Recipes Discovered

Black Bean Salad Recipe

During the summer, it’s nice to find recipes that don’t heat up the kitchen. Potato salad and pasta salad require boiling water, and sometimes, it’s just too hot. Plus, you have to worry about potato salad spoiling at picnics and sometimes pasta salad is just too heavy. This black bean salad is a perfect alternative, and is sure to please everyone.

The recipe is very simple. Just combine a 15 ounce can of black beans with chopped onion, pepper, jalapeno, corn, garlic, parsley, lime juice, and olive oil. Season the salad with salt and pepper and allow the flavors to mix for at least 30 minutes. I like to make it a few hours before or even the day before to let all the flavor mix together. It’s a great salad that is light and refreshing. Perfect for summer picnics.

Goulash with Gnocchi Recipe

Gnocchi is one of my favorite “pastas”, although it’s not really a pasta. It’s a small dumpling usually made with potatoes. Gnocchi is cooked and served in the same way that pasta is, boiled gently in salted water and generally served with a tomato or butter sauce. They taste wonderful and are a unique alternative to traditional pasta.
This recipe for goulash called for ground chicken, but I needed to use up some ground beef, so I just omitted the oil and butter and substituted the beef for the chicken. I drained the browned meat before adding chopped onions, peppers, mushrooms, and garlic. After the veggies cooked for a few minutes, a seasoned everything with paprika, salt, and pepper, and then added stock and tomato sauce. Instead of canned tomato sauce, I used Prego. I think it made the sauce a little thicker and added a lot of flavor. I simmered everything for another couple of minutes before removing the pan from the heat and stirring in sour cream and parsley. The sour cream, although it sounds like an odd addition, adds a wonderful, rich flavor.
For the gnocchi, I boiled a large pot of water, salted it, and then added the frozen gnocchi (my grocery store doesn’t have fresh). The dumplings only cooked about 2 minutes before a couple floated to the top. As soon as the first few started floating, I drained them and added them to the goulash.
This makes a delicious, hearty meal. The sauce is thick and rich, and the gnocchi has a wonderful chewy texture. There are a lot of veggies that bring freshness to the dish. It’s quick, easy, and very filling. It would make a great meal to warm up in the middle of winter, or just when you want to try something that’s a little out of the ordinary.

Turkette Recipe

Although I didn’t make this recipe, I can tell you that it is absolutely delicious. My aunt made it over the weekend, and the leftover just keep getting better and better. Turkette is similar to porkette or pulled pork, but it’s made with turkey obviously. After roasting a turkey, my aunt pulled the turkey off the bone, shredded it, and added it to her slow cooker with the broth from the roasting pan. Of course, she doesn’t have an exact recipe (she’s another old school cook like my mom), so I don’t know the exact measurements on the spices, but she added fennel, oregano, basil, garlic powder, salt, and pepper to taste. She also adds some water if there isn’t enough broth to moisten the turkey. After cooking the turkey on low for a few hours (at least 3, up to 8 she says), the turkette is served on buns. Our favorite topping is sweet pickled relish, but I’m sure there are other good ones. It’s a little bit different, but it makes a great sandwich!

Blueberry Delight Recipe

If I had to pick my favorite dessert not in the chocolate family, I would definitely choose Blueberry Delight. It’s an amazing dessert that is sweet, tart, and absolutely delicious. My parents live near a blueberry farm, and every summer we used to go pick fresh blueberries to make this wonderful dessert. It can be made with other fresh berries, or even peaches, but blueberries are the best in my opinion. It can only be made with fresh fruit, so while blueberries are in season, we make this dessert a lot!

The dessert is layered, and it begins with a graham cracker crust. I usually make a 13×9 pan, but the recipe can be scaled down to the 9 inch prepared crusted that can be bought in the grocery store. For the larger pan, I crush a pack and a half of graham crackers (15 sheets), which turns out to be about 1 1/2 cups crushed. I mix the crushed graham crackers with a half stick of melted butter and press it into the pan using a piece of waxed paper. Sometimes I bake the crust for 8 minutes in a 350 degree oven and other times I don’t bother. It’s usually hot in the summer, and I don’t want to heat up the oven. The dessert is fine both ways.>> Read more

Grilled Peach Melba Recipe

I finally have access to a grill again so I got to make a recipe I have been waiting weeks to try. The recipe is titled Grilled Peach Melba, and I saw it on an episode of Good Eats awhile ago. I think Alton Brown can make anything sound good, but grilled peaches with raspberry sauce served over vanilla ice cream definitely sounded like a great dessert waiting to happen.

I halved and peeled peaches and then put them in a syrup consisting of sugar, water, lemon juice and vanilla extract (I didn’t have a vanilla bean). I let the peaches in the syrup for about 10 minutes while I heated the grilled to medium heat and then placed the peaches directly onto the grill. The peaches I used were a bit under ripe, so I grilled them about 5 minutes on each side and then returned them to the syrup and covered them. For the raspberry sauce, I pureed thawed raspberries, lemon juice, and a little bit of sugar until it was smooth. I didn’t have anything to strain the sauce, so I served it with the seeds. It was fine, but be sure to warn the guests before they take a bite! To serve the dessert, I scooped vanilla bean ice cream into bowls, topped it with 2 peach halves, and then drizzled it with the raspberry sauce.

The dessert turned out really good. I think it would have been better if the peaches were more ripe (they were a little hard), but they still had good flavor. I liked the balance of sweet ice cream and sour raspberries, and the warm peaches with cold ice cream. It’s a great dessert, and it’s really fun to serve to company during a summer barbecue!