Love and Cooking

For me, July 4 is not about the fireworks ... it's about the food.

The old rec.food.cooking guard has a potluck.

So it's cook, cook, cook all morning and eat and drink all afternoon.

I made the cherry buckle. It was well recieved (as it should have been ... I had the Quality Control piece shortly after I arrived).

I also made something suggested in a piece about Thomas Jefferson's garden in the latest Cooking Light. It was called "antipasto salad" but was your basic marinated-vegetable salad. It called for fresh artichokes, but I had a big jar of marinated, so I used it instead: artichokes, carrots, cauliflower, pattypan squash, and olives in the recipe, to which I added French filet beans and cherry tomatoes. All veggies except the tomatoes briefly cooked (3 mins for the carrots and cauli, 1 min for the squash and beans). It looked a little better than it tasted IMO but it was fine.



I finished cooking an hour before the party, which was enough time to load the dishwasher and remember to put my clothes in the dryer (oops). NPR's Talk of the Nation had a segment on "what are you having for July 4 and what makes it American", which I considered calling in for but I was in the middle of snapping beans at the time.

There was lots of other excellent food, including burnt-butter brown-sugar cupcakes and home cooked carnitas. Yum.

Now to see if Little Miss is okay around firework noise. (Someone let off a large one in the street at the party. I didn't see the very friendly house cat after that!)

Hope all my readers had a wonderful one!