Gal #3 and Guest Report on July!

Well this was one fun month to make this menu! My friend was in town for a visit so like our first month, she was there for another Gal #1 menu, we made this together! And I'm glad we did. This took some work gathering the ingredients and getting everything prepared and cooked together. We did find we did time this menu well getting the dessert first, then the broccoli salad together and then following with preparing the salmon and then the tomato salad. Timing worked out well.

Let's start with the amazing dessert we had. Well we changed some things around due to what we had in the kitchen. Instead of using the requested plums and blueberries with the peaches, we used peaches, mango, strawberries and some blueberries. We wanted enough fruit to make both crostatta's. We followed the measurements as closely as possible and baked according to plan. We ran into the same problem as Gal #1, mine didn't cook all the way through the middle. We also used frozen peaches so next time all fruit will be fresh. The topping wasn't very crumbly for me but it baked and turned out YUMMMY!

Next came the broccoli and bow tie salad. This was a favorite of both Gal #3 and guest! Super fast and easy to do, the broccoli was just perfect and such a bright green color. It was the perfect tenderness and we did an entire box of pasta so doubled the sauce recipe. We had a lot of leftovers but no worries that it won't get eaten! The lemon was just perfect in here! We forgot the pine nuts but will be adding these to the leftovers because they can only enhance the great flavor.

The tomato salad was very good. We added the black olives and beans. We didn't have anything other than red tomatoes, but it still was great. Next time we think adding some yellow and orange tomatoes would just put this over the top. I also used fresh basil from my herb garden and it really made all the difference. You can't substitute the fresh basil in this dish.

And finally the salmon dish. We both are salmon lovers and found that this was a really good dish. We did run into some trouble getting the long list of ingredients, and for sheer expense reasons some were omitted. The fish sauce was left out and we had red curry paste instead of the the suggested chili paste. I'm glad we didn't put the fish sauce in, it was salty enough without it! Taking advice from Gal 1 & 2 we cut out some salt and halfed the recipe since it was just two of us. It still was salty and the panko wasn't crunchy enough on top for either of us.

*Note: aluminum foil is necessary, and parchment paper is not a great substitute. My fire alarm let me know this and it added some excitement to the kitchen, but all turned out just fine.

So overall this was a good meal, just a little more cumborsome in its attempts. For people cooking on a budget this might seem overwhelming but things can easily be substittuted without loosing a lot of flavor. It was a great time making what we had work in the kitchen. And it really cut down expense using what was there. Overall Gal #3's guest rates it a 8.5 and Gal #3 says 8! Well done Mrs. Gal #1, looking forward to next month?

Cause girls its going to be fantastic!!!