Summer rolls are a perfect summer food.  They require very little cooking and are great room temperature or chilled.  Full of fresh summery herbs and dipped in a pungent peanut sauce they are a flavor packed yet light meal.  Much like a hand-held salad, they are no more difficult to make than a sandwich wrap.  You can fill them with anything you like from left over chicken, pork, or shrimp or even make them vegetarian with all veggies and noodles.  Click here for the recipe »

Do you have certain foods that just baffle you?  Maybe you’ve tried to recreate them and flopped big time, or maybe it just seems so overwhelming you won’t even try.  I have foods like that.  Sponge cake used to be on that list.  Homemade pizza, too.  I know, I know.  You’re saying, “Pizza? What’s so hard about pizza?”  Well, it’s not that I couldn’t make a pizza.  I just couldn’t make a good pizza.  I wanted that crisp, crackery crust but with a nice flavor and some good chew, if possible.  And although I don’t have a pizza peel, I wanted to use my pizza stone.

Yet pizza after pizza was a sticky doughy mess.  It was impossible to shape.  It stuck to the pan.  It fell apart.  It was thick and bread-y in some spots and torn and holey in the others.  So I avoided it.  Good homemade pizza was not for me.  Yet Melissa felt my pain-and came to my rescue!  We pow-wowed over recipes and techniques and when it was all over I did the happy dance all around the kitchen.  Click here for the recipe »

So it’s too hot to cook right?  Well lucky for you this salad doesn’t require any.  And you are lucky.  Because this salad?  Wow.  This is one of those salads where every ingredients plays a role-from the crisp, sweet red bell pepper, to the smokiness of the bacon, the freshness of the green onion, and the tender beans, all a top a bed of baby spinach and dressed with a sweet, spicy vinaigrette.  There is just something perfect about that maple syrup, bacon, bean combo.  The dressing isn’t overwhelmingly sweet, but just sweet enough to temper the beans and the spinach and bring everything together into one healthy bite.

I saw this recipe posted on Lea Ann’s blog and I knew I had to make it.  And once I did, I made it again.  And again.  It is really a fantastic recipe: filling and easy.  The prep time on this recipe is almost nothing if you have cooked bacon on-hand.  If you don’t then the only real prep work is cooking some bacon which can be done in the microwave in a few minutes.  The recipe suggests warming the beans and dressing in the microwave before serving which is pleasant but unnecessary so you can decide for yourself.  Click here for the recipe »

Canned cherry pie filling is a no good dirty liar.  It promises cherries and sweet cherry syrup.  It screams “Pie is hard!  Pick me instead!”  Canned cherry pie filling should be forced to apologize.  It should have its nose rubbed in itself.  Because what you get isn’t cherries and syrup.  Instead you get cherries, water, high fructose corn syrup, more corn syrup, and Red 40.  Yum!

If I had known it was this easy to make a fresh cherry pie I would have been making them for years.  And the flavor!  Fresh cherries, tossed with real sugar and a little lemon then cooked to bubbling inside a pastry crust is so far removed from the thick tasteless junk in the can that you can’t even call them by the same name.  Click here for the recipe »