Salmon salmon everywhere...

As you may have noticed, I cook a lot of animals killed by my husband. Its very cavewoman, but I actually enjoy it for the most part (exception: the pheasant - it had an actual piece of a shot pellet in the flesh, it was just disturbing). When Jeff went on his annual salmon fishing trip and came back with about 40 pounds of fresh caught fish, I was excited for the chance to cook (well, mostly to eat) such a fantastic treat, brought home to me by my caveman. Now, 30 pounds of salmon later, I am running out of ideas. We've grilled, baked, sauteed, and even fried our bounty, and we've tried about 10 different recipes for salmon cakes. Enough already! A woman (or cavewoman) can only eat so much fish - even if its been hunted down by her man.

What to make when veggies attack

Every summer that I can remember, my mother has had a vegetable garden. And every summer that I can remember, she ends up with the inevitable mountain of squash and tomatoes.... we used to actually keep count of the cherry tomatoes throughout the summer, in the order of hundreds. Now that I have my own yard I grow an herb garden every year, but I don't have enough space for a veggie garden. So this year I joined a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), where for an obscene membership fee, we get an equally obscene amount of locally grown organic produce each week.

Since the veggie takeover has started at my own house, I've been bugging my mom for good recipes for hacking away at the mountain, so she shared her recipe for Garden Vegetable Casserole. Its a tasty way to use excess produce and fresh summer herbs, and it's hearty enough to stand alone as an entree. It's a flexible recipe, so tweak it for whatever herbs and veggies you have this week. If you don't love this one, then you deserve to lose the battle against the veggies.

Hot Summer Cold Soup

If you are a soup person like me, you love the mid-winter coziness of creamy butternut squash soup or thick and hearty chili. And even in the summer (when there is sufficient high-power office building AC), I crave a warm bowl of corn & crab chowder (just had that today for lunch, so good!). But in the peak of summer heat when you face day after day of melting in your sunbaked car and you don't want to even blow dry your hair much less use your oven, a big bowl of chilled soup sounds pretty appealing. So does a salt-rimmed margarita on the rocks, but I digress....

So over the past few summers, I have tried several different varieties of gazpacho, a cold tomato-based soup (usually raw) created by the culinary geniuses in Spain. I've tried various interpretations and levels of chunkiness, and in my attempts I've found a lot of gazpacho recipes that I like, and a few that made me feel like I was eating cold baby food. But I've finally settled on my favorite gazpacho, one that has wandered a bit from it's Spanish roots but is simple, healthy and packed with bold flavors. Most importantly, it requires no cooking whatsoever, so its the perfect dinner after a day of losing layers of skin to a hot leather drivers seat.

Weirdest things I've ever eaten

My standard for weird food may not be the same as most people... I have friends that think eating tofu is just about the craziest thing they can think of to try. So I thought I would put together my list of the top five weirdest things I've eaten and see how I measure up.

1. Grasshopper (in tacos at a mexican restaurant in DC)
2. Beef marrow (Roast, Detroit, MI)
3. Snails (Valencia, Spain)
4. Sea urchin (Restaurant Eve, Alexandria, VA)
5. Shark (first time in Merida, Mexico next to two bottles of tequila, second time grilled at home!)

The grasshopper was the only one I didnt particularly like... the flavor was good, but you could feel their little legs and feet in your mouth, it just didn't pair well with my margarita. In case you hadn't guessed, the common thread of my list is that alcohol was involved in the consumption of all of these items.

What about you - what's on your list??