Kitchen Scoop Blog

1. Vegetable juice, such as V-8. Makes a speedy gazpacho.
2. Cans of ripe olives and chickpeas. Instantly transform a side salad into a no-cook main.
3. Canned tuna. Whip with a bit of mayo and mustard, add celery and onion, and dinner is done!
4. Canned pineapple tidbits. The juice from the can acts as a preservative to keep cut fresh fruit from turning dark, so fruit salads can be made ahead.
5. Jars of reduced-fat Alfredo sauce. This lighter sauce pulls together summer veggie bounty into a hearty meatless lasagna.

What are your favorites?

We’re getting some fun feedback on our Shrimp Pasta Salad with Tomatoes and Capers that ran in our Desperation Dinners column. Not only are readers raving about it, they’re experimenting to make the recipe their own. (We just love it when people adapt our recipes and then tell us how they turned out!)

“I loved the brightness of flavor!,” wrote Ada Winters of Raleigh, N.C. “I've got some folks who are vegetarian and will try an adaptation next week: leaving out the shrimp, adding parsley, carrots, and perhaps some bell pepper. Thanks for this great recipe!”

Barb Thomas of San Diego, CA, had this to say:

You can count every rookie gardening mistake in the book right there in the “little box of dirt” we installed in the front yard two months ago.

For starters, I planted at exactly the wrong time. I knew that. And yet I planted anyway, because I thought it would be fun to flirt with a few seeds and consider it practice for the real season starting in September.

The gardening guides, however, did hold out hope for success with herbs as well as okra, zucchini, jalapeno peppers, peas, sweet potatoes and watermelon. My pea plants promptly died, and the watermelon vine was glad to see them go. That mighty vine took over the vacated pea territory to the left and invaded the zucchini on the right. I started those zucchini from seeds and was mighty proud when they came barreling out of the ground. So I could not bring myself to follow The First Cardinal Rule of vegetable cultivation:

As the heat of summer sets in, we start focusing on our freezers. We open the door and linger a few seconds longer than necessary. Not great for energy consumption, true, but it has made us think a lot about the best way to use this essential kitchen asset.

Your freezer is a true friend for helping reduce food costs. Space is limited, so make it count. Clear out those freezer-burned buns and the ice cream cartons with only one spoonful remaining. Replace these with normally expensive foods that you bought at a rock-bottom sale price.

Basically, freeze protein.

Meat, seafood and cheese send the cash register into overdrive, and supermarkets frequently offer “super-sales” or “buy-one-get-one” deals on frozen shrimp, shredded cheese and family-sized packages of ground beef and chicken. To benefit from these bargains, you need to stock up and store the bounty.

A few more hints:

Making pesto from fresh basil is easy -- provided you have the right tools. You’ll need a food processor (any model will do) and a salad spinner to quickly dry the fresh basil leaves.

Salad spinners really do make quick work of the drying process, and over its life span, you’ll save enough money on paper towels to more than cover the cost. (Noticed how a decent roll of paper towels costs nearly two bucks these days?!)

Spinners typically range from about $15 to $35 at kitchen shops and “mart” type stores. We’ve had good luck finding top-of-the-line spinners at a significant discount at TJ Maxx and Marshall’s stores.

My father grew up working in the family peach orchard in the sandhills of Eastern North Carolina. All throughout my childhood, I heard stories about the particulars of growing peaches in Anson County, and we’d look forward to the middle of July when peaches hit their peak. Clingstones, freestones, white and yellow -- I adore them all.

One of the biggest thrills for me even to this day is to visit the North Carolina Farmer’s Market in Raleigh and see the sign for Anson County peaches from Pee Dee Orchards towering above an endless supply. My children grew up in Raleigh eating these peaches out of hand, peels and all. All of these threads tied together is why there’s something about a fresh, ripe peach that just makes me feel all sappy and nostalgic. And happy. Deliriously happy!

You’ll find several wonderful peach recipes here on Kitchen Scoop, (just do a search for peach), and we’re always looking for more. So if you have a favorite peach dish to share, please email it to us or describe it in the comments section following this post.

Back in my twenties, I was desperate to become a gourmet cook. I already knew how to cook by then, but my repertoire was mostly simple and homey Southern fare.

I longed to get more complicated and dreamt of puff pastry, butterflied lamb roasts, layers of Genoise. But my job as a cub reporter paid a grand $110 per week, and I could barely afford to eat, much less pay for cooking classes.

So I offered myself out as a dishwashing assistant to every cooking school in town in exchange for the chance to observe and sample the culinary masterpieces. This went on for years, and now, several decades later, I still cherish my notebooks filled with those first “gourmet” recipes. Only now, after turning myself into a “desperate” cook who automatically thinks in terms of saving time in the kitchen, I have streamlined many of those early recipes to fit my current sensibilities.

Take this glorious cherry tart.

Here’s a photo of a must-have kitchen tool for summer. A cherry pitter will transform your relationship to fresh cherries -- making them “accessible” to put into fruit salads or whip into a fancy tart or homey cobbler.

In our opinion, the simplest pitters work best and don’t crush the fruit. But because the pitter essentially rams through the stem and blows the pit out the bottom, you will have a hole going all the way through the middle of the cherry. It’s also a good idea to wear an apron or an old shirt when pitting cherries as the juice does tend to splatter.

Our friend Julie R. asks: I am thinking about replacing our range in the near future. Right now we have a very old coil burner electric range.  I need to decide if I want to stay electric or switch over to gas.  Do any of you have strong feelings about this and/or can you recommend a brand you have or like?

Alicia's  response: I definitely prefer gas. I have moved into my new interim abode and it has electric. Even though it is a rental, I keep trying to figure out a way to get my gas back! I have two GE Profile gas ranges and like them both.

Beverly's response: I'm with Alicia. Gas is much more responsive, fast, to either heat up or cool off. Plus you have a greater range of temperatures you can achieve. However, gas is not nearly as good for baking (it doesn't hold a constant temperature). So the best thing in my opinion is a gas cook top and electric wall oven.

What say you, Kitchen Scoop readers?

Since I am hoping to sell my house before the summer is out (I have a contract pending, so keep your fingers crossed for me!), I decided to plant my small veggie garden to go.

My patio tomato is doing great, since is designed to be planted in a pot on your patio. My peppers are still small, so they are hangin' in there. My basil is awesome and I have already been pinching off leaves as the days go by. Oregano, OK, but going to need more room soon. Rosemary, happy as a clam. But my cherry tomatoes are completely freaking out. These beauties are used to being planted with plenty of room to stretch out and they are desperate for a wire support.