a healthy dinner menu from

Martha Stewart's Healthy Quick Cook cookbook:

sparkling fruit coolers (ice cubes of cranberry juice, lemonade, limeade, with sparkling water poured over, and garnished with a lime wedge)

apricot-glazed chicken (i cut up a whole chicken for the first time in my life! even left the bones in some of the pieces - for jason - eww, but i also feel like i've stepped into the world of real cooks now :)

layered summer salad (layers of yellow, red, and orange bell peppers, radishes, and carrots, each one marinated in it's own juice: lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit, and red wine vinegar; and tossed with olive oil & salt and pepper - this one was even better a couple days later, after marinating in said juices!)

haha - you know it's a good summer day from this shot - blue popsicle covered face, shirt off, marker all over... my son, joey didn't like my food i made, but he was too cute not to include! :)

 

 ...and for dessert, my first creative recipe: a fruit salad (haha) 

"Clementine Flowers": a fruit salad

      this started out as the dessert course in the martha stewart book, but then i discovered that the only ingredient i had that she required was cherries! i hadn't been able to find "eau de vie" at the grocery store, and half of the fruit i had bought (a week earlier :) had gone bad. so i decided this would be my first foray into adventurous cooking, and just went with what i had: a perfectly ripe mango, a pound of cherries, and some clementines. this was truly brave for me! i have always wanted to "cook creatively", and had even made that a goal of mine this last fall, but have never been able to really follow through... i have learned and enjoyed being creative in so many areas of life, but never this one! so i courageously looked square in the face of cutting up a mango (never a successful task before), pitting cherries (never TRIED before - note to self: get a cherry pitter :), and creating!

     the original recipe had called for oranges, and to prepare them all fancy without any of the pith... clementines, i discovered, are a little small to attempt that with. as i cut away the pith from each clementine section, the rest just fell apart in a heap. so i came up with a new way of cutting them - cutting off the peel in segments, and then just slicing them! they ended up looking like orange flowers, and paired with the cherries, made a striking new dish. now, i didn't want to leave it at just the three fruits, so i splashed on a little sparkling water (i think this step is completely omittable - i thought it might make the fruit sparkly and bubbly, but i didn't notice a difference in taste).

     then i remembered: lime and salt on ripe mangoes. i had this for the first time when i was working full-time at children's hospital of los angeles, from the "street fruit vendor" (do they have these in other cities?? i'm curious) - my coworkers would buy mangoes with lime, salt, and "chile". i wasn't brave enough to try the spicy version, but i got it with lime and salt one day, and it became an obsession. you know how people always claim that salt brings out the flavor in fruit? i always thought they were crazy, too (let my sweet stuff stay sweet, thank you very much!) until i tried it. a-mazing. so, i thought i'd try it here - and it was just as good as i remembered it. it worked with the cherries and clementines, too! (and then i remembered how my grandpa used to put salt & pepper on his oranges, and i always thought he was crazy - maybe he was onto something after all! :) so, although i'm sure other people have cut clementines into flowers before, i don't know about any ;) so this really was a creative venture! feel free to use my recipe!