Lentil and Salmon Salad on Tomatoes–Reading Molly O’Neill

This salad features late chef and food writer Molly O’Neill’s perky Lemon-Thyme Vinaigrette.

I can’t figure how this happens, but occasionally there’s an extra piece of salmon at our house–typically from a dinner party. Usually, the following night, I throw it in the food processor with cheese, herbs, and garlic; we spread it on crackers or scoop it up with fresh vegetables and have it with a glass of wine. Other times it’s chopped and added to some simple greens because who doesn’t like that instant sort of dinner? #justaddvinaigrette

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Grilled Potato-Vegetable Salad

Dedicated to Joyce Anderson Smith

While I love a good old American potato salad dressed with mayonnaise and sunshine mustard as much as the next midwestern girl, by this time in the summer I’m ready to change things up a little.

our Colorado front yard in its July glory

How about you? (By the way, my mother-in-law makes the very best potato salad and while she might not want you to know, pickle juice is her secret ingredient.)

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Spicy Cucumber-Feta Soup

When cucumbers are plentiful, cheap, and the weather is sultry, it’s time to make chilled herby and spicy cucumber-yogurt soup.  Lebanese to start with (Kh’yaaf B’lubban) and very like the Indian Kheera Raita, Americans have made this creamy, cooling dish their own–and I’m making it yours.  Perfect to eat as a cold first course or for a light meal, it’s ready in the time it takes to whir a few things through the food processor. That’s right; there’s NO COOKING HERE!! Just pressing a button–well, maybe a few times!

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Blueberry Waffle Ice Cream Sandwiches with Strawberry and Chocolate Sauces

In the house where I grew up in a Chicago suburb that was situated so far south that its streets ended exactly where the tall, green and golden midwestern cornfields began, the best treasures were often in the big freezer out in the utility room. Last summer’s fish from vacations in Minnesota or Wisconsin (cleaned by yours truly), stored in tubs of water, were frozen forever just as they were…or at least until the next weekend’s fish fry. Small cartons of peaches –the ones that came in after the canning was done–might be on the door for mid-winter dessert or for topping the homemade ice cream we all took turns cranking early the following summer. The thing you really had to search for, though, as they were well-hidden from my Dad, me, and all the grandkids (you know who you are), were ice cream sandwiches made from Mom’s leftover waffles. Now I don’t know how there were ever leftover waffles, but there were. And somehow my mom managed to press vanilla ice cream between a couple of them, wrap them tightly, and hide them well until they were badly needed. You get it, right? When your whole adolescent world was falling apart or the Chicago weather had turned frightening…

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“How about an ice cream sandwich?”

asked my mom…
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