the rind off of ten of the lemons and have them infusing in vodka for limoncello, so the Meyer lemon tree is definitely feeling the love now!)

This recipe has been written on so many napkins and been relayed over innumerable phone calls among my family, so while it may not be the original, it’s definitely been thoroughly tested!

We’ve tried out versions with many different cheeses (mmmm…cheese!), but we decided that this one is our preference. This year we tried not to go overboard (since there are only four of us, and we try to learn from our mistakes), so we cut the recipe to two-thirds and only prepped steamed broccoli and bread for dipping. This meant that, for the first time ever, we actually had room for dessert. Yay! Happy New Year, everybody!

I attempted my first gluten-free pie crust in April as Dan’s Celebratory Birthday Month. (Though his birthday’s in late March, I was out of town playing a gig. He was very understanding, but my guilt warranted a whole month of celebration. Besides, birthdays are simply more fun if extended!)

Having no inkling that the gluten-free pie crust would actually be better than a wheat crust (I kid you not, it really is!), I told Dan I’d make him another “normal” apple pie if this one didn’t suit his tastes, which of course resulted in him saying before even tasting it, “Well, I clearly don’t like this one then. I think we’ll need a second pie.” D’oh! Didn’t quite think that through before saying the offer out loud! Anyway, thankfully, this pie crust was so flaky and crispy–even the next day, when a wheat crust would be soggy!–Dan conceded that we could wait until Thanksgiving for the next one. So, just in time, I’m sharing how to make it!

After getting pie apple recommendations from my mom (whose mother–whom we called Mimi–made notoriously fabulous apple pies), I went with half late-season Rome apples and half Granny Smith apples, all organic. The Rome apples were a bit soft due to the late season (it was April, after all), but their sweet softness played off the tart, crisp Granny Smiths really well. For the filling, I followed Mimi’s recipe (basically just apples, sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon, and butter—mmm…butter…). For the fall we’ll be getting the nicest tart apples we can find in North Carolina.

This week was the last week for blueberries at the farmers’ market, and considering how much joy they’ve brought me this summer, I felt like they deserved an honorable send-off for the season. Little did I know that a gluten-free tart crust would actually make me love tarts even more than I already did. Unlike some wheat tarts I’ve had where the crust is so thick in places that it’s hard to bite into, let alone cut, even the thickest parts of this gluten-free crust are light, flaky, and crispy—even the next day. And then when you fill it with creamy, delicious vanilla custard and top it with fresh berries…well, it’s simply heavenly. This tart elicited the highest compliment from my usually understated engineer of a husband (who doesn’t even tend to like sweets): “You can make this any time!”

Gigantic blueberry from the Mountain View Farmers' Market

My old basil pot in Dallas, now Jon's (Courtesy of Jon Haupt)

Regarding nuts, any nut will do really—pine nuts are more traditional, but I’ve had excellent results with both walnuts and almonds. My most recent batch was with arugula, walnuts, and extra garlic. Mmm…

Though I haven’t yet perfected growing basil in Northern California (definitely need to plant the seeds earlier!), my friends in Dallas are swimming in basil. So here you go, guys!