corn – The Kitchen Illiterate

Field Fresh Chopped Salad with Chicken

I’ve always loved the idea of eating a great big luscious crunchy salad for dinner. But I’ve never been very good at coming up with creative ideas for main dish salads. I tend to get stuck at lettuce and carrots. And my basic vinaigrette is great, but it can get a bit monotonous. But there is a prepared salad from Trader Joe’s that I love: the Field Fresh Chopped Salad. It’s sweet and savory and fresh and crunchy, and I got in the habit of buying it for solitary dinners and occasional lunches. Then I looked at the ingredients. The poor chicken in this salad is full of so many preservatives, and I know the vegetables could be fresher and more full of flavor. So I decided to make this salad myself.
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Grilled Portobello Mushrooms with Corn and Tomato Salad

The grilled portobello mushroom is ubiquitous. It’s a standard vegetarian burger substitute on many menus. I recently read a food magazine (Bon Appetit, perhaps?) in which an author begged to an end to the ever present portobello. I myself have had many grilled portobellos, and I’ve never found them too compelling. I hardly ever want to order such a thing in a restaurant, and if I’m at a barbecue, well, give me a burger. But for some reason this week, the idea for this portobello and corn salad dinner popped into my head and wouldn’t let go. I wanted the seemingly most overplayed thing you can put on a grill.
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End-of-Summer Baked Penne

This baked penne really felt like my last hurrah to summer: chock full of summer’s produce, corn, zucchini, tomatoes, but baked in the oven, which heats up my little house quite nicely when it’s suddenly dropped to 50 degrees outside. I realize October might seem pretty far past summer, but it’s really only a few weeks since the official season change, and people do seem to be pulling the last tomatoes off their vines right about now. Not me, though. Mine gave up the ghost ages ago. So I think this is an excellent early fall dinner, to use up the last of the over-abundant zucchini and get you ready for casseroles and slow cookers and braises galore as the days cool off.

I originally saw this recipe on the Williams-Sonoma site, but I have to say their proportions seemed a little crazy. Eight zucchini? Really?! My skillet is just not that big. Of course, their recipe is meant to feed eight people, and I really only wanted to feed one, with a few days of leftovers. Some recipe rearranging skills were definitely in order.
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