grilled lamb and a summer salad

I have been using quite a bit of ground lamb this summer - this is a spiced lamb patty that is grilled. I made a great summer salad of baby greens, blue cheese, almonds, and nectarines to go with the lamb.
 

pasta with artichokes and pancetta

Prepping and slicing the baby artichokes can take a bit of tedious time, but I like doing it. I just saute some diced pancetta and then add the sliced artichokes to poach in a bit of white wine. Toss with pasta and parmesan for a delicious meal. I also had some of my first garden tomatoes to make into a simple sliced salad with a caper vinaigrette.

shrimp for dinner, puff pastry for dessert

For our main course I sauteed shrimp in a hard cider sauce and served it over rice. For dessert I baked up some sugar-crusted puff pastry "pillows". Then I split them open, spread with mascarpone cheese, and topped with ripe apricot and plum slices.

summer dinner and dessert

This one is a turkey cutlet - pan sauteed with a green chile and brie sauce atop.  I paired it with some ricotta-spinach 'dumplings' and then couldn't resist making a caprese salad with freshly picked tomatoes from our garden.  Dessert was a beautiful and tasty plum-almond galette - we thank our neighbors for sharing their bountiful plum crop with us.

squash blossoms and enchiladas

I grow a few squash plants mainly to harvest squash blossoms - here I fried them in a tempura-type batter as an appetizer. Dinner was Beef and Black Bean Enchiladas with an Ancho Chile Sauce - using a recent recipe in Cooking Light magazine. http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/beef-black-bean-enchiladas-50400000120717/

apricot abundance

We harvested apricots day after day.  This dinner was a scallop-watercress salad, garlic scape pesto pizza bread, and apricot cobbler.

enjoying red chile & tortillas, while working with apricots

We had a bumper crop of apricots from a large tree in our yard so I spent many hours making jam and baking cobblers.  This night we had some red chile (we make ours with ground pork in it) and I made some flour tortillas too.  For dessert we had fresh apricots in a mint syrup while another pot of apricot jam bubbled away.  After I made 'regular' jam for a few batches, I switched it up to make Apricot-Ginger-Lime jam.