Chicken Adobo Summer Rolls (A repurposed leftover)

Even though I live with people who are happy to eat leftovers 90% of the time, I love recipes that transform a leftover entree into an entirely new dish.  One of these repurposed leftover ideas is to make summer rolls.  You can stick just about anything in a summer roll!
I wrote this post the second month of my blog, since the chicken adobo we repurposed was from this post, my 11th post.  I've been sitting on this recipe for months, since by the time I was ready to post we were fully into the Fall season and it would not have been appropriate. There's a lot of sat upon posts appearing this week on the blog.  Something about the beginning of June marks summer eating for me, even if we won't hit the solstice for a few more weeks.

I love summer rolls but shy away from planning to make them because I often think they require too many fresh herbs that I don't have in my garden.  (This year I've planted a stealth herb garden with mint near the downspout by the driveway, and rosemary nestled under the dogwood. I'm attempting to fool whoever has been "going out to eat" in my raised beds, decimating the first round of parsley, dill, and fennel I've planted thus far this spring.)
The basic ingredients for a summer roll, however, are shelf-stable.  Once you've stocked your pantry with rice paper wrappers and rice noodles, you're set when the right herbs, vegetables, and even protein collide in your farm share, garden, or farmer's market.

Buttermilk Crust Pizza with Pepperoni and Four Cheese Topping

Do you keep buttermilk in your fridge?  I do.  Sometimes I make my own, sometimes I find it marked down at the grocery store and buy it.  Once I saw a half gallon for 15 cents (on the sell-by date).  You bet I snagged that bottle in a hot minute. 15 cents!
What do I do with all this buttermilk? I'm glad you asked.  I use it in a bunch of different muffin recipes.  The key recipe is here, and there are many more variations to the right ------> in my Recipe Index by Category.  I also use buttermilk in waffle batter such as this one.  I'm encouraging my son to pick up the skill of biscuits, so he'll be following this recipe.  And this summer, once all the bottles on the door of the fridge are used up, I am going to make this Buttermilk salad dressing.  But today, because it is Friday, I want to talk about pizza dough.
Buttermilk in dough makes a tender crust.  It's also got subtle tang that works great with sweet (ok, more like sweeter, I have yet to make a dessert pizza) and savory toppings, as you'll see today and in the future.  My recipe is from my favorite pizza book, The Best Pizza Is Made at Home (Nitty Gritty Cookbooks), by Donna Rathmell German.  I kept it basic this time, but there are more variations on tap (and currently in my fridge!  Check my FB page for the pizzas we're eating tonight using a whole wheatier Buttermilk Pesto Dough).

Generally, when I am sharing a new dough variation, I tend to keep the toppings pretty normal.  I mean I didn't want to freak you out like I did with the beet crust dough for vegans, vegetarians, or omnivores.  Today is no exception--as you can see by the title, it's a pepperoni pizza.  Like my Not So Simple Cheese Pizza, this pizza uses the wonderful Fresh Tomato Pesto I discovered when Heather put it up on In Her Chucks.  Since I spent fall and winter figuring out how to make, put up, and subsequently use many variations of that pesto, it has earned its own "how to" blog post which will be coming out next week.  Around these parts, that's before the fresh tomatoes show up--but don't run out and buy a well-traveled tomato.  Wait.  Patience is a virtue. Local tomatoes, like local strawberries and local celery, just taste better.  Life is too short to eat tasteless food.

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Sunflower Seeds and Coconut and Sled Hockey

I'm delighted to say that this evening I will be picking up my first CSA farm share of the season.  Soon I'll be blogging about fresh local veggies--but in the meantime, how about a cookie?

As a food blogger (a tiny squee when I type that), there are a couple of signs you are overextending your creativity and need to step away from the kitchen, sit down, and catch yourself up with what you've been doing.

The first sign is when your spouse, the chief photo downloader/cropper/color corrector (when he's not deployed), checks the camera on Thursday night and notes that you've 228 new photos since he last emptied the camera on Sunday morning.

In my defense, I'd like to point out that was before breakfast on Sunday morning.

The second is when you pull a sheet of cookies out of your oven, look at them expecting to see oats but see none, and wonder what's in them instead.  Silly blogger, you baked Monday's Dark Chocolate and Peanut Butter Chip Oatmeal cookies on Wednesday for your spouse's work function on Thursday.  These cookies were baked on a Friday, therefore I was baking the Chocolate Chip with Sunflower and Coconut dough. (Why aren't these recipes highlighted with links to the posts?  Patience, I've got scads of notes and photos to turn into posts.  Did I mention the need to catch myself up?)

Conveniently, these cookies, along with some stretched taco meat, were for the Saturday night team dinner during a sled hockey tournament, so I had some enforced time away from my stove. (I need more, though!)

There's no farm fresh ingredient here--I'm in between egg shares at the moment though if I lived near The Tipsy Gardener I'd be all set.  Instead, since I needed a dessert, I rooted around in my freezer stash and chose a couple of add-ins which looked like a good idea.  It was.  I'd tell you the team loved them, but this is a sled hockey team and sled hockey players are like all other hockey players--they'll eat anything.  At least that's been my experience. Hockey, and this dessert, really is for everyBODY*.