How I'm Using Peak-Summer Produce 🌼

An ice cream project update, along with recipes for tomatoes, peaches, fig leaves, and more

Summer, with the joy and freedom it once held, takes on a different meaning in adulthood. Growing up, it meant school’s out, early morning swim meets, lazy afternoons binge-watching America’s Next Top Model, babysitting the neighborhood kids, and working my way through my mandatory summer reading list. Summer now lacks the ceremonial beginning and ending it once had. It flies by when most of your time is spent in a cubicle. Office workers, be warned: blink and you’ll miss it.

The Foggy Bottom farmers market that I walk through on my way to the metro on Wednesdays after work helps anchor me in the season. The crates of peaches whose sweet scent wafts toward me when I get close, the grid of cartons containing blazing red chili peppers, and the sprawl of heirloom tomatoes have become my new markers of summer. Honoring and celebrating summer produce and all its bounty is what makes summer feel like summer. Whereas August used to barely feel like summer because going back to school was always right around the corner, this month now screams peak summer — the tomatoes have never been riper, the peaches never juicier, the figs never sweeter.

Scenes from farmers market hauls and garden deliveries

I’ve traded Saturday morning swim meets for Saturday morning farmer’s market runs. America’s Next Top Model has been replaced with Love Island, and I’m making cherry tomato pasta, homemade pesto, and peach crisps in between episodes. In addition to wonderful farmer’s markets in Alexandria and D.C., I have access to my dad’s garden, and there’s nothing better than him showing up at my apartment with piles of leafy green basil, shishito peppers, and boxes full of different regular tomatoes and cherry tomato varieties — some bright red, others golden yellow, some red with green stripes, some almost veering toward purple.

Today’s newsletter catches you up on some highlights of late summer cooking and baking. Also, in my last newsletter, I shared that I’d be making a different flavor of ice cream each week and have (mostly) kept that up. More on all that later. I have good excuses for the few weeks that have been interrupted — a fun day trip to Charlottesville, a long weekend in Lewes, Delaware, and our annual family trip to Emerald Isle, North Carolina. Last year, I wrote at length about our Emerald Isle trip and traditions, and if you want to see more, I’ve included below a little TikTok I made about the delicious meals my dad made throughout the week.

@hangrytohappyYou all loved seeing what my dad cooks for us at the beach last year, so here’s what this summer he cooked up. We love Chef Jim 🌊🦀🫶🏼 #privatechef #beach #seafood #crabcakes #familyvacation #bestdad #homecooking

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Taking Full Advantage of Summer’s Bounty

🍑 Caramelized ("knäckig") peach pie

I saw Nea Arentzen post a Swedish-style peach crisp with a toffee-like oat topping and had to make it immediately. It was just as delicious, and even simpler to make, that I thought it would be. Few things are better than a summer peach, and that’s why this recipe is perfect, leaving the peaches totally untouched but then topping it with the most beautiful chewy, crispy caramelized topping. I passed off the leftovers for breakfast, serving it with a little yogurt and drizzle of maple syrup — heavenly.

Caramelized ("knäckig") peach pie

🌱 Figs and their leaves

A few months ago, I had a peach cake from Capitol Jill Baking that had a fig leaf-infused buttercream. The flavor was subtly earthy with hints of coconut and vanilla. Jill uses fig leaves for a lot of infusions in her baked goods, and I’ve seen others online starting to do it more too. For my dad’s most recent garden delivery, I asked if he could throw in a few leaves from his fig tree. He was confused but obliged. I dehydrated the leaves in the oven by baking them at 200 degrees for 15-20 minutes, and they let off a surprisingly strong smell resembling a rich coconut custard. Then I blended them up into a powder, straining out the fibrous parts of the stem. I added a spoonful of the powder to my chia pudding for the week, which I then topped with some figs from his tree. I didn’t flavor the pudding with anything else to really try to get a sense of the fig leaves’ taste. Once again, it was pretty subtle but pleasant, and it made the pudding a beautiful muted light green. The rest of the powder is in the freezer until I decide what to use it for next!

Fig leaf chia pudding with figs

🍅 Tomatoes every day

Back in the day, my family took carb loading seriously the night before swim meets, which usually meant cooking up a big pasta meal for my sister and me. My favorite dish my dad would make used golden cherry tomatoes picked fresh from his garden, slowly sautéed with lots of garlic and a few leaves of basil, served with whole wheat spaghetti, and topped generously with parmesan cheese. Wishbone Kitchen’s Sungold Tomato Pasta recipe is very close to the improvised version he used to make. If you’re hoping to recreate this simple magic that is really only possible when tomatoes are in their prime during the summer, her recipe is a great one to follow.

Sungold tomato pasta (right)

🥒 Maximizing my zucchini intake

When zucchini is everywhere at this point in the summer, I like to join in on the fun by having a few interesting ideas on hand for how to use it. One is a quick and easy pasta that cooks zucchini until it nearly melts into a creamy pesto sauce. I use fresh basil to make a simple pesto recipe, substituting pine nuts for pistachios. Then, I sautée onions and zucchini in olive oil with red pepper flakes until the veggies caramelize. Meanwhile, I’m boiling my pasta — a shape with lots of nooks and crannies like fusilli is good for this recipe to capture all the sauce. The pasta then gets added to the caramelized zucchini with a big dollop of pesto and a splash of pasta water. If you have a lemon, grate in some zest at the end. To finish, season with salt and pepper to taste — it might not need as much salt as you think because pesto is salty. A dose of extravagance that kicks this pasta up a notch is topping with a half ball of burrata and a little drizzle of extra olive oil. An additional perk of this recipe is that it tastes great cold, if you want to take a pasta salad route for the leftovers.

If you want a non-pasta option, one of my favorite home-cooked meals this summer was Smitten Kitchen’s Braised Chickpeas with Zucchini and Pesto. Once the initial chopping is done, it’s a pretty hands-off recipe that is hearty enough to be satisfying as a stand-alone meal and is brightened up with the pesto and my recommended addition of a squeeze of lemon at the end. When I made it, I didn’t have any burrata but had halloumi, which I pan seared separately and added in at the end. It’s a great meal to keep in your weeknight rotation, or to make on Sundays to have as leftovers for lunch.

Zucchini and pesto pasta (left); braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto (right)

🫑 Simple shishito peppers

When my dad realized how good this dipping sauce was for shishito peppers, he immediately made a double recipe to share between my sister and me, which he hand delivered alongside a small box of shishito peppers, picked fresh from his garden. All you have to do is add the shishitos to a hot, lightly oiled pan to let them blister and get slightly tender. Take them off the heat, add some flaky salt and a squeeze of lemon. Bonus points if you make that sauce which was the perfect creamy and savory complement. I stood over my counter eating the whole plate, sopping up as much sauce on each bite as I could.

Shishito peppers

An Ice Cream Update, Five Flavors Later

I’ve made some progress on my summer ice cream project since I last updated you in my newsletter from June. Two weeks ago, I made pistachio ice cream using Broma Bakery’s recipe, which I was skeptical of its calling for raw pistachios, instead of toasted, but I’m glad I trusted the process because it helped highlight the true essence of pistachios. If I closed my eyes, I could’ve been in Rome eating pistachio gelato.

This past weekend, I made chai and cookies. I knew I wanted to riff on the traditional cookies and cream at some point and also wanted to make some type of caffeinated beverage-inspired flavor, so this was a perfect way to combine the two. I read in the Ample Hills Creamery cookbook that they like the combination of cardamom and oreos, which inspired this creation. I used Ample Hills Creamery’s coffee and cookies recipe as the base, swapping the coffee for an infusion of black tea and spices (coriander, cloves, allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, and black pepper). Some of the cookies were ground up and added to the ice cream liquid as it churned, and the rest were crushed and folded in at the end.

Pistachio (left); chai and cookies (right)

Earlier I had a little farmer’s market series, making strawberry, sweet corn, and peach — all separately. The strawberry was a favorite, and it was also one of the easiest recipes of the summer. No heating required, as the strawberries macerated in sugar for a few hours before going in the blender with the other ingredients.

The sweet corn was a must-make flavor this summer, and I used Mei Liao’s recipe because I found it so intriguing that she used all parts of the corn — husks, silk, kernels, and the cob. The end result was sweet, nutty, and earthy. If I made it again, I would probably omit steeping the corn silks in the milk since it imparted a slight grassy flavor, and I preferred the toasty, cereal notes of the corn. I made a malted streusel topping for this flavor that paired really nicely.

Strawberry (left); sweet corn (center); peach (right)

The peach was the only one I was slightly disappointed with so far, as it came out a little icy. I suspect it’s from my mistake of pouring in too much of the leftover juice from the peaches after they macerated. Luckily, the flavor was still great. I used David Leibowitz’s peach and sour cream recipe. The sour cream gave it a yogurty tang that complemented the peaches so nicely. David has been another great consortium of ice cream knowledge.

Peach

My Three Things…

Here are a few other food things I’ve been loving since we last spoke.

1. 🌶️ Baan Mae in Shaw is part of Chef Seng Luangrath’s restaurant group, serving incredible and vibrant Southeast Asian dishes. I recently went for the second time with my dad and sister, and they were filming a documentary about Chef Seng for a Toast promotion! Baan Mae translates to “mom’s house,” which makes sense because going feels like a warm, familial hug, from the food to the service. We really loved the sakoo (dumplings), fried chicken wings, gaeng phed (red curry with crab and lychee), and thom khem sam chanh (braised pork belly with caramelized fish sauce and lychee glaze).

2. 🍹 Lapop is the cocktail bar in the basement of Lapis that serves its full food menu. Lapis is a long-time favorite, but the Lapop concept was new to me.It’s not so different from the basement set up they have before, but I love a new concept to recapture some well-deserved attention. It was an ideal three-hour dinner spot to go to with friends — dimly lit, moody, cozy. Our favorites were the Buz-Kashi Sour (pisco sour with saffron and cardamom), mantoo shrimp (dumplings in a creamy saffron sauce), and qabuli palow (pilaf rice with carrots, raisins, and braised lamb).

   

   Baan Mae (left) and Lapis (right)

3. 🍅 During the most recent Real Housewives of New York season, Erin Lichy wore this perfect, effortless tomato dress, and I rushed to find it online. It was surprisingly within my budget, but I had to stay on the waitlist for a few months for them to restock. Lucky for anyone else who wants this dress, it’s in stock and on sale on Vrg Grl’s website.

Tomato dress

Thank you for reading, subscribing, and continuing to follow along at @hangrytohappyy on Instagram. See you here next time!