Two Summery Meals

Here are two meals you can make this weekend: one, a meal of farmer's market goodies that are seasonal and good for you and good for the planet and the farmers, and the second a crowd-pleaser from your local grocery store that isn't good for you or the planet but boy is it good and easy to make. Let's start with the angel on your shoulder meal:

There on the plate you'll see vegetables--sugar snap peas, beets and radishes. You'll also see a Parker House roll (from the post below this). What I liked about this meal was that, even though it was a meal of just vegetables, it wasn't punishing in any way. After washing and peeling the snap peas, I took butter--a few tablespoons--and cooked it in a skillet until it turned a toasty brown (make sure it doesn't burn!) and then I added the peas and tossed them around until they were coated. I sprinkled them with salt and pepper and after a few minutes (and tasting one to see that it was just cooked enough) I put it on the plate. The beets were prepared with the knowledge that raw beets are better for you than cooked beets, so I peeled them and cut them thinly into strips and tossed with a simple vinaigrette of mustard, red wine vinegar and olive oil. And they were fantastic--I think I like beets better raw, now, than cooked!

So that was a relatively healthy dinner, rounded out by the rolls which helped fill us up. On the flip side was this:

This is a meal I hope all of you make at some point this summer. It's like an instant picnic, and even if you eat it at home after a long day of work (as Craig did having come home from a full day of teaching high schoolers how to make movies) it transports you instantly to a sunny bench in the park.

The components are simple: fried chicken, biscuits, and watermelon feta salad. All of these are recipes I've posted on the blog before. For the fried chicken recipe click here; for the biscuits click here; for the watermelon/feta click here. It's guaranteed to please a crowd or just a grateful significant other. And you'll really impress if you serve the biscuits with your homemade red currant jam, as I did:

We're eating well this summer, aren't we? Let me know if you give any of this a try....