Sooo I mentioned earlier in the week that I spent last week on Martha’s Vineyard with my family. Are you ready to be absolutely bombarded with pictures? (Pictures that I shamelessly stole from my dad.)
My parents live in the Boston area, and we’ve been going to Martha’s Vineyard for a week every summer for as long as I can remember. It’s one of my favorite family traditions, and this was the first year Nate got to join!
(So of course we got matching hats.)
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Oh guys, I am beyond predictable. I go on vacation for a week, then I come back and make you salads. Well, I come back and make me salads. And therefore you all get salads, too! So does Nate. Oops.
We just got back on Sunday night from a week on Martha’s Vineyard with my family. I’m usually ready to come back from vacations, but let me tell you, the Vineyard is one place I’ll never be ready to leave. I’m currently in the depths of the post-vacation blues and scheming up ways to retire early… any suggestions?
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I say tomato, you say tomahto, but I think we can all agree that it’s a wonderful time of year when they’re ripening in abundance. I wish I were the type of person to have a million tomato plants about to bear fruit in my garden, because there really is nothing better than fresh-picked tomatoes. I could eat them for days! As it is, I have to rely on my local farm stand, plus friends with greener thumbs than mine, to satisfy my sweet tomato tooth.
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I think I may have died and gone to heaven.
Not the kind of heaven where you get all your tax dollars back in a lump sum (because, all religion and politics aside, let’s face it: that would be awesome), but the kind where you’re surrounded by watermelon. How thrilled would you be if the reward for a lifetime of good deeds was towering cubes of juicy watermelon everywhere you turned for the rest of eternity? I think I would be pretty pumped. If I’m lucky, my tax dollars will be tucked in there somewhere, too.
Sigh… a girl can dream.
The main surprise here is that I even tried a new kind of gazpacho. Prior to this fabulousness, regular tomato gazpacho was the only flavor ever to grace my blender. My mistake, because I’ve been missing out big time! I was inspired to blend up this batch after enjoying a particularly delicious cup of watermelon gazpacho at a restaurant, and now I’m afraid this may turn into the Summer of Gazpacho. I mean, I can’t think of a single fruit or vegetable that wouldn’t taste delicious as part of a tomato-y chilled soup. Maybe that’s an exaggeration… I haven’t brainstormed very hard. But still, you get the picture: YUM.
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This shrimp and orzo salad was just catapulted to the top of my all-time favorites.
Why, you ask? Well, cause my mom made it for me, of course! And I guess the huge chunks of feta don’t hurt, either.
This was lunch one day during my bridal shower a few weekends ago. My mom made a huge batch (like quadruple the recipe!) to feed 11 hungry women. Well, I don’t know if everyone was hungry… but I sure was, and I think I ate 4 servings. Or maybe that was the souffle the next morning that I ate 4 servings of? Oh wait, that too. There was a loooot of good food. But I certainly wasn’t the only one going back for “just one more bite” of this salad.
Now, I know I don’t post a lot of seafood on this blog, but the truth is that I eat a fair amount of it. It’s usually at restaurants, because let’s face it, I love sushi! Also, fish is often the healthiest thing on a restaurant menu. But I forgot how absolutely WORTH IT it is to cook seafood at home from time to time. This pasta salad is a prime example.
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