Ripe avocados were an incredible challenge to find in Quebec. On the day we arrived, Monday the 13^th, we went to the grocery store directly from the airport. We bought 8 avocados and they were rock hard. Kim also bought 3 bananas.

Did you know that the way to speed up the ripening of an avocado is to put it in a brown paper bag with a banana?

Yep, ripe bananas release ethylene, the hormone that triggers ripening in mature fruit, so placing one in a closed paper bag with your under-ripe avocados will speed up the process.

At least it does in AZ, not so much in Canada. When I left on Tuesday morning, (8/21) those darn avocados were still hard as rocks!

Thankfully, we went to the farmer’s market in Ottawa mid-week and found 6 ripe avocados. I used 2 of them for this recipe and the other four in the guacamole I posted yesterday. Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up purple leaf lettuce, so please use your imagination and pretend it’s there, mixed in the butter lettuce.

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I’m still in Quebec at Kim and Paul’s dreamy lake house. I haven’t been posting regularly because, well, I’m on vacation and because I’ve been obsessed with reading a book I found on the shelves here. I finished All The Light We Cannot See yesterday afternoon. My dreams have been filled with it since the day I picked it up and last night was no exception. Many of you have probably already read it since it came out nearly four years ago. I’m usually behind the curve when it comes to books. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a new read.

Now that I have my nose out of the book and my head out of the clouds, here is the salad recipe I promised you last week. Oh, and there is a mouse update at the bottom of this post.

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This is the last of the creole recipes from Connor’s birthday, which was now more than two weeks ago. Plus, I still need to post the recipe for the dessert he requested, banana cream pie. Oops.

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I have brought this salad as a pot-luck dish to many parties over the years and everyone always asks for the recipe. I brought it again last weekend and promised the recipe would be here this week. Promise kept!

I use already toasted and peeled hazelnuts from Trader Joe’s for this recipe.

If you have raw hazelnuts, go to this LINK to learn how to toast and skin them.

I almost never go to all that trouble anymore. Just another reason I am always so grateful for Trader Joe’s! I also used TJ’s quinoa, a mix of red and white.

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Did you know that in the last week of March you can not find fresh rhubarb in any grocery store in the Valley of Sun?

Trust me, I tried. I went to Fry’s, Safeway, Sprouts, and Whole Foods. I called Albertson’s, Bashas, A.J.’s, and Natural Grocers. I’ve never even set foot inside a Natural Grocers, so I don’t have a clue as to what sort of inventory they have, but I was desperate!

Not one of them had rhubarb. All the produce managers said they had tried to order it, but it wasn’t coming in. By the time I discovered this, I’d already bought the strawberries for this salad and I had my heart set on it. I love strawberry-rhubarb pie, so I was craving this salad for my Easter brunch.

Finally, I took a closer look at the recipe and saw that the rhubarb was cooked for a couple of minutes and then sat in the hot liquid. It seemed to me as if the frozen rhubarb would work just fine. And it did!

A bonus of this recipe is the cooking syrup from the rhubarb, you’ll have about 1 cup of it but you only use 2 tablespoons of it for the dressing. The rest of it you can save and use as a grapefruit-rhubarb simple syrup for cocktails. Mix it with vodka and soda for a refreshing drink. Oh, it is good!

Strawberry-Rhubarb Salad

• 1 cup freshly squeezed grapefruit juice
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 cups 1-inch diagonally sliced fresh rhubarb or a 12-ounce bag of cut frozen rhubarb
• 1 tablespoon fresh orange juice
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 20 ounces fresh strawberries, quartered lengthwise (about 3 cups)
• 1/2 cup toasted slivered almonds
• 1/4 cup small mint leaves
• Mint sprigs, for garnish

In a medium saucepan, stir together the grapefruit juice and sugar over medium-high; bring to a boil, and cook, stirring occasionally, until sugar dissolves.

Add rhubarb to pan; cook for 1 minute. Remove pan from heat. Cover and let stand until rhubarb is tender-crisp, about 15 minutes if fresh or 10 minutes if frozen.

Remove rhubarb with a slotted spoon, reserving rhubarb syrup.

In a large bowl, stir together the orange juice, lemon juice, and 2 tablespoons of the rhubarb syrup. (reserve the remaining syrup for another use.) [Read more →]

Of all the dishes I made for our Easter brunch, this was just about everybody’s favorite. Well maybe, except for the biscuits, because, come on, they’re biscuits! So that’s a given.

I especially love the herb dressing. I’ll be making it again and again.

I used a mix of colored potatoes from Trader Joe’s but you can just use regular new potatoes. Other than that, I followed this recipe pretty much to a T.  The link to the original recipe from Southern Living is at the bottom of this post.

When you measure the 2 cups of radishes, it doesn’t matter if you measure them before cutting or after, it comes out just about the same either way.

And when asparagus goes out of season, long green beans will be just as pretty and just as tasty.

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This refreshing salad is the perfect counterpoint and complement to the Spaghetti Squash Pad Thai – posted last week. It is best served cold from the refrigerator.

My family enjoys and can tolerate quite a bit of heat and spice in our food. I thinly slice the jalapeño pepper for this dish, but it can also be finely minced for those who like things toned down a bit. I give directions for both methods; you decide which suits your taste.

Prep the salad and the dressing hours ahead and then dress it just before you heat up the wok for the pad Thai and your meal will come together in a snap.

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I’m sure I am not the only one. Honestly, I pray I’m not the only one! I often go though periods of time where I am obsessed with one specific food. I’m not talking about a craving, but rather a true obsession. Watermelon is my current object of complete focus and desire. I can’t get enough of it.

Maybe it’s this never-ending heat and the need to cool down. Perhaps I’m dehydrated and I’m using watermelon to refill and refuel my bodily fluids. Or could it be that watermelon is just so dang satisfying and delicious? Whatever it is, I confess that I’ve eaten two whole seedless watermelons in the last 3 days! I didn’t share them with anyone else, they were consumed by me alone. And I’m not talking about the sweet little baby-size individual watermelons, I’m talking about the 5 to 7-pound medium-size seedless watermelons.

Mostly, I ate them “straight up” but the other evening, I made dinner out of them by throwing together this simple salad, a copy-cat recipe of my favorite summer salad at True Food Kitchen.

At TFK, the salad is served with feta cheese. Earlier this summer I made it with fresh ricotta cheese and it was stellar! Since feta is easier to find and what I had on hand, I used it.

I’m not providing quantities for the recipe, make as little or as much as needed. Feed yourself or feed a crowd.

*Be sure the watermelon is cold and the tomatoes are at room temperature.

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Two of the three instructors who taught cooking classes at Les Gourmettes Cooking School this April have made refreshing and colorful citrus salads. And why not? We all love to use local ingredients and Arizona offers some of the best citruses around.

Another coincidence was that both of the chefs used a variety of orange called Cara Cara. I don’t recall this variety ever being used at the school before and then suddenly two consecutive teachers use them. Amazingly, they are even available at Costco.

The Cara Cara orange is an all-natural hybrid orange, the result of the cross-pollination of a Washington Navel Orange and a Brazilian Bahia Navel Orange.

They were discovered in 1976 in Venezuela at the Hacienda da Cara Cara. The oranges found their way into very limited US markets in the 1980s.

The next citrus tree I plant is going to be a Cara Cara! I love the sweetness of the fruit and the gorgeous reddish-pink color of the flesh. The photo above shows the blood orange, the Cara Cara and the navel next to each other. Beautiful!

I enjoyed and was inspired so much by the cooking class salads that I decided to pick up a bag of Cara Cara oranges at Costco and use my backyard bounty of lemons, grapefruit, blood and navel oranges for my dad’s birthday dinner.

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Today’s recipe was one of the two side dishes that accompanied the Pork Schnitzel at my German-Swiss Dinner Party.

It’s an extremely easy and quick recipe and a great side dish for just about any main course.

The other thing I’m sharing today is a few photos of a quick taping I did yesterday for Channel 12. I received a text message from one of Tram’s colleagues, Nico, at 7:45 in the morning asking if he could come by in a couple of hours to film a “how to set the table” segment. I told him sure, that I could be ready by 10:00.

I knew it wasn’t going to air until November, so I started pulling out the Thanksgiving stuff. Luckily, I’d just hauled the Halloween decor out of the shed over the weekend, so I knew exactly where the Thanksgiving tubs were located.

Next, I went out into the Miscellany Shed and pulled out the wood slabs to use as chargers and a handful of antlers.

Finally, I dug through the various china cabinets to round up the dishes, crystal and flatware.

One unfortunate thing happened though, I broke one of the wine glasses from my wedding crystal. I’d love to blame it on the cats (they were annoyingly underfoot) or on my rushing, but it was just general clumsiness. Even after sweeping twice, I kept finding glass, long after the shoot was over.

I didn’t get my Halloween decorations put out, which was my plan for the day before the text arrived, but I was ready when Nico arrived… and that’s saying something!

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