Weekend Cooking: Cooking with Summer Vegetables

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Summer is here and cooking now involves grilling, salads, and my two favorite small appliances: the slow cooker and pressure cooker.

Here are a couple of recipes I made this week that were winners. Not only were they really yummy but both were pretty and relied on the fresh vegetables that are so plentiful at the farmers market right now.

Italian Vegetable Stew

I found the recipe for the vegetarian stew on the Epicurious app, and although it wasn't written for the pressure cooker, I was able to make adjustments. You might wonder about having soup in June, but we had a couple cool(ish) and rainy evenings this week, and the vegetable soup was perfect.

The Recipe: Click through to the Epicurious site to find the original recipe on the Web. It's worth looking through the readers' comments for tips, some of which I took into consideration.

My changes: Because the recipe was developed for 6 to 8 servings, I had to cut it down for just the two of us. So instead of using two different greens for the soup, I used just 1 bunch of collards, which I did not precook. I more or less cut the remaining ingredients in half, and threw everything but the bread, beans, and cheese into the electric pressure cooker. I set the cooker for 5 minutes. When the time was up, I let the pressure release naturally. Then I stirred in the beans and let them heat up in the soup for a couple of minutes. This was excellent and reheated in the microwave perfectly the next day.

Snow Pea, Scallion, & Radish Salad

I love Ellie Krieger's recipes and have reviewed several of her cookbooks over the years. The following recipe comes from her The Food You Crave book, and is a refreshing salad that looks so pretty in the bowl and on the plate. I served this with simple grilled chicken breasts.

The Recipe: Click through to the Fine Cooking site to find the original recipe. Again, read over the reviews for some tips, which are really helpful.

My changes: I doubled the number of radishes and scallions called for in the recipe. I didn't have the right salad dressing ingredients so I used unseasoned rice wine vinegar and good olive oil instead. I also omitted the sugar in the dressing, and we didn't miss it at all. This was still good the next day for lunch.

I pinned both recipes to my Pinterest "Recipes: Tried and Liked" board.