The 10 Best Things I’ve Cooked This summer
From corn pasta and whipped ricotta to the weeknight steak that cured my fear of cooking meat, these are the recipes I keep coming back to.
Cooking for the people I love is my love language. Honestly, I think it deserves its own spot next to the traditional five. I'm far from a professional. I like things simple and unfussy, but I care a lot about flavor, and I love a recipe that's creative or a little inventive. To me, recipes are more inspiration than instruction; I'll read through one to get a sense of the vibe it's going for, and then I almost always make tweaks along the way.
Summer is my favorite cooking season. There's an abundance of good produce you don't get the rest of the year, and the whole vibe of cooking shifts when life slows down a little. You know the scene: Sonos on, someone manning the grill outside, a glass of wine on the patio while the pasta water comes to a boil, everyone half in and half out of the kitchen.
These are not my recipes (with one exception). They're just the ten things I've been making over and over this summer, delivered to you with four weeks left before Labor Day to get cooking.
1. Cast Iron Steak
I used to be genuinely scared of cooking meat. Chicken I could handle, mostly because I could just put it in the oven at a set temperature and walk away, but steak felt like something that belonged to experts. Then one day this summer I was craving a steak salad and thought, how hard could this actually be? Men do it. So I went to Trader Joe's, picked up a couple of sirloins, threw them on the cast iron, and they came out perfect. I've since looked into doing it properly, and the method is stupidly simple: a screaming hot cast iron pan, a good cut, and the discipline to leave it alone. Under ten minutes, and it works every single time. If you're someone who avoids meat out of fear the way I did, start here. You'll be having steak on a Tuesday before you know it.
2. Sweet Corn Pasta
In the summer, I'll eat corn in pretty much anything. I love how the sweet, umami thing it does makes a dish feel a little indulgent without actually being heavy. I became properly obsessed with corn pasta this year after trying the sweet corn agnolotti at Buccan in Palm Beach during my bachelorette in March, and I've basically been chasing that flavor ever since. This Melissa Clark recipe has been my summer corn pasta fix. It's much lighter than the Buccan agnolotti, but it still has that same sweet, complex, distinctly summer flavor. It's simple, fast, adaptable, and it's been on the menu all season.
3. Baja Shrimp Tacos
I keep a bag of frozen, peeled, deveined shrimp in the freezer at all times for emergencies because it thaws fast and turns into a protein-forward dinner with almost no planning. This has been especially true this summer. Once the wedding buzz wore off, Kevin and I found ourselves looking for the easiest possible version of everything, and these tacos became one of our go-to lazy dinners. The recipe is basically impossible to mess up: marinate the shrimp, cook it on the stove, throw together a simple slaw and crema, get good tortillas (if you're in Texas, the butter tortillas from Central Market are unmatched), add lime and a thinly sliced jalapeño. Somehow it tastes like something we went out for, not something we threw together in under thirty minutes.
4. Roasted Carrots with Whipped Ricotta and Hot Honey
Roasted carrots aren't exactly the first thing that comes to mind for summer, I know. They feel more like a Thanksgiving vegetable. But I was hosting friends for dinner early this summer and was totally stumped on a vegetable. Nothing was calling my name until I found some gorgeous rainbow carrots at Central Market. I looked up a recipe on the spot, and this ended up being the serendipitous favorite of the night. Carrots are hard to mess up on their own (roast them and you're most of the way there), but the ricotta, pistachios, and hot honey are what truly make this dish: salt, fat, acid, heat, layered with the subtle sweetness of the roasted carrots to tie the whole thing together. Suspend your disbelief and don't sleep on roasted carrots as a summer vegetable.
5. Whipped Ricotta Toast
Bread and cheese are my two favorite food groups, so any slightly elevated combination of the two will always win me over. This Wishbone Kitchen recipe, inspired, I assume, by the Misi ricotta toast, is an oldie but a goodie; I've been making it since long before her cookbook came out. Ricotta in the summer is exactly what I want: bright and fluffy but still rich, and this is one of those recipes where presentation does most of the work. It's really just bread and cheese dressed up in cocktail attire, perfect for a summer night when you want something that's equal parts easy and special.
6. French Potato and Green Bean Salad
My sister found this recipe while we were cooking together on a low-key family night on Nantucket in July. I was thrilled when I saw that it involved green beans, because Kevin claims not to like them, and any time Kevin says he doesn't like a food, I take it as a personal challenge to find the preparation that changes his mind. Olives and mushrooms have already fallen, and this was the recipe that did it for green beans. The trick is a fast blanch, straight into ice-cold water after, so the beans stay crisp and bright instead of going mushy. Everything else comes together easily from there into a fresher, greener, and slightly more herby take on your standard potato salad. We had this with grilled tuna steaks as a loose homage to salade niçoise, and I'd highly recommend the same if you can get good tuna where you are.
7. My Signature Vinaigrette
This one has a fun and colorful origin story. I've been making the same simple vinaigrette since 2015, when I really started cooking. I've never written the recipe down, I've just found myself making it the same way every time. In business school, my friend Emily hosted dinner every Wednesday night and always put me on salad duty, and at some point during my second year, this vinaigrette became the thing everyone always asked for. This year, Emily, an accomplished chef herself, published her own cookbook and recreated my vinaigrette from memory so she could include it, and it turns out she nailed it. So technically I'm sending you to someone else's book for my own recipe, but it's the right version, and I'd rather have Emily give it to you correctly than deliver a botched re-creation of my own signature dressing from memory. Plus - gentle plug - the book is well worth the purchase.
8. Gazpacho
Everyone has that one slightly niche restaurant dish they have to order any time they see it on a menu, and growing up, my mom's was gazpacho. I, too, inherited the gazpacho habit somewhere along the way without really noticing. As an adult, I found this recipe in the New York Times, and that was when I realized gazpacho is basically just a vegetable smoothie: everything into the blender, no cooking required. It's healthy, refreshing, and surprisingly filling for something that's mostly vegetables and olive oil. Kevin was openly skeptical the first time he watched me make it, and now he's the one finishing the batch before I get a second bowl. The only real trick with gazpacho is patience. It's best served ice-cold, but it won't come out of the blender cold, even with chilled ingredients, so give it six to eight hours in the fridge, or overnight if you can. It's not the same at room temperature. Plan ahead.
9. Lemon Ricotta Pancakes
These Genevieve Ko pancakes are my signature breakfast at this point. They're just slightly more special than a regular pancake without being fussy: perfectly fluffy, with just enough lemon zest, no lemon juice at all, to brighten them without tipping into dessert territory. The recipe makes just enough for two, which means Kevin and I can polish off a batch between us on a Saturday morning. We put weekend indulgences like this on pause while we were getting ready for the wedding, so bringing these back into the rotation this summer has felt like getting a favorite little ritual back.
10. Quick Pickled Onions
If you open our fridge on any given day, I'm willing to bet there will be a deli container of pickled red onions in the top left corner, and I'd argue they do more work than anything else on this list. In the spirit of keeping summer cooking simple, it helps to have accoutrement ready to go that you can toss onto whatever you're making, and pickled onions have a delicious amount of complexity for something so easy. The sharpness of the raw onion is balanced out by sweetness and brine, so they end up tasting less oniony and more sweet-and-tangy. I use this Nas Durabian recipe from NYT Cooking, though honestly almost any version works; pickling is not rocket science. One batch lasts a long time, so a single onion keeps you stocked for a while. We put these on shrimp tacos, avocado toast, scrambled eggs, steak salads, shawarma bowls, and more or less anything that needs a little more zip. I've tried store-bought versions out of laziness and have never found one worth keeping around. If you're looking for an easy way to make simple summer meals feel more finished, a batch of these in the fridge is a genuine game changer.
