Cucumber-Corn Soup

And finally, how about one more chilled corn soup? This one will use your cucumbers, too. With all this heat, I’m searching for all the cool meals I can find. This one is no-cook, perfect for this weather and came from “Everyday Food” magazine. The avocado provides the creamy component for this soup – a fabulous raw recipe. You’ll have to rustle up your own avocado; they’re not an organic crop for this neck of the woods so we’ll never see them in our Riverview box. Unless of course global warming advances faster than we think ….

Corn and Squash Tacos

I am now officially a fan of squash tacos having just written about some for the AJC and tomorrow’s Food section. That recipe came from Seth Freedman who is the market chef at the East Atlanta Village Farmers Market. Here’s another variation on the theme. I love that you make a corn cob stock for this recipe. That’s a great thing to do any time you’re cutting corn off the cob for a recipe. Turn those cobs into a delicious stock either by themselves or with tomato and onion trimmings. Waste not, want not … you know.

Chilled Corn and Bacon Soup

I know I’m the mood for a chilled corn soup. This recipe came from the nice people at Good Housekeeping. It uses smoked paprika, one of my favorite ways to get a little smoky heat into a recipe. Lacking smoked paprika, you could use a little adobo sauce from that can of chipotle peppers I know you keep in your pantry. And of course the bacon lends its own smoky nuance.

Sweet Potato Souffle with Pecan Coconut Crumble

What’s a Southern Thanksgiving without Sweet Potato Souffle?

This recipe published in Atlanta magazine and here’s Susan Puckett’s write-up:

“Tony Morrow, chef/owner of College Park’s Pecan restaurant and Tony Morrow’s Real Pit BBQ, owes his appreciation for good food to his mother, Dr. Joyce Irons. A voracious cook ever since she was a small child, she helped her grandmother bake cakes and strip collard leaves from their stems on the family farm near Decatur, Alabama. A practicing psychotherapist, Irons’s idea of “winding down” is freezing a bushel of white corn or boning a whole turkey and rolling it up with spices like a jellyroll.
Every holiday, Morrow gathers with thirty or so family members at his mother and stepfather’s house for a massive feast that includes turkey and cornbread stuffing with giblet gravy, baked ham, chitterlings, collards (from the farm the family still owns in Alabama), macaroni and cheese, cranberry sauce and Irons’s signature sweet potato souffle—a creamy, nutmeg-spiced casserole thickly blanketed with a candy-sweet topping of coconut and pecans. The sweet potato dish, Morrow says, is a longtime favorite: ‘I could add a scoop of my mother’s homemade vanilla ice cream, and I’d have my dinner and dessert without even getting up from my seat.’ ”

Sweet Cornbread for Thanksgiving

This makes excellent cornbread to cube up for dressing. Just bake it tonight, or early tomorrow, let it cool and then cut into cubes. You can toast the cubes in the oven to dry them out a little so they’re maintain their integrity in your dressing. Or if you prefer the cornbread to break down and meld with the other ingredients, then just use it right out of the oven. It’s really, really sweet though. That works great if you’re making a sausage dressing with lots of savory ingredients, but feel free to cut down on the sugar if you like.

Of course, you could just serve it as cornbread. What an idea!