Roasted Shrimp and Potato Salad with Grapes and Celery

A savory and sweet, crunchy and filling late summer salad with roasted potatoes and shrimp, chopped celery, and whole grapes in a dilled yogurt-mayonnaise-lemon dressing.

I've been doing a lot of walking to train for a half marathon, and part of my walking has been to pick up milk at the local grocery store.  Normally I have Simon (the photobombing dog below) with me, waiting patiently at the dog tie up & water station, so I don't linger in the aisles.  The other morning, however, my daughter and I walked together, and after walking in the woods (just found out there's elevation changes on the course, so I need to get some hills in) she and Simon headed home and I headed to the store for milk (and to pad my mileage).  I had time to linger over the deli section, and two salads in particular caught my eye--a dilled shrimp, celery, and grape salad and a dilled lemon potato salad.

On the way home (lugging a gallon of milk is not the hassle it used to be--a side benefit of having kids who go through a gallon every 36 hours) I wondered what would happen if I combined the two salads and, for grins and giggles, roasted the potatoes and shrimp instead of boiling or steaming them.

Since the celery I'm regrowing in my garden is doing amazingly well (of course it is, since I'm only meh on celery by itself, though I love it in soup packs and to help stretch a pound of ground meat) I figured I'd try and combine the recipes.  Our farmers have a nifty new tool, a potato digger, and we've been getting lovely harvests of red potatoes lately, so I had most everything I needed.  I played around with my kitchen scale again, like I did in my Chicken Salad by the Ounce recipe, but this time in metric form.  The volumes in this recipe are my estimation of the weights I used.

Thai Inspired Creamy Chicken Noodle soup (dairy and gluten free)

What's the most comforting bowl of soup you've ever had?

Many years ago my employer sent me on a long, all-expense-paid, trip to an exotic foreign locale just before a major holiday.  My friend drove me down to the airport, we said our goodbyes, I put my gun in the armory and settled down in anticipation of an early call for the next day's flight.

I woke to an ice storm instead.

After a day or so of 'will the weekly flight go late or just be cancelled' my friend came back, picked me and my gear up, and brought me back home.  Where I wasn't supposed to be.  I'd already celebrated the holiday, emptied my fridge, given away my houseplants and sent my dog ahead to my spouse.  It was a weird few days, of being there when I wasn't supposed to have been there, my brain straddling what was happening with what should have been happening.

My friends invited me to many meals during that time, and it was during one post-holiday gathering that I had the most comforting bowl of chicken soup.  It was chicken and rice, and I know my friend's mom added some food coloring to make it more visually appealing, but no matter.  A mom made me chicken soup when I needed some nurturing and it was good.  A few days later I left on my deployment without any weather-related or other drama, but the memory of what a good bowl of chicken soup can do for you stayed with me.

As you can see from the title, this is not your run-of-the-mill chicken noodle soup.  It's got a Thai twist because I had opened jars of Thai ingredients in the fridge, and the wonderful food bloggers I turned to for advice suggested I use them up in soup.  My recipe is an adaptation of both Kalyn's Thai Chicken Soup recipe and  Winnie's Thai-inspired Chicken Noodle soup.  I used what was on hand in my pantry, and I like my substitutions enough to write up the recipe on its own.  We ate this soup as chicken noodle soup for dinner, using a large handful of rice noodles.  The next day, since soup is better the next day, I brought this plus my rice cooker to serve chicken and rice soup for lunch at work.  If you need a little nurturing, and can access Thai ingredients (see NOTE below), keep this soup in mind.  Use coconut milk, not cream, if you like, or chicken breasts, not ground chicken, add sliced Bok Choy if you've got it in your CSA farm share--but do add the peanuts, fresh herbs, and a squeeze of fresh lime juice for garnish.  It's very tasty.

Chopped Vegetable Pizza

BLUF*:  Chop a bunch of stuff together and put it on a pizza.  Bake it.  Enjoy.

This pizza starts with chopped late summer vegetables, fresh mozzarella, optional meat, and a quirky sauce.  Sounds fairly traditional, yes?  I guess maybe the corn might be unusual unless you're outside of the US.  I ate corn on pizza in Germany, but this particular combination was inspired by my fellow Learn Food Photography classmate, Gaurav Prabhu, during our 30 Days to Better Food Photography challenge.  He shared this photo about making pizza it caught my attention not only because he did a great job of capturing the elements that went into his pizza, but also because of those elements.

Chopped onion, chopped tomato, chopped pepper, and corn?  Sounds like a good combo.  A sauce of Szechuan chutney and mayonnaise? Interesting.  Mild cheese to tie the whole thing together?  Good plan.  I decided to make a pizza using ingredients that I had on hand (corn I'd put up in the summer, red pepper, red onion, leftover Italian sausage and pepperoni).  Instead of a chutney/mayo sauce I scanned the refrigerator door and picked up the bottle of Raspberry Enlightenment.  It's suggested in both sweet and savory recipes, so I used it as a sauce.  It was quirky--pretty good, yet not incredible like garlic scape pesto. I think this pizza would also be delicious with Gaurav's chutney/mayo or even a plain tomato sauce.

I've been putting off this post, in part because I had more seasonal pizzas to share and in part because I really don't care for the photos of this pizza.  The more I figure out how to produce semi-decent photos, or at least not blurry ones, it makes it really cringe-inducingly frustrating to see an older pre-rudimentary skills photo.  Yet the other day I got the most delicious corn in the farm share, and beautiful peppers, and I've still got red storage onions, so it's a good time to suggest this combination.

I just hope yours looks prettier than mine.