Summery, light, and wonderful.

We had this salad from Bobby, except that I used thawed frozen corn instead of grilled fresh corn (much easier) and herbed feta instead of bleu cheese, because we like it better. The salad includes corn, grape tomatoes, feta, vidalia onions, and a delicious basil vinaigrette that's made in the blender so it's a gorgeous light green color. The vinaigrette would be delicious on just about anything, though it's particularly good with this light, well-balanced salad.

To accompany the salad, I made basil popovers, a modification of Ina Garten's thyme popovers (with one obvious substitution) to go with our basil theme for the evening. I don't have a popover pan, but a regular ol' muffin tin works just fine for me. These turned out to be the perfect thing for mopping up vinaigrette from our plates. Even Kent loved them. The recipe made a dozen, and there are only two left; really, we didn't want to leave any, since they don't reheat very well, but our stomachs could only expand so far. Popovers are mostly air, but still, we were quite full... maybe we'll munch on the last two after Kent goes to bed and we've had some time to digest.

All you basil lovers/growers looking for something to do with your herb crop, this is the meal. Dinners like this are the very reason I'm so diligent about keeping my basil plants alive, even though I usually kill every other outdoor plant I try to grow. There's just nothing like fresh basil.

Labels: flora, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 8/25/2008 07:40:00 PM
•