Saturday, July 25, 2009

Summer Non-Recipes

Hello, readers. Did you miss me? No? I didn’t miss this place either. I haven’t been cooking much lately, you see. Instead, I’ve been having dinners of cut-up vegetables and salsa, raw sugar snap peas and dip, grilled zucchini with feta. Simple and summery. You don’t expect me to dig out my camera and spend my evenings blogging about that, right? Right.

Over the past couple of months, though, I did come up with a little arsenal of quick non-meals that might inspire you to give up cooking for a while, too. (For more on this phenomenon, see Mark Bittman’s 101 simple summer salads piece from last week’s New York Times.)

Here are some ideas:

Thinly sliced cucumber round sandwiches with cream cheese and turkey (above).

Grilled zucchini and summer squash slices, cut into chunks and eaten with some feta and cubed ham or turkey.

Grilled zucchini slices topped with cheese or bacon or thinly sliced ham, like open-faced sandwiches.

Cut-up carrot sticks with black bean and corn salsa.

Slightly sautéed sugar snap peas or green beans, topped with feta.

Hot, grilled onion rounds (especially red onions) topped with cheese.

Sliced radishes, sprinked with kosher salt and topped with cheese or turkey.

8 comments:

Stellochka said...

no bread?

Mrs. M. said...

Stellochka--That's right! Sure, you could put this on thinly sliced rye. But I like cucumbers on their own for a very light summer snack (or breakfast).

Stellochka said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Stellochka said...

No knead bread will be a perfect addition to these really cooool summer dishes. See the same Mark Bitman blog for that. I changed the recipe and added 1/3 of rye flour plus caraway seeds and ground cardamon. The result is bread with so familiar Russian/German/Baltic flavor. Yummy!

adele said...

Ooh. Those cucumber "sandwiches" are dead clever. They'd make a great gluten-free canape for a party. :)

Mrs. M. said...

Stellochka--No knead bread is so easy. I haven't made it in a while, but it'd be could for summer canapes.

Adele--Thanks! I actually like them more without the bread. Low-carb, low-fat, low-cal but good.

anya said...

That article by Mark Bittman is my salad reference 'book', if any such thing exists, that is.

Lo said...

Of course we missed you! :)
But, I don't blame you for not missing all the work of blogging. Summer non-recipes are really where it's at right now. So many great foods at the market, how can you resist??

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