gluten-free summer
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Good afternoon!
Apt! [Instagram]
What Your Grocery Cart Says About You [NYTimes, unlocked]
Apologies for the day-late newsletter. “It was a busy Monday!” I’ll say with a straight face knowing full well I had to watch Stephen Nedoroscik on the pommel horse at least twice, the crowds on the hill outside Taylor Swift’s Munich shows way more than twice, and listened to Chappell Roan’s full catalog as I did the actual (less exciting) work of meetings and a podcast recording across two boroughs yesterdays.
This week’s newsletter is a shockingly overdue theme: really fantastic gluten-free recipes for summer. There is no time like exactly right now to delight garden-centric recipes that work for everyone, including some of my friends’ stealth favorites like the corn chowder salad and that trust-me-it’s-going-to-make-your-a-granita-person raspberry crushed ice.
Plus, if you can, take a moment to dig into this year’s Classroom Wishlist Project. If it feels hard to choose, find a school near you or a subject near to your passions. And please remember that there is no purchase too small to make a difference, and to make a teachers day.
Cheers!
Deb
The Smitten Kitchen Classroom Wishlist Project 2024 is now live! In the US, a tremendous number of teachers don’t get the funding they need to set their classrooms up for success. Most will end up paying out of their own pockets to buy educational materials, which is all wrong. I’ve asked teachers to send me their wishlists in hopes that we can help clear as many as possible, as we did the last two summers. Help out if you feel you’re able — you will unquestionably make a teacher’s (and their students) day! [Project information. Direct link to spreadsheet.]
corn chowder salad
Corn chowder, reimagined as a salad, from only six ingredients and using a single pan. Obviously, this is exactly what we have to cook next.
arugula, potato, and green bean salad
Here is an underrated lunch: Not potato salad, per se, but a salad *with* potatoes. Green beans, arugula, and a lightly creamy walnut dressing have made this one of my favorites for over a dozen years. It's highly tweakable, so try it with what you've got around.
eggplant involtini
I cannot stop making eggplant involtini, which is essentially a summerweight, weeknight-friendly eggplant parm with no skimping on the tangy mix of melted cheese, tomato sauce, and silky eggplant. I hope you find it as worthy of repetition as I do. [Video below!]
baked feta with tomatoes and chickpeas
Feta, tomatoes, garlic, and chickpeas roast in olive oil until the tomatoes blister and soften, the feta becomes creamy, and the whole mixture is a dream to scoop on anything. It's almost endlessly tweakable. Dinner should always be this easy.
takeout-style sesame noodles with cucumber
One of my favorite summer dishes is full of ingredients you keep in the pantry (with a lot of flexibility) + any noodles you've got + any raw vegetables you like thinly sliced. I sometimes add cubed tofu as well.
rice-stuffed tomatoes
Don't let tomato season pass without making these, doubly so if you've only had terrible ones to date. The rice absorbs the most clear-noted pure tomato sauce you’ll ever scoop onto a fork; the ingredient list couldn't be less complicated. It's total summer dinner bliss.
zucchini, tomato and rice gratin
Roasted tomatoes and zucchini are layered with rice, sauteed onions and garlic, and then held together with egg and parmesan to make the kind of weeknight all-in-one-dish dinner I crave endlessly -- like a very distant Italian cousin of fried rice. I think we should make this for dinner.
piri piri chicken
Inspired by the chicken we had in Portugal years ago, you can make this recipe with any level of heat, a whole chicken or just parts, on a grill or roasted. It's so streamlined and simple, you can make it for dinner tonight and it always comes out this good.
raspberry crushed ice
This intense raspberry granita converted me to granitas. I used to think they were often icy and dull but this is vibrant and impossibly refreshing, basically the best crushed popsicle/sno-cone I've ever made and the only thing worth eating until this heat wave abates.
almond-crisped peaches
Forget pies and crumbles; the peaches here *are* the crisp, maybe even brushed with bourbon before filling their centers with a mound of crumbly buttery almond topping, which bakes into a caramelized brittle lid. Top with ice cream and watch your scaries vanish.
raspberry brown sugar gratin
Fact! The best recipes are often the ugliest, almost as if they're trying to warn you: this is going to be impossible not to make over and over again, forever, because you never knew three ingredients could combine so transcendently well.
I’ve written three cookbooks and I’m a tiny bit biased, but I think you’d love them all. Wondering what you might cook from Smitten Kitchen Keepers for these warm summer days? I thought you’d never ask! Try the zucchini cornbread and tomato butter, two-bean salad with basil vinaigrette, spinach spiral bread, tomato and corn cobbler, and lamb skewers with crackly vinegar glaze. To finish, I recommend the big crumb pie bars, the blondie chipwich, and/or the strawberry summer stack cake. Were you looking for a list of all the recipes in each of my cookbooks? I’ve added these in a separate page and hope it makes it easier for you to find everything you want to cook.
My podcast with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, launched this spring. Our tenth episode and season finale is the second of a two-part Mailbag episode where we answer as many of your questions as we can. You can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts and I’ve set up a podcast tab/page where you can keep up on it here, too. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening along to season one.
eggplant involtini
shop my favorites
Ever wonder where I get my cutting boards, paring knives, offset spatulas and more than you see when I cook? I've created a page on Smitten Kitchen with links to some of my favorite kitchen items, the ones I'm asked about the most — yes, including the the Smitten Kitchen x Staub Braiser, which is back in stock! For each item, I've attempted to provide a range of shopping links so we're not just focusing on one giant retailer.
See you next week!