Last weekend I spent a few days on Salt Spring Island, where I grew up, with a bunch of girlfriends. We stayed in a house on the ocean and basically just vegged out. There was a lot of talking and laughing (obviously, it was a house full of girls), a lot of eating and a little drinking (OK, more than a little), some suntanning (or in my case, burning), and there may or may not have been a very loud sing-a-long to terrible 90’s music (any Aqua fans out there?).
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Summer is almost here, I can feel it. The first half of May was a big tease, followed by nothing but cold and rainy disappointment, but I have high hopes for June. So far it’s been pretty nice and we’re been doing a lot of barbecuing to take advantage of the warm evenings. Which brings me to probably the most well-known item of the summer barbeque: the hamburger. Many people go to great lengths to doctor up the beef patty, but in this case, I decided to focus my energy on the bun instead. It was a good idea!
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Butterflied chicken, aka spatchcocked chicken (which is much more fun to say), is one of the items on my list that can now be checked off. Butterflying/spatchcocking (see? more fun 😉 ) a chicken simply means cutting out the backbone so that the chicken lies flat, and as such, it cooks faster and more evenly. Last week we had a run of gorgeous early summer weather (shorts, t-shirts, and SPF 30 kind of weather – it was glorious) so I fired up the barbeque to celebrate and cooked my spatchcocked chicken on the grill.
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Last weekend we went to Nate’s parents’ house for lunch to mark his mum’s and (now) 4-year-old nephew’s birthdays. Of course, two birthdays call for two cakes. Gunnar, the 4-year old, got a fantastic Mr. Bean cake, and I offered to make Kathryn, Nate’s mum, a cake. She requested a lemon cake (my nemesis!) but I was stoked to try to get it right finally – third time’s a charm, right?
Gunnar’s Mr Bean cake (not made by me, if that wasn’t clear)
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Sweet corn has got to be one of the best things about late summer. I could eat it every day straight off the cob, but sometimes it’s fun to do other things with it – like putting it in a creamy chowder with smoked salmon. Recipe on the SeaChange blog!
This summer has been all about pizza for me – and the perfect summer pizza is a grilled pizza. This one is topped with smoked salmon, goat cheese, red onions, capers, and arugula. So good! Head over to the SeaChange blog for more pictures and a full recipe tutorial. 🙂
Last year sometime, I went to a homemade calamari feast at my friend Katheryn’s house. (I brought dessert, and also helped disembowel about 300 little squid. My kind of dinner party!) One of her other guests, who was from the Szechuan province of China, concocted a delicious Szechuan spice mix for dipping our calamari: a combination of sugar, salt, black pepper, Chinese 5 spice powder, and hot paprika.
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Seeing local strawberries in the store is a sure sign that summer is here, but to me, it is the raspberries that signal its true arrival. Last summer I got nostalgic about blackberries, but really, it’s all about the raspberries. My mum used to grow reapberries in her garden and I loved eating them straight off the bush, still warm from the sun, sweet and tangy and so good, and now, they taste like summer to me. BC raspberries are finally in stores and I have been shelling out the $4 or $5 per pint to get me some summery goodness. The only problem is that they don’t keep and I needed to find something to do with them besides eating them by the handful. Enter: Raspberry-Lemon-Poppyseed Muffin Cakes….
The move is over and we have settled into our temporary new home – temporary because (fingers crossed!) we have plans in the works for bigger, better things. I have not really taken the new kitchen for a spin yet, but I’m looking forward to it. It’s bigger and better laid-out than the kitchen in our last place, which was a galley-style layout that could only accommodate one person and had barely any usable counter space:
The kitchen on a good day (there was usually a dish rack taking up valuable real estate above the dishwasher).
Not that I’m knocking small kitchens – I know you can do a lot in them and I’ve survived in an even smaller one – but a little extra space is so nice. …
I have another guest post up at the SeaChange blog: Cedar Planked Salmon with Rosemary Smoke. This is a perfect summer grilling recipe and a very exciting cooking method!