Weekend Cooking: Dinner at My House

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page.

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If you can believe it, this is my 301st Weekend Cooking post! I kind of wish I had known last week was 300, because I might have celebrated or something!

Anyway, for the first time ever I was at a loss of what to post today. So I did what any normal person would do--I asked Twitter. I got a number of great suggestions (which I'll use in the future) and decided to go with dinner at my house last night. So here we go.

I started cooking at 5:33 pm. I had five large peaches left over from the farmers market and thought I should make a peach crisp. OK, so really I wasn't planning on baking, but because I was documenting the meal, I felt compelled (I'm kind of an overachiever). I used my standard recipe, which you'll find by clicking the link.

Next, I had some beautiful heirloom tomatoes, a cucumber, and a couple of carrots, which were crying out to be some kind of salad. I ended up using only the tomatoes: I sliced them, drizzled some olive oil and balsamic vinegar on them, sprinkled them with pepper, and then grated some ricotta salada cheese on the top. Yum. And pretty.

Finally, we grilled lamb chops and zucchini. I've used a variety of seasonings on lamb chops over the years, and our current favorite is the salt-free Cajun seasoning mix from Penzey's, which I used last night. We grill the chops at about 400F for 6 minutes on the first side and 5 minutes on the second side for a perfect medium rare. I simply sliced the squash in half, brushed it with a vinaigrette, and grilled it exactly like the meat.

We were eating dinner on the deck, with a nice glass of red wine before 7:00. We'll dish out the peach crisp a little later in the evening (after I've already written this), and will likely make a pot of coffee to go with it. I kind of wish we had vanilla ice cream in the house, but alas we don't.

All in all this was an easy summer dinner that I managed to pull off after a full day of work. Of course, I didn't have time to take a walk last night and I do work from home, but still, I didn't feel rushed or put upon, and the evening on the deck was lovely. It didn't hurt that grilling means cleanup was super easy.

If Mr. Linky is gone (there are some issues today), just leave your link in the comments and I'll add it to the linkup when it returns.