#nytsummercooking

It’s almost the weekend and my favorite weekend activity is going to the farmers market. There’s nothing I like better than getting all sorts of fresh fruit and vegetables at their summer peak and then cooking with them all week long. Here are a few of my recommendations of what to buy this week at the farmers market and what to make with it.

Peaches

Peach season is in full swing and at least for me, it is hard not to get carried away buying all the different kinds. Here are two recipes for yellow peaches.

Quinoa Salad With Peaches And Pickled Onions – One of my favorite summer salads with a simple recipe that can be scaled down if you’re feeding fewer people. You can also make it with couscous, bulgur, or barley depending on your personal preference

Bacon Lettuce Peach sandwiches aka BLPs – No recipe needed here just make you’re your peaches are ripe and juice. I’ve used little gem lettuce when making this but you could also use something like arugula for more flavor. 

Parsley, Cilantro, and all the other herbs

In general I’ve found that you can get a way bigger bunch of herbs at the farmers market for the same price as one of the little plastic containers of herbs at the grocery store. Here are two recipes where you can use up your herbs and get a big punch of flavor.

Grilled Tofu with Chimichurri –I used powdered cumin instead of cumin seeds and swapped in mint for the oregano for the chimichurri since I wanted to use it up. The chile pepper adds more heat to tofu.  

In addition to the side salads in my last post, I’ve also made a few new salads that can be eaten as the main entrée of lunch or dinner.

The first salad I made was the Grilled Steak Salad with Beets and Scallions from Bon Appetit. The majority of the recipe for the steak, scallions, and beets is quick and easy to make. The steak and green onions grill very quickly and can even be grilled at the same time if your grill is big enough. I also skipped holding the steak in a warm oven and just sliced it after letting it rest at room temperature for 5 minutes. The recipe also calls for making an aioli from scratch but I’ve always had bad luck doing that so I skipped it and used regular mayonnaise with garlic and Dijon mustard mixed in like it suggested as an alternative. I used arugula as the based of the salad and the final dish was great. I would definitely make this again on a warm summer night.

The second salad I made was Ludo Lefebvre’s Roasted-Carrot Salad. If you are not familiar with him, Ludo Lefebvre is a French chef based in LA who is also one of the hosts of the television show “The Taste” on ABC. It was a harder salad to make but it resulted in a much more complex layering of flavors.

The salad is not like a traditional salad as it does not have a lettuce or greens base. Instead it has several parts to it including a crème fraiche base, roasted carrots, and salad of herbs, onions, and oranges. You do have to roast the carrots in an oven so this might not be the best thing to make on a hot summer day. A few notes about making the salad:

I have made it using both blood orange juice and regular orange juice without much change in the vinaigrette flavor.

As the introduction to the recipe says, you don’t really need all the herbs for the garnish. I skipped the chervil and did not miss it as I already had the parsley, tarragon, and chives giving it a lot of herbal flavor.

If you have time, let the carrots soak up the vinaigrette for 15 minutes before putting the salad together to get fully infused with the citrus flavors.

Don’t skip the crème fraiche! It may be hard to find but the fatty creaminess of it is a nice contrast to he carrots and herbs.