Warm days call for cool picnic ideas, and this white bean salad certainly answers that call. Made by Elise at Simply Recipes from a recipe of her mother's, it looks both refreshing and hearty, a simple solution to the perennial question of not only what to eat, but what to eat while sitting on a blanket, fending off ants and sunburn.

And while you may be able to hold both at bay, we're guessing that when a salad looks as pretty as this one, you'll have no such luck fending off the hungry advances of fellow picnickers eager for just one more mouthful of beans, kissed with fresh lemon juice, spiked with raw purple onions and garnished with fresh, lush herbs.

[Via Simply Recipes]

Caramelizing Onions from Simply Recipes on Vimeo.

There are few meals I make that don't in some way involve onions. I add red or sweet ones to salads for crunch. When I saute greens, I almost always start by softening slivered yellow onion in some olive oil, in order to give the chard or kale a flavor partner. They go in all my soups, stews, braises and roasts. And, when I want a real treat, I'll caramelize them down to a puddle of dark, sweet onion jam that goes amazingly well on sandwiches, pizzas or even just on top of a cracker.

Elise at Simply Recipes posted a tutorial yesterday on how to make caramelized onions that is helpful for the beginnger and a good reminder for those of us who have let caramelized onions slip off our mental food map. What's more, she created a time lapse video of the caramelization process that I've now watched four times, just for the pleasure of seeing those crispy raw onions melt down into a rich and mellow spread.

Each Friday afternoon, I gather up an assortment of links from around the food webs for your pre-weekend enjoyment. Here's some of what's caught my eye recently.

1. Move over canning, root cellars are the newest (oldest), hottest method of food preserving on the block. The New York Times featured them last week and Culinate offers more on subject from expert Harriet Fasenfest.
2. Looking for a way to make your winter a little brighter? Plan meals with friends and family.
3. Like the taste and convenience of slow cooked foods but don't have an electric slow cooker? CityMama helps you use just a cast iron casserole dish and your oven to achieve the same effect.
4. The Wednesday Chef featured a chocolate chip cookie recipe that includes buckwheat groats for added fiber and texture. These are going on my 'must make' list for this weekend.
5. I bought a big bunch of kale last weekend at the farmers market. I haven't gotten around to cooking it yet, but I've got my eye on this recipe from Elise at Simply Recipes.
6. For those of you out there who keep kosher, it's going to be a whole lot harder to get kosher beef for you dining table. NPR reports that one of the largest Kosher meat plants in the country has shut down their beef facility.
7. I like pumpkin bread and I LOVE cranberry bread. Putting the two of them together? Genius!
8. Looking for a weekend baking project that will knock the socks straight off your loved ones? What about the Feather Boa Doughnuts that Erin made recently! Based on a recipe from 101 Cookbooks, they are a little lighter than fried doughnuts but I imagine no less delicious.

I used to drink Kahlua a lot many many years ago, but as I've gotten older I've gotten away from Kahula/chocolate/mocha/whatever flavored drinks and more towards gin and wine. However, that doesn't mean that I'm against using Kahlua in dessert recipes.

This delicious-sounding recipe for Kahlua Brownies comes from Garrett McCord over at Simply Recipes. It uses 1 1/2 pounds of 60% cacao chocolate, though I wonder how the brownies would taste if you used something even higher (say, 70%) or another type of chocolate?

I have always been a sucker for butterscotch. When I was a kid, I would always choose one of those hard, orange butterscotch candies over a piece of chocolate. One those rare occasions when my family went out for ice cream sundaes, I would choose vanilla ice cream with hot butterscotch syrup drizzled over top (my mother, being a chocolate person herself, never understood my choice). While I don't always make the same selection these days (I did come around to chocolate sometime in my teens), I still love the flavor of real butterscotch.

Yesterday on Simply Recipes, Elise published a guest post written by Shuna Fish Lydon of the blog Eggbeater on how to make homemade butterscotch. The post comes with step-by-step pictures, which are extremely helpful for those of us who are never sure if the sugar/butter/cream mixture has cooked to the proper consistency. She makes it sounds really easy, which is at once both encouraging and a little dangerous, as the last thing I need in life is the ability to make butterscotch on demand.

Those of us who follow food blogs are well acquainted with Elise of Simply Recipes. Her recipes are always dependable and she seems to have cooked just about everything in creation, which means that her website is something of a definitive resource.

However, if you haven't been following her for a long time, you might have missed a particularly useful blender tip she offered nearly three years ago. Lucky for all us internet readers, those eagle-eyed editors at Lifehacker found this particular tip and have brought it to prominence for our edification.

She suggests using a canning jar in place of your blender carafe when mixing up small batches of things. Apparently, most blenders are designed so that their bottom blade contraption will screw onto a standard sized canning jar. This way you can blend or chop inside a jar, remove the blender blade and store easily by popping on a regular old jar lid. It's like the predecessor to the Magic Bullet.

[via Lifehacker]

Really now, when you think of food porn, that last thing you think of is bean dip, right? Okay, maybe a luxurious cannellini bean spread drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, or perhaps even a deep, dark sultry black bean dip, but seven layer dip? That's the stuff made with brown lumpy stuff that's mashed together with pork lard then layered together into a congealed rainbow of Taco Bell flavors most often found pre-made in the grocery store refrigerated section. There is nothing sexy about Seven Layer Dip.

Unless it's the Seven Layer Bean Dip over at Simply Recipes. Unlike all those supermarket dips, Elise demands that the refried beans as the first layer be hot. I agree. Who wants to bite into a lump of cold, hard smashed beans? When the refried beans are hot, then the next layer, shredded cheese, melts itself all over it, creating quite the pornographic seven layer dip pictured above.

You'll never be able to look at Seven Layer Dip the same way again.

Yesterday, for the first time ever in my entire life, I canned. I've been watching my mom can jam for years, so it wasn't a totally foreign process to me, but I had never done it on my own from start to finish before. I don't think words can express just how satisfying it was to hear the snap when the cans sealed. When they were all finished, I kept going into the kitchen to tap on the lids, just to hear the pleasing dull ring that means that they were properly sealed.

The reason I was canning is that I started a batch of apple-pear (the apples were the last of the ones that Scott and I picked for the second episode of Slashfood in the Kitchen) butter on Tuesday that took until Wednesday to finish. Sadly I was overconfident and didn't call my mom for advice. Had I touched base with her before I started, I would have been reminded that she cooks the apples for a bit and then strains them in a small-holed colander for a while to get some of the liquid out before pureeing and cooking them down. The way I did it, it took nearly 10 hours of cooking before it had simmered down to the right consistency (my stove didn't help matters as it doesn't do the long, slow simmer very well). However, it doesn't matter, as it all turned out and I now have five jars of really delicious apple-pear butter to give as gifts this holiday season.

When my mom was pregnant with me, she craved borscht. She would buy the jars of Manishevitz brand borscht and drink it cold, straight from the container. It was a surprise to no one when I came into the world with an unreasonable love for beets. I like beets just about any way that they come, and borscht is one of my favorite ways to eat them. However, for someone who loves those red root vegetables as much as I do, you'd think that I'd then have a go-to recipe for the stuff. Sadly, you would be mistaken. I've tried many times and while I've always come up with something edible, I've never made it and then thought, "Gee, I love that."

However, on Sunday, Elise at Simply Recipes posted about borscht and included a recipe that she's adapted from Bon Appetit. It is based on beef broth and includes beets, carrots, potatoes and cabbage. It looks hearty, flavorful and deeply colored and is calling my name. I think I'll save this recipe for when I go to visit my parents in Oregon in a few weeks, to see if I can't shake my mother's attachment to the jarred version of this soup. With this recipe in hand, I don't think it should be hard.

Still have turkey leftover from your Thanksgiving dinner? If so, I recommend turning to Elise of Simply Recipes for a little post-holiday inspiration. This afternoon a friend of mine came over for a bit. While he was here, he mentioned that he was interested in making some chili that would incorporate all the meat leftover from the 12 pound bird he bought to share with his mother and brother. A quick Google search led up to the recipe for Turkey Chili that Elise posted two years ago. And just today, she shared a recipe for Turkey Tacos with Cranberry Salsa that sounds really tasty. I'm not much of a fan of reheated poultry (it's a weird quirk of mine) but after reading these recipes, I'm wishing I had just a little bit of leftover turkey. If these recipes whet your interest but don't seem perfectly for you, make sure to check out the box in the upper right hand corner of the screen that says More Recipes, as it links to even more terrific turkey recipes from Elise.

Thinking about Lemonade this morning put me in the mood for something refreshing and the Pink Lemonade from Simply Recipes sounds like just the thing. Elise's recipe is extra-pink and uses cranberry juice to give it its distinctive coloring, unlike commercial versions which use food colorings or concentrated natural colors to create pinkness. The natural tartness of the cranberry juice also helps it to blend well with the lemon flavor, creating a smooth and balanced drink. Sure - it's a tiny bit girly looking, but who could turn down a glass of lemonade, knowing that it was homemade? If you can't use plain sugar for any reason, you could try sweetening the juice with Splenda, too.

Pasta salads are not usually considered to be particularly elegant dishes, in large part because people think of them as bowls of mayonnaise that happen to have pasta mixed in. A pasta salad could really be any kind of cold or room temperature salad that has a dressing (as opposed to a sauce) and veggies in it. If you use a long, thin noodle, your pasta can quickly be transformed from a picnic side to an elegant main dish. Elise from Simply Recipes used this techinque with her inspired Sesame and Cilantro Vermicelli Salad. The asian-inspired pasta uses a honey and sesame soy dressing over a mix of thin noodles, cilantro, peanuts, green onions and red pepper, creating a perfectly satisfying summer pasta dish - no mayonnaise required.

Mushroom caviar is a food that gets its name from a slight resemblance to real caviar, when in fact it is simply a type of dip or spread made with mushrooms - no fish eggs to be found. This version of the recipe was posted by Elise at Simply Recipes and I'm fairly certain I have never seen mushrooms look this good. The caviar is made by sauteeing finely chopped mushrooms with some butter, shallots and a bit of garlic, then topping it off before serving by mixing in some sour cream and toasted pinenuts. It is chilled before serving. Elise served hers with crackers, but I can't help by think that it would be at least as delicious with some sliced baguette pieces. Besides, you can pile more onto a slice of bread than you can onto a cracker, right?

Elise, the blogger behind Simply Recipes, began her blog to document all the things she learned from her parents about how to cook. Since the food blogosphere has grown so much in the past several years, it is no longer necessary to have had culinarily inclined parents to grasp the basics of cooking, because bloggers can fill in the gaps. Elise started a series called Learning to Cook, where she tries to ferret out all the "how to's" and "why's" of cooking from blogs around the world. So far, I would say that she is doing an excellent job. Part 1 has guides of mashed potatoes and ricotta cheese, among other things, while part 2 covers quiche and sushi rice. Part 3 has links to posts about prepping leafy greens and beating egg whites. There will undoubtedly be more to follow, but this is a great start. Thanks, Elise!

 

Artichokes have been a favorite food for over 2000 years, first appearing as a popular aphrodisiac in Ancient Greece and Rome. They grew natively around Italy, but by the year 800, they were being cultivated in Spain and gradually spread to other areas of Europe. Today, nearly all commercial artichokes grown in the US come from California, where they are harvested year-round. There are more than 50 varieties of artichokes, but only a few are commercially grown. The ones in the United States are likely to be round and green Globe artichokes, but some varieties have brown or purple leaves. The small artichokes sold as "baby artichokes" are not a variety of their own, but merely an immature version of larger artichokes.