Greetings, FoodFirst Community!

I hope you are having a wonderful summer! It’s been intolerably hot in DC, so we are heading out for a two-week road trip to Wisconsin, visiting friends and sites in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan along the way. I promise some camping cooking photos when we are back!

So what’s for dinner at my house? This summer has been so hot that all I can think of is “cool, cool, cool.” Hence this cold soup that I discovered a few weeks ago on the Love and Lemons website (here is the link) and now made a number of times. It’s so simple and so refreshing! You need just a few ingredients: one large cucumber (or a few small ones), 1.5 cups of plain yogurt, basil leaves and/or mint leaves, 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, 3 tablespoons of lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon honey, and salt and pepper to taste. Put all the ingredients in a blender (not a food processor!), blitz it for 10 seconds, and voila, ready! To serve, drizzle some olive oil, grind some black pepper, and decorate with herbs and/or thin slices of cucumber. Enjoy!!

For a cooling dessert, I have been making Ina Garten’s panna cotta - it’s really a perfect summer dessert. The only downside is that you need to (ideally) make it a day in advance, so it would have the time to firm up in the fridge (honestly, on one occasion I only had it in the fridge for a few hours, and it was still delicious). I halved Ina Garten’s original recipe of the panna cotta and modified the raspberry sauce recipe for a much more reasonable number of calories per serving, down from 853 (!) to about 220 per serving. You will need 1.5 cups heavy cream, 1 cup yogurt, 1 sachet gelatin, 6 tablespoons sugar, vanilla, a tablespoon of Grand Marnier liqueur if you have it, and a cup of fresh or frozen berries. There are 3 steps to making this fabulous dessert:

1. In a small bowl, mix half a sachet of unflavored gelatin with 2 tablespoons of water and set aside to “bloom” (basically, to dissolve).

2. Combine 0.5 cups of heavy cream with 6 tablespoons of sugar in a small saucepan and heat up, stirring, until sugar is dissolved. Add bloomed gelatin and whisk gently until fully dissolved. Set aside to cool. While the sugar/cream/gelatin mixture is cooling, combine 1 cup heavy cream with 1 cup plain yogurt and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I prefer the paste variety with bits of vanilla bean in it, but any vanilla will do). Pour warm sugar/cream/gelatin mixture into cream/yogurt/vanilla mixture and stir till combined. If you have Grand Marnier liqueur on hand, add a tablespoon. Pour the mixture into 6 serving cups or bowls and leave in the fridge to firm up, ideally overnight, but at least for 5-6 hours.

3. To make the sauce, I deviated from Ina’s recipe. I took a cup of frozen mixed berries and cooked them in a saucepan with 2 tablespoons of water and 1 tablespoon of sugar for about 3-4 minutes. I then blitzed them with an immersion blender. That’s it! You can adjust sugar up if you like, but to me, the contrast of sweet creamy panna cotta with tart berries screams “summer”! Cool off the sauce completely and then spoon it on top of the firmed up panna cotta. Decorate with berries and mint leaves if desired and be prepared for moans of extasy from from your loved ones!

Woohoo - we just completed the inaugural Cooking with Confidence course! We cooked amazing food over the last four weeks, and our intrepid pioneers are now ready to take their home cooking journeys to new heights!! Check out their reviews on Yelp!

The next Cooking with Confidence course will start on August 19 at 6:30 pm; we still have 2 spots left, please spread the word! And I am adding some Master Chef classes to the schedule, as well.