A Tale of Two Salads

Yesterday, when we were at Williams Sonoma making a return, D and I found a gadget called the "Corn Zipper" to be used for taking kernels off the cob. This morning I put it to the test with 10 ears of leftover corn on the cob. At first it was working okay, but after about 5 ears I cut my thumb. D then came in and noted I was using it incorrectly - he had read the instructions on the package about how to hold it. It was MUCH easier after that. The Corn Zipper removed the kernels quickly and easily, though it makes a little bit of a mess (so does a knife).


Once the corn was off the cob, I had to decide what to do with it. I consulted our cookbooks, but everything required ingredients I didn't have on hand. Then I remembered that my sister-in-law comment from yesterday indicated that she likes a Martha Stewart corn salad recipe. I checked MarthaStewart.com and found the recipe. It called for just corn, white wine vinegar, olive oil, scallions, salt and pepper--perfect! I put 1/2 the corn in another bowl (so I could make 2 different recipes) and not having white wine vinegar, I substituted rice vinegar for the first bowl of corn. As I was chopping the scallions, I thought lime juice would make a great substitution for the white wine vinegar, so I added the juice of 1 lime to the 2nd bowl. Both bowls then got some olive oil, salt and pepper and the lime juice bowl got a handful of cilantro while the rice vinegar bowl got some grated ginger root. Both salads were delicious!

As I was just finishing up, D's brother-in-law called to say they were on their way home from Maine and would be arriving at our house in less than 2 hours. I was excited to serve them corn salad for lunch!

Being on a cooking binge I then decided to make banana bread (because having a 350 degree oven on for 1 1/2 hours on an 85 degree day didn't seem insane to me at the time). As the banana bread was baking, I made a watermelon salad with the 1/2 melon leftover from the 4th of July. Then I decided to grill some sweet potatoes to go with lunch. I consulted a new cookbook we just received the other day and found a recipe (basically I just wanted to know how long to cook the slices). We used our new shaker basket for the grilling.

My sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and nephew stopped by for a tour of the house and a quick lunch of the food I had prepared this morning and brought a fabulous peach foccacia from a bakery in Portland.