(2023) Homemade Caesar Salad Dressing and Croutons

We’ve returned from a ten day road trip to the Madawaska Kanu Centre (MKC) in Ontario. In addition to a week full of daily paddling instruction, their kitchen kicks out homecooked meals three times a day. I grabbed some of their recipe cards from the gift store.

MKC puts their freshest produce forward by serving cut fresh veggies with a dip at every lunch and dinner. The recipe cards didn’t include my favorite dip from the week, but this Caesar salad dressing can be served with the sliced peppers, cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes from this week’s box.

(2021) Garlic Confit Toast

For those who are wondering what to do with their bounty of garlic …. how about making garlic confit? Down below is a simple recipe from Bon Appetit ages ago. It calls for one head of garlic but they were thinking those big heads of grocery store garlic. I’d peel as much garlic as I thought I wouldn’t be using fresh and make the garlic confit. What you don’t use to make garlic toast will keep for weeks and be perfect for your other cooking. You can stop at the first step – just the garlic and butter – and it will be useful in a hundred ways.

(2021) Le Grand Aioli

This week’s box has me primed to cut those slender little crookneck squash (what happened to the zephyr squash of years past?) into long strips and dip them into the aioli made from the recipe below. Also all those cherry tomatoes, rounds of cucumber, strips of red pepper …. and maybe boiled eggs with those popular “jammy” yolks? Sometimes I’m tempted to use olive oil in aioli, but olive oil can be bitter (there’s lots of good info on the internet about that) so the suggestion for grapeseed oil or canola oil that came with this recipe when it was published in the Washington Post is good, but I’ll be using Oliver Farms sunflower seed oil instead.

This recipe calls for steady whisking, but I’m going to make mine in a food processor.

(2017) Pasta with Kale Pesto

Adapted from a recipe in Saveur magazine. Have you tried making pesto with kale? Delicious. And no telling how long kale will still be coming in, so enjoy while you can. Blanching the kale keeps the pesto a bright green. Not entirely necessary, but a nice touch.

(2017) Garlic-Potato Deviled Eggs

Everyone needs one more deviled egg recipe. Right? This one’s from something called “Homestyle Family Favorites Annual Recipes 2008.” They use just a few of the egg yolks in order to reduce the cholesterol in the deviled eggs. If that’s not an issue in your family, then keep them all!