Cucumber Dill Salad with Tzatziki Dressing

I wanted to prepare a simple salad for dinner this evening, so I made a cucumber salad with a really easy to make tzatziki dressing.

Prepping the cucumber takes only a few steps. I wash, chop, salt and pat dry the cucumber slices and they're good to go. The tzatziki sauce is made of dried mint, dill and yogurt and is seasoned with salt and pepper. If you want to make it extra rich, you can add some sour cream or crème fraîche. Mix them together and you're ready to serve. That's it. Easy never tasted so good.

Blueberry Yogurt

We've been trying to eat healthier, so I've started serving blueberry yogurt to Lulu as a late night snack instead of one of my decadent desserts. Blueberries are delicious and packed with antioxidants. Many studies have concluded that a diet high in antioxidant foods prevents heart disease, cancer and reduces blood pressure. I typically serve the yogurt with unsweetened green tea (another antioxidant) mixed with vanilla soy milk.

Cardamom Spritz Cookies dipped in Mint Chocolate

I've made spritz sablé cookies before. The most recent variation was one made of orange and dark chocolate. The girls felt like baking today and they really wanted to make a fresh batch of the sablé cookies. I was all for it but I wanted to teach them to be creative and come up with a new flavor combination.

There was a tall pitcher of my mint and cardamom-flavored Arnold Palmer on the counter. Sunny, the eldest, looked over at it, then back at me, and said "why not mint and cardamom-flavor spritz sablé?". - I thought it was a brilliant idea. If you browse through the recipes on the website, you'll notice that I use cardamom in almost everything, from savory dishes, to drinks, to desserts. I knew it would make a perfect flavoring for the cookies.

I didn't want to add mint extract directly to the cookie dough because I thought it would be to overpowering. Instead, I used Guittard pink-colored mint chocolate chips to make a ganache, which I dipped the cookies in, once they baked and cooled. These particular spritz cookies are thicker and chewier than the orange and dark chocolate version. They both taste great so it's really a matter of personal preference. Try both and see which one you like!

Creamy Ricotta and Bell Pepper Crostini

What do you do with stale bread? Make crostini. It's one of my favorite ways of turning a day-old baguette into an elegant appetizer. I love them and could eat a ton!

Typically, crostini is grilled (or toasted) bread that is covered with a flavorful topping. I made mine with a red bell pepper purée and paired it with left-over goat ricotta cheese. The cheese brings some creaminess to the topping and I love the subtle taste of the chèvre (goat in French). I flavored the crostini with some fresh mint and Meyer lemon from the garden.

Mint and Chocolate Filled Rose Thumbprint Cookies

Thumbprint cookies are similar to sablé cookies. They both have the texture of shortbread. The characteristic thumbprint shape is created by pressing down on the cookie with a spoon half-way through the baking process. A sweet filling is placed in the resulting cavity. The cookie itself has a mild sweetness that goes very well with the sweeter filling. The filling can be jam, preserves, caramel or even chocolate.

I chose a pink mint filling because of my little five-year-old sister-in-law. She came to me with the cutest request. She adores Cookie Monster, and often shares her cookies with the Cookie Monster doll we got her. Today, she came to me, hid her face with the stuffed animal and said in her best Cookie Monster impersonation, "Cookie Monster is hungry, I want pink cookies." My heart melted; I can't say no to my little munchkin.

All the girls gathered in the kitchen and pink cookies it was. I looked in the pantry and found several choices for a pink-colored cookie. Some pink-colored mint chocolate chips from Guittard, raspberry and strawberry extracts or rose paste. The girls voted and we went for a rose-flavored cookie dough with pink mint chocolate filling. Sunny, my 13-year-old eldest sister-in-law wanted to create some fun design in the filling, so we melted some bittersweet chocolate and vanilla chips as well. This has to be some fun designs.

We were all very happy with our unique cookies and needless to say, Cookie Monster also enjoyed our creation.