Three Favorites of the Summer
In honor of 100 posts: The summer sleeper hit wild rice sald, my very riffable zucchini loaf, and a quencher salad for the season's most prized produce (nope, it's not tomatoes)
I hope these final weeks of summer are treating you well! I’m on my way home to New York after a week all by myself up in the mountains around Lake Tahoe — my favorite place in the world, especially this time of year. I love the dry heat that reminds me of summers growing up, the liquid quiet at night (the wind in the trees really sounds like the ocean), and overall just the chance to move most everything outdoors.
There has been a lot of cooking to do but I’ve been happy to do it, especially because the local farmers market has been at its absolute peak. And I’ve got three recipes to share with you for capitalizing on that produce, which you can get to by scrolling down:
Briny Wild Rice Salad with Charred Scallions & Olives
Raspberry-Rye Zucchini Bread with Dark Chocolate
Simplest Peak-Summer Melon & Cucumber Salad
But first, I realized as I was writing this that it is my 100th post on Substack. I started this newsletter almost two years ago, excited about the structure and the opportunity to have an open line — for feedback, but also to just stay in touch — and it has certainly delivered on that front.
An unexpected pleasure has also been to find and meet so many other great food people. It kind of feels like the old blogging days. If you primarily engage with my newsletter in your email inbox rather than through the Substack platform, you might not be aware of the breadth of writing you can find, so here are a few recent favorites:
Devan Grimsrud’s Grated Tomato Spaghetti “Carbonara”
Dr. Annie Fenn’s Salted Chocolate Walnut Protein Bars
Martin Sorge’s Fresh Mint Chip Ice Cream
A quintet of Tempeh Recipes from Alexandra Shytsman
Swetha Sivakumar’s Explanation of How the Dishwasher Works (and why it’s so much more efficient than handwashing)
And with there now being 100 of these things in the archives, I finally created a recipe index for easy perusal, up in the navigation bar, which I’ll keep up to date as things progress. Just keep in mind these are links to posts, some of them for paid subscribers only, and to get to the recipe you’ll need to scroll down to the bottom.
Briny Wild Rice Salad with Charred Scallions & Olives
Here’s my summer sleeper hit. Charged with creating a salad that can be made ahead and packs well for beach days and other excursions, I shared this with paid subscribers several weeks ago. And ever since then, it’s been a staple of my dinner parties and potlucks — if you ask me to bring something to share, this is likely what you’ll get.
The combination of smoky charred scallions, briny olives that get a quick pan-sear, the juicy tomatoes and crunchy cucumbers — paired with nutty, wild rice… It’s unexpected, but so good. A rice cooker comes in handy for streamlining things, too.
Raspberry-Rye Zucchini Bread with Dark Chocolate
This is a riff, or an evolution, on my Zucchini & Blackberry Muffins, which were the very first recipe I shared here on Substack. Recently I reformatted them into a whole-wheat, berry-studded loaf, and then over the past week in the mountains, I tweaked further.
A little bit of molasses adds such a satisfying depth of flavor here, as does a small addition of rye flour. And the combination of raspberries and dark chocolate, while nothing new, feels to me like destiny in a loaf like this. Freshly baked, it’s hard to beat with its moist crumb, crackly sugar crust, hint of cinnamon, nuggets of chocolate, and tart raspberry bursts.
Simplest Peak Season Melon & Cucumber Salad
My opinion is that peak-season melons are more worthy of hype than tomatoes are. The same goes for cucumbers, melons’ cousins. Nothing against tomatoes, it’s just that cucumbers and cantaloupe — and especially all the heirloom varieties that are popping up lately, in their many muted shades of green and orange — are so good, infinitely better now than any other time of the year, and their moment is so fleeting.
This very simple salad, hardly worthy of a recipe, is a tribute to these paler tones of summer. The gist is simply to combine equal parts melon and cucumber, and toss them in a “dressing” made from 3 parts lime juice to 1 part runny honey. Then finish with a few pinches of salt and pepper, and throw in the mint or basil if you like. But save this for later if the melon isn’t in its prime.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for your support! Here’s to the next 100 recipes. —Lukas
Lukas, congrats on 100 recipes! Your newsletter is one I always open and read word for word each time it comes out. Thank you for all the love you put into it. And now I can send people to the Tofu & Tempeh section of the Recipe Index whenever they ask me how to make these foods delicious.
Just wanted to say that you are such a generous cook! Thank you! I love your postings. Do you have a good source for wild rice? Thanks.