Tasty Treats - Grilled Summer Squash & Peach Salad

With summer in full swing, I'm craving summer fruits (peaches, cherries and plums) all day long.  When I found this grilled summer squash and peach salad with manchego cheese and white truffle from Roost, I new I found the perfect salad for summer.  I know what I'm going to be making this weekend! What is your one of your favorite summer tasty treats?

image and recipe via Roost

Cheers,

Tasty Treats - Chickpea Radicchio Wraps

image via Love & Lemons

I've been on my Project Lose Baby Weight since December and as part of that plan I've been eating a lot less carbs than normal (most of my carbs are coming from fruits and vegetables).  So, I'm always on the hunt for good recipes that would give me that feeling of having a sandwich or a wrap without the carbs that go along with it.  When I saw Love & Lemons recipe for Chickpea Radicchio Wraps, I knew I had to put it on the menu to make this week!  It looks so like it will be a crisp, tasty and refreshing snack.  I highly recommend adding Love & Lemons to your must read blogs if you are searching for healthy, tasty and mostly vegetarian recipe inspiration.  

What are some of your favorite low carb meals or snacks?  I can use all of the inspiration I can get! 

Cheers,

Tasty Treats - Kitchit

Last month, Erin invited me over to her loft for a fun cooking class with Kitchit.  For those of you who don't know, Kitchit allows you to choose a local chef from your area (Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York currently) and then choose your dining experience.  You can choose a cooking lesson, dinner party or cocktail party and then work with the chef to customize it to your taste.  They do all the shopping, prep work, cooking and they even clean up!

At Erin's loft, Erin, Courtney, Caitlin and I received a cooking lesson for a romantic dinner that you could cook at home for a loved one.  Chef Jed Cote showed us everything from how to shuck an oyster to how to make our very own mozzarella.  The food and the company was amazing!  I highly recommend Kitchit to anyone wanting to plan a fun dinner party or wanting to learn some new recipes for their cooking arsenal!

images via my iPhone except for images 7,8 & 9 were taken by Colin Price for Apartment 34 

Cheers,

Tasty Treats - Salted Caramel Ding Dong Chocolate Cake

When the fabulous and newly married pinner, Maia, repinned this recipe from Portugese Girl Cooks, I immediately repinned it to my Savvy Desserts board.  Salted caramel and ding dong in the same sentence is almost too much to handle.  My friend, the talented Michele of Cakewalk Baking and Pastry Chef at the Berkeley restaurant Zut!,  repinned it from my board and then made it within a couple of days. She said that everyone went crazy for it! I'm having a hard time getting it out of my head, so I think that it might need to be made ASAP.

What is your favorite cake recipe? 

image via Portugese Girl Cooks

Williams-Sonoma Agrarian - Seed to Table

Raised beds and planters by Farmer D Organics and a vintage galvanized English dolly c. 1920-1940's (in Europe they used these to clean their clothes).

I love these Slate garden markers, Sophie Conran gardening tools and Beekman Seeds.

Ambatalia denim apron, Blithe and Bonny avocado hand cream (made in Santa Cruz and they use old book pages to print their labels for the glass jars), canning and preserving tools and DIY cheese kits. 

Beehive kits, fresh goat cheese made from the DIY cheese kit, Williams-Sonoma chef and fresh lemon curd meringues.

Seeds from Fire Escape Farms (she lives in San Francisco and developed seeds that would thrive in the city) and my new lettuce bowl where I planted romaine lettuce, sun gold cherry tomatoes and the Fire Escape Farms edible flower seeds.  I'm also wearing my garden utility apron, that is made by Ambatalia.  Molly makes these aprons from sustainable fabrics that are manufactured in the United States. 

How fun are these Cocktail Garnish Seed Bombs! I think these would be such a fun gift to give along with two vintage cocktail glasses! The instructions also include a cocktail recipe to go along with each garnish that you will be growing! (image via Williams-Sonoma)

Chalkboard labels that can be reused on your jars! (image via Williams-Sonoma)

I was invited a couple weeks ago to go to a preview event at Williams-Sonoma for their new Agrarian line.  It couldn't have come at a better time, since we had just moved into our new house and I was looking into planters to set up a vegetable garden.

Williams-Sonoma's Agrarian line supports a lifestyle of healthy living - connecting the virtues of the homegrown and homemade to your everyday table.  Their new line includes live plants, gardening essentials, DIY kits (cheese, kombucha, mushrooms) to canning, beekeeping and they are even selling chicken coops.

What I loved about a lot of the products that they have added in this line is that they are from local vendors that are making sustainable products. They have all the things you would need to be able to start your own herb or vegetable garden even if you have limited space like most city dwellers do.

Right now they only have a limited amount of stores selling the Agrarian line across the United States (the closest for us in the Bay Area is Palo Alto at Stanford Shopping Center).  But everything is available online along with some great tools that will tell you what to plant and when for the area that you live in! 

Santa Claus Cookies

 Use any sugar cookie mix or recipe or buy a pre-made rolled dough (Pillsbury). 

 Make sure you have a great assistant to help with the taste testing!

 If you make your own recipe, roll the sugar cookie dough into a long roll, so that you can slice the cookies. Then place it in the refrigerator or freezer to make it firmer for easy slicing.

 Two slices for each Santa cookie. 

 Leave one circle whole and cut a triangle out of the second one for the hat and the extra two half circles become Santa's mustache. 

 I normally buy Nestle Toll House chocolate chips, but decided to buy Ghiradelli chocolate chips not realizing how BIG they were. So, this Santa is a little bug eyed! You need candy red hots for the nose. 

 You can either use red sprinkles for the hat or you can ice it in red icing after you have baked them.

 I used the natural sugar frosting that came with the Trader Joe's sugar cookie kit for the mustache and hat trim. I grew up using the Cake Mate frosting tubes, which tastes OH SO GOOD, but when I read the ingredients this year and realized that partially hydrogenated oil was part of the ingredients, I decided to pass on the trans fats. I have to admit the Cake Mate frosting tubes with the fun tips create much cuter Santa mustaches and hat trim, but this will do!

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas. We are enjoying some of our favorite holiday movies (The Family Stone, Love Actually and The Holiday), drinking hot chocolate, getting ready for Christmas Eve and making this star tree cookie from Crate and Barrel for our family Christmas celebration tomorrow.

image via