Most of us Americans live busy hectic lives with lots of complicated tasks facing us daily. I’m in the middle of refinancing my mortgage and let me tell you that is complicated. On any given day the lender might call me up to ask for a document filed log ago in some faraway place in my home. We all have these challenges living our complex lifestyles, but why take that into the kitchen? Case in point is summer foods that offer the best in simplicity due to the heat.

Not many of us want to be in the kitchen any longer than it takes to put together a meal, but that doesn’t mean it has to be junk food. Take the humble egg. There has been a lot of talk about it being healthy or unhealthy. It is however a great item for fast eating whether it’s a quick omelet, scrambled eggs, or egg salad. I don’t eat eggs often as I pretty much agree with the book “The China Study”that they are high in cholesterol, and not the most healthy food for us, but about once a year I fall prey to the siren song of comfort foods of my childhood.

I get those warm and fuzzy memories of mom serving us up egg salad sandwiches and potato chips for a perfect lunch, and want one soon. Yesterday I planned ahead and boiled up six eggs and whipped up a quick egg salad for today’s lunch. It was close to my mom’s way of making them that includes chopped dill pickles, chopped celery, mayo, salt and pepper. I added to that some pickled jalapenos for a bit of a kick, and Spike seasoning salt. Instead of serving it on white bread I used my home made whole wheat bread and garnished it with fresh basil and cherry tomatoes from my garden. The result was a trip down foodie memory lane that tasted great and brought back wonderful memories of a simpler time. So please join me in welcoming the humble egg salad sandwich to you home for lunch soon and enjoy a great lunch food for these hot summer days.

Egg Salad

6 large eggs hard boiled

1/3 cup celery chopped fine

1/3 cup dill pickles chopped fine

1/4 cup mayonnaise or low fat yogurt

1 teaspoon Spike seasoning salt, or just salt and pepper

4 cherry tomatoes for each sandwich garnish

1 bunch fresh basil sliced or whole leaf

sliced pickled jalapenos, optional

Chop eggs and set aside. Mix celery, pickles, Spike, and mayo together and add to eggs until blended.

Serve open or closed face on the bread of your choice.

Serves 4

Note: I use a pastry cutter for chopping the eggs instead of a knife.

There is a whole world of salads out there in food land for us to choose from. Since it’s summer I like to make salads as a main dish once and a while. I have had a bean salad idea brewing in my mind for the last three days and today I put it into a recipe for myself and my readers. When I was starting out in the cooking business as a young cook in the US Coast Guard I had to make many a dish that I didn’t like.

Three bean salad was one of those. It didn’t help that all the beans were canned. I didn’t like it until just a couple years ago when I tried one that was pretty good, and that got me thinking of ways to make my own version of this common salad. I set out to make it uncommon though, and today I whipped up what’s sure to be a classic(Three Bean Salad with Sweet Corn) for you all to try.

Hopefully you all are staying cool enough to go into your kitchen and make something quick and healthy from scratch like I do here at the Fast and Furious Test Kitchen. It’s important to have dishes like this one that you make once and can eat two or three times over the course of four to five days.

This isn’t just your every day three bean salad. I sought to make it healthy, quick and delicious while being different too. I decided  to use fresh green beans, and edamame to make it non-conforming. Then I added fresh basil for another twist. I thought about using garlic infused olive oil, but will try adding that some other day to see if it adds or detracts from the overall taste.

Usually I would add hot peppers to something like this but I wanted a baseline recipe first to see how it tasted before tweaking it much. After all one could add hot sauce or peppers at the table and it would still get the job done. Since we are in the third day of a heat wave it’s a great time to make a refrigerated salad that can have the hot stuff added later on the whim of the person eating it. So give this one a try, and tweak it if you want. Please leave feedback so I can gauge how popular this recipe is. Stay cool until we meet again and look for my Facebook posts from Alaska starting July 25th.

Three Bean Salad with Fresh Corn

1 1/2 cup green beans, fresh, frozen or canned

1 can of kidney beans rinsed and drained

1/2 cup ready to eat edamame beans, or frozen

1/2 cup diced red bell pepper

2 cups fresh cooked corn off the cob

1/3 cup chopped parsley

1/3 cup fresh basil sliced thin or left whole

1/4 to 1/2 thin sliced red onion

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons natural apple cider vinegar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 avocado for garnish

1 fresh tomato for garnish

If using frozen edamame heat 4-5 cups water to boiling and cook for 3 minutes. If using frozen or fresh green beans cook with edamame. Drain and cool. Add all ingredients except oil, vinegar and salt in a mixing bowl. Sprinkle with salt and stir it in. Add oil and vinegar and mix well. Refrigerate for 30 minutes or more and serve with sliced tomatoes or avocados for garnish.

I’m from Colorado but I’ve lived in Baltimore going on 5 years this November. I grew up not knowing much about humidity. Baltimore has furthered my education in humidity though. In the almost 5 years here in humidity central I have learned to deal with this minor nuisance. After all, my garden is quite happy with the way the weather is here, and the tomatoes seem to love this hot humid weather the best. About every 5 to 8 days we tend to get a gift from drier climates west of here and dry air blows in from somewhere out there.

On these special days I pay extra attention to what chores there are to do outside and I also like to go for a good hike while this gift of great weather is with us. My wife and I celebrate these special days and say something like, “wow, it feels like Colorado weather”, or something like that. This summer is different though. So far it seems there have been twice as many dry weather days than the first 4 summers had, and they string together for 2-3 days in a row instead of 1-2. We are in the midst of one of those stretches now with 3 in a row and counting. To celebrate the great weather I already played in the vegie garden and harvested a mixed bag of beets for a special salad, and plan to hike the Gunpowder River later today to celebrate this wonderful dry and not too hot day.

Before going off on a hiking adventure with my 14 week old German Shepard puppy Tucker I decided to test a beet recipe that was forming in my mind. I suspect there may be a similar recipe out there in foodie land, but it’s a first for me. I wanted to join beets, goat cheese crumbles, fresh squeezed orange juice and toasted walnuts together to make a salad fitting for a beautiful summer day. This salad will grace the dinner table alongside fresh green beans from Huber’s Farm just up the road in Kingsville, sauteed Swiss Chard from my garden, and King Salmon from Alaska.

All of these foods are summer foods, and go great together. The citrus in the beet salad will complement the salmon nicely, the chard will be good and full of galrlic goodness, and the green beans will add a nice color to the plate.

Even though the salad is not as fast and furious as I would usually do I don’t mind waiting 35 minutes for the beets to simmer. After cooking and cooling the beets the salad goes together quickly, and some things just can’t, or shouldn’t be rushed. It should turn out to be an excellent summer meal, and with any luck we can enjoy it ourt doors on our patio. Now that it’s officially summer I wish you the best of fun and food with family and friends, and be sure to celebrate beautiful weather where ever you live, or vacation.

Beet Salad with Goat Cheese and Curry Roasted Walnuts

1 bunch of beets,about 1 1/2 cups cut into bite sized pieces

1/4 cup goat cheese crumbles

1 teaspoon minced chives

2 tablespoons fresh squeezed orange juice

1/2 teaspoon minced orange zest

2 teaspoons walnut oil

salt and pepper to taste

1 cup walnuts

1/2 teaspoon curry powder

Trim and boil or roast beets, about 35 minutes, then cool, peel and cut into bite sized pieces.

While beets are cooking toast walnuts in a saute pan with 1 teaspoon of the oil. This takes about 6-8 minutes on medium to medium low heat stirring or tossing often. Add curry powder, salt and pepper after 5 minutes of cooking.

Cool walnuts.

Mix beets, orange juice, orange zest, goat cheese, 1/3 cup walnuts, chives, salt and pepper until just combined. Serve on top of leaf lettuce or shredded lettuce with a few more walnuts for garnish.

Note:

I call for 1 cup of walnuts so you have extra for snacking on as they are delicious.

Salad oil, or olive oil will do instead of walnut oil.

After six visits to Japan over the last 15 years I was ready to try a five star hotel, and when the Chanzanso Hotel Travelzoo deal showed up in September of 2012 we jumped on the offer. Hotel Chinzanso Tokyo is set on a hillside that was called Camelia Hill until 1878 when prince Aritomo Yamagata purchased it and named it Chinzanso. The gardens that he and later owners established are there for all to see and enjoy, not just hotel guests. This is one of the nicest gardens attached to a hotel that I have ever seen! The camellias and cherry trees were in full bloom for our visit. The rest of the garden sights like the three story pagoda that is around 500-600 years old, are worth noting too. The garden lists the “Ten Scenic Spots at Chinzanso” that are all worth seeing. I loved the little statues found along the garden path that I called “Japanese garden gnomes”. The sacred tree of the garden is about 500 years old and stands magnificently towards the bottom end of the garden close to the soba restaurant. They also have a stone lantern from around the 12th century.

Chinzanso Hotel

As if the garden isn’t enough of a reason to stay at Chinzanso we found the room, restaurants, and staff to be excellent. Our room was large by Japanese standards, and in excellent condition. The large bathroom had a tub and separate shower as well as L’Occitane toiletries. We were given room number 1001 which had great views of both the gardens and the city of Tokyo. We found the location of the hotel to be much quieter than any other we had stayed at in Tokyo. I had read in previous reviews online that the hotel is kind of far from restaurants and shopping, but we found that the restaurants in the hotel and nearby were very good and many to choose from. The concierge told us about a nearby 175 year old Unagi restaurant the was Michelin rated and quite good. The train station is a 15 minute walk and the Metro is 10 minutes walk from the hotel. Or you can take a taxi for 710 Yen. The hotel is serviced by the Friendly Airport Limousine bus from Narita Airport, and is a good way to and from the hotel.

All in all I can’t think of any other place I could recommend more than this hotel for comfort, and service. We will never forget the service from the concierge desk just hours before we checked out. We had lost our camera two days before, but when we were packing up to leave the room my wife found a taxi reciept from the ride we had taken the day the camera was lost. On a whim we had the concierge call the taxi company to see if the camera had been turned in. It had, but they had sent it to the police lost and found. The concierge called the police, but they couldn’t find it so the concierge called the taxi company back, found the camera and got it to us an hour before we left for the airport. Now that is great service.

Unagi for lunch

The foodie part of the trip was great as usual. We started out by having lunch at the Unagi (eel) restaurant near Chinzanso. For about $40 each we had a great lunch in a Michelin starred restaurant that seemed to be a small mom and pop type place.

The next morning we went to the Tsukiji Fish Market and had sushi for breakfast at Sushi Zanmai. I had a great Tuna Sampler for just $30 that was as good as it gets. For dinner that night we went to a fancy sukiyaki restaurant called Asakusa Imahan to meet friends. It was a lovely traditional sit around the table and eat a big Japanese meal. It was fun during the part of the meal where we got to do a bit of the cooking in the frying pan at the table conveniently placed in front of us.

The next evening we ate dinner at the soba restaurant on the Chinzanso Hotel grounds. This was one of the best soba meals I have ever had! It was enhanced by the view of the gardens lit up at night just in front of our table. The soba itself was cooked just right and the sauce was excellent.

The best meal of the trip was at the Japanese restaurant in Chinzanso Hotel. They called it a buffet, but what it was is a menu of about 35 items that you ordered from at will. There was sushi, hot pots, appetizers, desserts and more. We couldn’t believe it was all you can eat. The quality of the food was superb, with the exception of the hot pot that was a bit weak on flavor. The appetizers were great, the sushi was great, and the cherry ice cream at the end was great! Apparently they have this deal all year, but the menu varies with the season. For about $100 you get an amazing meal. Next trip to Tokyo I would definitely go back to this restaurant.

yummy appetizers

For a quick and affordable lunch it’s hard to beat the Sekiguchi french style bakery chain that has been around Japan since 1888. The baked goods are quite yummy, and at lunch you can get soups and sandwiches too. For about $10 each we had a very good lunch there. Their croissants are very good as well as the curry bread, and salads.

For a Japanese style salad dressing to commemorate the trip I made up this dressing today in the Fast and Furious Test kitchen.

Sesame Oil and Cider Vinegar Dressing

1 tablespoon minced shallot

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup sesame oil

1/4 cup canola oil

1 tablespoon light soy sauce

1-2 teaspoons minced fresh ginger, optional

Mix all ingredients in a bowl then pour into a salad dressing bottle. Best if you can refrigerate it over night, but plenty good just after it’s made too.

Note,

Try this pouring this dressing over bite sized fresh broccoli, cauliflower, red bell pepper and carrots. Put in refrigerator for 2-3 hours for best tasting salad.

14 oz firm or extra firm tofu cut into 1 inch cubes
2/3 cup of low fat plain yogurt
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
6-8 ribs of celery sliced diagonally
2 carrots shredded
1 red or green bell pepper chopped
2 teaspoons curry powder
2 teaspoons turmeric
2 teaspoons Spike seasoning salt
2-4 pickled jalapenos sliced
1 cup walnuts
4 teaspoons garlic infused olive oil
Optional: 1/4 cup green onions sliced

In a medium mixing bowl combine yogurt, mayonnaise, curry powder, turmeric, and Spike. Gently mix in tofu. In a large mixing bowl combine celery, carrots, bell pepper and jalapenos and mix well. Gently toss in the tofu mixture to the large bowl then chill for 30 minutes.
In a saute pan heat the oil on medium heat for a minute or two then add the walnuts. Lower heat to medium low and stir for 3-5 minutes being carful not to burn the walnuts. Sprinkle a bit of Spike or salt then set aside. When serving the salad top with walnuts, and green onions.
Note:
Can be served on a bed of lettuce. Suitable for a main dish, salad or appetizer.

1 cup of quinoa
2 cups of water
1/2 cup of diced or sliced celery
1/2 cup of frozen peas
1/4 cup diced red bell pepper
1 carrot diced or cut in half lengthwise and sliced
1/4 cup minced fresh parsley
1 medium fresh tomato
salt and pepper to taste
optional, 1 jalapeno pepper diced
optional, 1/4 cup of sliced green onions

Dressing
2 tablespoons of fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons of olive oil or salad oil
1 teaspoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

I like to cook the quinoa the night before by cooking more than what I need for dinner and using the rest for the salad the next day. That way it’s chilled and ready to go into this recipe. Just follow the cooking directions on the quinoa package, and chill it until you are ready to make the salad.
Frozen peas.

Bring 3 cups of water to a boil and add the peas. Cook for just 2 minutes, drain and rinse with cold water to cool off the peas. Drain well before adding to the quinoa.

In a large mixing bowl stir the quinoa to break it up before adding all vegetables, except peas as they are fragile.

Dressing.
in a small mixing bowl add the lemon juice, vinegar, and herbs. Mix well with a whisk to moisten the dried herbs. Add the oil and mix well. Pour over quinoa and mix well. Add peas, salt and pepper to taste, and mix gently. Garnish with sliced tomatoes and jalapenos. Serves 4-6.

Here’s one of my favorite pasta salad creations that comes from years of fishing and catching Alaska wild salmon. Many times we would have leftover salmon from dinner the night before and it gets used up nicely in this recipe.

3 cups bow tie or shell pasta

1 1/2 cups cooked, flaked salmon, about 8-10 oz

1 cup diced or sliced celery

1/2 cup diced dill pickles

1-2 fresh jalapenos diced or sliced thin

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/3 cup plain yogurt

1-2 tablespoons of the pickle brine, or Bragg’s apple cider vinegar

1 tablespoon of Spike

Optional; 2 tablespoons fresh parsley
Optional; 2 tablespoons of sliced green onions

Cook salmon by baking it with a little olive oil, salt and pepepr the night before and chill in the fridge, preferably for dinner and use the planned leftovers for this recipe.  Clean the cooked salmon of any remaining fat, and bones.

Cook pasta according to directions on package. Rinse well with cold water and drain.
In a large mixing bowl combine mayonnaise,yogurt, 1 tablespoon pickle brine, and Spike. Mix in pasta, celery pickles, jalapenos, and parsley. Carefully mix in the salmon being careful to leave some visible pieces for visual effect. Add more pickle brine if it looks at all thick. This type of pasta salad tends to soak up the dressing making it a bit dry if served hours after preparation. Chill for 30 minutes or more and serve with a bit of parsley on top if you like.
Serves 6-8.

Shopping list:

2-3 pounds of salmon filets

fresh celery

mayonnaise

plain yogurt

2 fresh jalapenos

dill pickles

fresh green onions, optional

fresh parsley, optional

Spike seasoning salt

1 box bowtie or small shell pasta

1 medium red ripe tomato
1 ripe but not too soft avocado
1/2 fresh lime
1 fresh jalapeno optional
salt to taste

Core tomato and cut into 1 inch size pieces.
Cut avocado in half and remove seed. Scoop out avocado with a spoon and cut into 1 inch pieces. Slice jalapeno in half lengthwise and remove seeds. Then slice jalapeno halves in thin half moon slices. Put avocado, tomato and jalapeno in mixing bowl and squeeze lime over it. Stir well but gently. Ready to eat with your favorite bread or tortilla chips.

3 cups shredded green cabbage
1 cup shredded carrot
1/2 cup diced red bell pepper
1/4 cup Annies Shitake Seasame Vinegrette salad dressing
Optional: 1/4 cup sliced green onions

In a large mixing bowl mix cabbage,carrots, bell peppers, and green onions if using. Add salad dressing and mix well. Best when chilled for 30 minutes or more, but plenty good right away.