Weekend Cooking: The Week's Winning Recipes

Happy summer! Here's to the coming weeks of good weather, garden-fresh fruits and veggies, and lots of outdoor dining. Once the weather breaks in May, we don't eat inside again until cool October evenings force us back to the kitchen. We take full advantage of both porch and deck and, of course, the grill.

The other thing I love about summer is the switch from grocery store to farmer's market. My area has several outdoor markets each week, and we have our favorite vendors at each one. All summer, our meat, cheese, veggies, and fruit (and sometimes our beer too) are locally grown or produced. We're blessed.

In today's Weekend Cooking, I'm sharing the winning recipes of the week. As almost always, I forgot to take my own photos of the completed dishes, so the images shown here come from the websites, where you'll find the original recipes by clicking the links.

This Week's Winners

Awesome Tacos: I've made a lot of tacos in my life, but these Hard-Shell Red-Eye Tacos from Rachael Ray were some of the best ever. I followed her recipe pretty much exactly except I had 1½ pounds of ground beef so I didn't use the mix of beef and sausage. The chili powder mix I use comes from Frontier (she suggests a different brand), and I used both jalapenos called for in the recipe. I put out an array of toppings, including pickled jalapenos, cherry tomatoes, red onions, green and red sauces, cheese, and lettuce. We loved the flavor of the meat, and I bet I return to Rachael's version often. If you click through to her site, you'll find a video of Rachael Ray making the tacos in front of a live audience.

Easy, Versatile Salad: I love salads that can serve many roles: main dish, side, or lunch, and this Mediterranean Orzo Salad from Ree Drummond is a good example. I ran across this one when searching for a dressing recipe. I tend to make the same old vinaigrette over and over. Then I thought, why not just make her salad while I was at it. The only thing I did differently here was to add a small orange bell pepper that I wanted to use up. I didn't have one on hand, but I'd consider adding a cucumber next time too. We had this for dinner one night, for lunch the next day, and as a side the second night -- putting the salad through its paces all in one go.

Grilled Pizza: I did something different for our grilled pizza last night. I started with my usual pizza dough and grilling method, but then decided against our usual red sauce and veggie toppings. Instead, I used homemade garlic scape pesto for the base (my photo from a few years ago). Then came Make-Ahead Grilled Paprika Chicken from Clean Eating. I followed the recipe exactly, using three boneless chicken thighs and grilling it at about 400F for 5 minutes on a side. I wasn't worried about the meat being cooked all the way through, since I was going to chop it and recook it with the pizza. Next came grilled yellow bell pepper strips, and finally fresh mozzarella cheese. This pizza was sooo good.

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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.

NOTE: Mr. Linky sometimes is mean and will give you an error message. He's usually wrong and your link went through just fine the first time. Grrrr.
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