Tag: Summer

For Your Best Tomatoes and Peaches Only

This recipe is designed for peak-of the season, perfectly ripe tomatoes and peaches from your garden or a local farm. It’s perfect for heirloom fruits. These varieties can’t withstand the rigors of long-distance shipping and are therefore locally grown and readily found at farmers markets. If you like, serve this salad with crusty bread to…


Brighten Every Meal With Fresh Herbs

One of my favorite luxuries—and one that I urge everyone to try—is keeping a small herb garden. Not much space is needed; a windowsill, a few pots in a sunny corner, or a small patch just outside the kitchen door are all enough to put fresh herbs in your hands whenever you need them. Planting…


Tips for Choosing the Best Dry Rosés

When the days are consistently hot, an iced tea, beer, iced coffee, or simply a glass of ice water are among the most obvious ways to cool off. But when friends arrive and conviviality is appropriate, only a handful of beverages seem to be the best alternatives, especially if you’ve put out some cheese and…


Frozen Limeade Is a Satisfying Summer Treat

For this recipe, we wanted a drinkable frozen treat like Del’s Frozen Lemonade. We found that the best way to create a slushy frozen drink texture was to freeze half of our limeade mixture in ice cube trays and then blend it with the rest of the chilled liquid. Blending solid cubes with some liquid…


A Summertime Steak Dinner

Corn, tomato, and basil scream summer, and simplicity makes this easy dinner recipe perfect for the season. Serve the grilled skirt steak and relish with salad greens for a quick and healthy dinner you’ll want to make over and over. Grilled Skirt Steak With Corn-Tomato Relish Active Time: 25 minutes Total Time: 25 minutes Serves…


Corn Chowder Is Just Right for a Cool Summer Evening

Can you ever get enough corn in the summer months? I don’t think so. Once you locate a purveyor of fresh sweet corn, you may find yourself there more often than usual just to pick up a few extra ears. I have a farm stand nearby, and I can’t stop myself from picking up a…


Have Vegetables for Dessert in These Sweet Italian Cakes

It took years to convince me that vegetables could belong in desserts. But Italy’s cucina povera, or peasant cooking tradition, is actually full of cakes with vegetables that perfectly embody the cuisine’s spirit: They use whatever is abundant and in season—not just fruit, but vegetables, too—in an inventive way, turning poor ingredients into rich treats….


Scarpaccia Viareggina (Sweet Zucchini Cake)

This thin, moist cake, filled with tender young zucchini and the unmistakable fragrance of basil, is a traditional cake from the coastal town of Viareggio in northern Tuscany. It was traditionally baked by old sailors with zucchini from their vegetable gardens. Now, come summertime, when zucchini flood market stalls and overtake backyard gardens, locals still…


Jeffersonian Ice Cream

Thomas Jefferson first encountered ice cream as the ambassador to France, and brought back a special French ice cream maker, called a sorbétière, to Monticello. Ice was harvested from the Rivanna River in the winter and stored in Monticello’s ice house, then used throughout the year to preserve meat and butter, but also to chill…


Making Ice Cream Memories, the Old-Fashioned Way

I have fond childhood memories of family reunions on Pine Lake in Eldora, Iowa. Coming together from several central Iowa counties, my mother’s side of the family got together each summer to reconnect. As the adults caught up with each other’s busy lives on the farm, the kids ran up and down a sandy bluff…