Last week Serious Eats linked to Pioneer Woman's Gazpacho recipe. This had three effects on me. First, I immediately wanted gazpacho. Second, I fell in love with Pioneer Woman's site to the point that I was ready to chuck everything and try life on a cattle ranch. Then I remembered that I'm a vegetarian from suburban Maryland and perhaps that is not the right choice for me. Maybe if I could just hang out with the horses all day. And third, I got to thinking about summer recipes.

I made the gazpacho last night with some alterations and it is delicious. I didn't use the shrimp, obviously, and I left out the avocado and jalapenos. I would have put sour cream in if I had any. Trader Joe's has a yogurt dip that is really good in gazpacho too, but I don't have any of that either.

Anyway, my contribution to the summer recipe file is corn salad and corn fritters. Corn salad is pretty quick and easy, and is great for summer cookouts.

Corn Salad

7 ears of corn
2 limes
1 medium red pepper
½ red onion
4 plum or Roma tomatoes
4 ounces Monterey Jack or Colby Jack cheese
3 - 4 tablespoons chopped cilantro
salt and pepper to taste

To cook the corn: bring a large pot of water to boil. Throw in a handful of salt. Shuck the ears of corn and put them in the boiling water. Cook for about ten minutes or until it smells like corn when you lean over the pot. One of my cookbooks calls this "the air will be perfumed with the smell of fresh corn" which cracks me up every time. Remove the corn from the pot and set it aside to cool.

While the corn is cooking, dice the red pepper, onion, and tomatoes, chop the cilantro, and grate the cheese.

Once the corn has cooled for a few minutes, take a knife and cut the kernels off the cob. You want to cut close enough to the cob that you're not wasting kernels, but not so close that you get the hard bits that hold the corn kernels together in clumps.

Throw out the cobs. Put the kernels in a medium sized bowl. Add the red pepper, onion, tomatoes and cilantro. Stir. Add the grated cheese and stir again. Add salt and freshly grated pepper in small amounts until it fits your taste. Then squeeze in the juice of the two limes and stir again.

You can serve this at room temperature or chilled.

Now, let's say that everyone at the cookout you go to is a corn hating freak. Or maybe the cookout gets rained out. Or maybe, just maybe, you get all excited by the first fresh corn of the season and forget to halve the recipe and find yourself with a lot of corn salad to eat. Corn fritters are the perfect recipe for leftover corn salad.

Corn fritters

2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup milk or buttermilk (I prefer buttermilk. It makes them tangier)
¼ cup melted butter (delicious, but you can increase the milk a little bit and leave the butter out)
1 ½ cups corn (you can get away with ½ cup more or ½ cup less corn)

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together.

Combine the eggs, milk and melted butter. Fold in dry ingredients. Stir in corn (or corn salad).

Heat oil in a deep frying or sauté pan. Drop large spoonfuls of the batter (it will be a little messy. I smush my blobs of batter down a little bit) into the hot oil and fry for 5-7 minutes, flipping halfway through so that they are browned on both sides.

You can eat these plain and they'll be great. They are also good topped with queso, salsa, guacamole and/or sour cream.

Enjoy!

A while back I wrote about my fondness for new fitness equipment, and wondered about kettlebells and the Wii Fit. Well, since then, I've acquired both. They put the kettlebells on sale at Target, so I caved and bought two - a ten pounder and a 15 pounder. They are an awesome workout. The ones I bought said they came with a DVD, but that just turned out to be a very short demonstration of some kettlebell moves, with no indication of how you might want to string them together or how many reps you should do. The Amazon reviews favored Kettlebell Bootcamp with Angie Miller, so I got that, and soon discovered new muscles in my inner thighs. Two thumbs up for the kettlebells, although if anyone has any recommendations for other kettlebell videos, please leave them in the comments.

The Wii and Wii Fit were a surprise gift, and one that made me very happy. The Wii is so much fun! I particularly like the tennis game. The Wii Fit is not the toughest workout in the world, but I do think it is good for me, because my balance is terrible. At the beginning of the game they have you take a fitness test standing on the balance pad. You sort of wiggle around and have to keep a colored bar at a particular level. Well, I couldn't do it, to the point where the game actually asked me if I trip a lot. Which sadly, I do. I confuse the Wii though, because I'm really good at lunges and squats and the yoga poses. I have heard that the EA Active game is a harder workout, so I may try that next. If you've tried that game and have any feedback, let me know.

Let's see...I started going to a second kickboxing class each week, which really seems to be paying off. My teacher actually complimented me and said that I'm getting better. Who knew that day would ever come?! I do love kickboxing, so it is nice to hear I'm making progress.

Pilates and Pilates-inspired workouts are my other new obsession. I can't do proper pushups, and I've come to the conclusion that it is because my back and core need strengthening. Pilates seems to be the way to get there, and it has the added benefit of increasing flexibility. We'll see.

The other thing I'd like to do is get back to running. My knee still bothers me pretty regularly, so I'm not going to go do anything nuts like train for a ten miler, but it would be nice to regularly run a couple of miles. There's nothing quite like that feeling. I just have to find the time to fit it in to my schedule.