UnRecipe: I Hope Hell Has a Salad Bar

The house is almost ninety degrees and it's 10pm at night. Earlier in the afternoon, I looked outside and the tall evergreens looked like they were wilting from the oppressive heat. It's official: the Pacific Northwest is in Hell. I'm not entirely sure what mortal sin the Puget Sound Area committed, but it must have been pretty serious to cast us into the flaming pit of Hades without easy access to air conditioning. All that being said, a girl still needs to eat, so I had another dinner, sans heating element.

It's gettin' hot in herrre... so have a salad - Photo by Wasabi Prime

By the Power of DJ Spinderella, I remixed the Gettin' Figgy With It meal ingredients and made a couple of salads. One featured a roma tomato sliced thinly, sprinkled with goat cheese crumbles, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and some slices of proscuitto on the side. Not quite a caprese salad, but a similar idea. I had already shorn our basil plants down, and figured they needed some time to recover their foliage for another meal.

The other salad was a rerun of what we did on the weekend -- heirloom cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives, snowpeas, and feta instead of goat cheese. It was nice to take a moment and enjoy the two cool, fresh salads, and dream of better days ahead. Hello, Autumn? Are you coming anytime soon...?

The salad days of summer - Photos by Wasabi Prime

* Post Script - Thanks to Food Photo Blog for posting the almost-caprese salad photo on their site! Grazie!

* Post-Post Script - Thanks to Foodie View for posting pics of the heirloom to-mah-toes and the split snowpea pic!

UnRecipe: Gettin' Figgy With It

The summer heat caused a serious case of Couch Potato-itis in the Wasabi household this weekend. I tend to develop a mild addiction to the Turner Classic Movie channel in the summers, and recently recorded King Solomon's Mines (1950) starring Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger on our DVR. It's a gorgeous Technicolor-riffic movie and both the leading actors are rather gorgeous themselves. I think given the hot weather, I wanted to see people suffering in the heat along with me, and searching for the fabled diamond mines in the deepest, darkest heart of Africa seemed a lot worse than languishing on the sofa.

O bring us a figgy dinner... and bring it RIGHT NOW - photo by Wasabi Prime

Given that state of inactivity, there was no way in hell I was going to turn on the stove or even BBQ. Thankfully, a bounty of summer goodies were at the ready, from both the store and our garden, so an uncooked summer dinner was on the menu for the warm evening.

Embrace of proscuitto and cheese? Yes, please - photo by Wasabi Prime

The star of this meal was undoubtedly a pile of fresh figs from Whole Foods, courtesy of Michelle, a fellow foodie-in-arms. I do love figs. They have a light, nuanced flavor that plays nice with both sweet and savory pairings, and the texture of soft and crunchy is just fun. Along with the figgy bunch, we had multicolored heirloom grape tomatoes, goat cheese crumbles, Sopressata salami, and proscuitto, procured from Trader Joe's. Our garden was able to provide more fresh snowpeas, basil, and romaine lettuce. A slice here, a chop there, and a caprese-inspired salad with the tomatoes, cheese, and basil was paired with goat cheese-stuffed figs, wrapped in proscuitto, and finished off with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Chunks of the Sopressata were nestled alongside some garlic-stuffed olives for snacking. I like my bubbly, so I always keep a bottle of the very affordable Domaine Ste Michelle Blanc de Blanc in the fridge. It helped cool our jets while we sat in the backyard with our faithful dog, Indy. She sure looked cute, but not cute enough for proscuitto-wrapped figs stuffed with goat cheese. Sorry, pup.

A dinner of fig-gasmic proportions - photos by Wasabi Prime

To further add to the evening's atmosphere, Brock had music from Hey Marseilles playing. They're a local group with a delightful Parisian sound that is reminiscent of the movie Amelie. They were playing at the Capitol Hill Block Party this weekend, but our summer laziness prevented us from attending. If anyone went and heard them perform, drop the WP a line!

* Post Script - Thanks to Food Photo Blog for posting my pic of heirloom grape tomatoes that almost made it into this post, as well as the pic of the wrapped figs. Cheers FPB!