We eat green salads year-round at my house, but they become even more popular at this time of year, when the produce is gorgeous and temperatures jump into the high 80s.    Many a warm evening I abandon the stove altogether and throw together a huge salad for dinner.

Usually a simple vinaigrette is my first-choice dressing for a pile of impeccably fresh greens,  heirloom tomatoes and whatever else catches my eye at the farmers market.  Lately, though, I’ve been playing with more elaborate dressings to turn even the most basic salad into a memorable meal.   This updated Green Goddess dressing has become a favorite.

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Say what you will about English cooking, the Brits know pudding.

They so love their custards, fools, trifles, and duffs that they’ve come to  refer to all desserts as pudding.  None is so magical to my mind as summer pudding.  Only alchemy could turn something as prosaic as white bread, berries and sugar into something so gorgeous, elegant and delicious.

The Oxford Companion of Food traces the first published recipe for summer pudding to a missionary in India.  But I first tasted it in a hip East Berlin restaurant not long after the wall came down.  I still remember the vivid fuchia color and the bright berry flavor that seemed to distill the essence of summer.  It was like no other dessert I knew, neither as rich as pastry or as creamy as a typical pudding.  I was smitten.

So when I was casting about last week for something different to make with a portion of the 15 pounds of olallieberries my husband and I had just picked at Coastways Ranch north of Santa Cruz, summer pudding leaped straight to mind. (more…)

Before we left on our recent trip to Alaska, I compiled a collection of recipes that I thought might work for car camping.  They had to be simple — based on ingredients we could find at most any grocery store —and require a minimum of pots and pans.  One skillet would be ideal.

At the same time, I wanted fresh flavors and appealing textures.  Canned goods and pantry items soon lose their charm when you’re traveling for six weeks.

Our favorite quick and easy meal turned out to be an updated version of Joe’s Special, the venerable San Francisco dish made with spinach, eggs, onions and ground meat.  Think of it as a deconstructed fritatta.  It takes a bit of chopping but it comes together fairly quickly and tastes terrific.

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I first came across a recipe for Nanaimo bars in an old issue of Sunset Magazine. It was over the top with butter and sugar, but I couldn’t resist trying it out. And from the first bite, I was a fan of this indulgent combo of chocolate and buttercream with its irresistible balance of cake-like base, creamy filling and brittle chocolate topping.

Since then, I’ve made the recipe a couple of times a year, whenever I feel like spoiling myself or my friends. The only other person I know who makes the bars is Susan Steade, now food editor of the Mercury News.  Her recipe is very similar and the bars are always a cause for celebration in the newsroom.

The glorified brownies get their name from the town of Nanaimo on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, but they have been been adopted throughout British Columba as a provincial specialty. So I made a note to myself before starting this trek to Alaska and Canada to taste the first BC-made Nanaimo bar I came across on my travels.

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One of the striking ironies of Alaska is how difficult it is to find fresh fish in the ports serving North America’s biggest fishery.

Frozen fish is everywhere, neatly packaged in vacuum-sealed pouches.  That’s because all but a small portion of the huge harvest of salmon and halibut is destined for markets elsewhere.  The fish are filleted and frozen within hours after they’re pulled from Alaska’s icy oceans.

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