A divine menu to welcome summer

Strawberry-pecan crisp, seared sea scallops, pickled chili herb sauce + blistered green beans, sugar snap pea salad with pink peppercorns

✴︎🌟✴︎ If you enjoy this post, thank you kindly for clicking the ♥️, restacking it, or sharing it with another foodie fan. ✴︎🌟✴︎

This is a reader-supported publication - thank you so much for being here. If you’re able to upgrade to a paid subscription, enormous thanks! Gain full access to the archive and make all of the summer hits - from fast and flavorful pasta salads, to zippy summer sauces and panzanella bursting with flavor, to juicy grilled meats and delicate poached seafood. Dive into the complete Recipe Index and the entire archive when you upgrade. Either way, thanks so much for giving this the ❤️ and commenting on this post. It not only lets me know that you were here (and reading them makes my day), it truly helps my visibility on Substack, too.

Good morning, and welcome to today’s Stories from Catbird Cottage! I have a real treat for you today. In the - pardon my French - shit show of things transpiring at a breakneck pace all over the world, I thought, why not lean into reclaiming some collective joy? Here’s how it works: without too much work, prepare zesty, outrageously good food. Sit at a table with someone you like and revel in the marvel of good food together. Share in conversation about how we might make this planet one we want to pass onto the next generation, and rejoice.

Today is a very special ‘welcome summer’ three course menu, with some of the best and brightest flavors around. Whether you make one or all three, eat with zeal and glee. Happy solstice!

There are probably a zillion strawberry recipes out there, and for good reason. Strawberries may be the quintessential ‘berry’ and a great strawberry is cathartic… hand-staining juiciness, richly sweet, with a tiny bit of tartness. Unfortunately, most grocery stores stock Driscoll strawberries, who - aside from an awful record on workers’ rights - are most known for huge, pesticide-laden, not red-to-the-core berries. Bred for size over flavor, and picked before ripening fully to withstand the hundreds (or thousands) of miles of transit, those berries pale in comparison to real strawberries.

If you are lucky to live in California you know about the legendary Harry’s Berries, so red they are ruby-hued. For those of you not as lucky, there are countless PYO strawberry fields this time of year - or locally available strawberries at green grocers - where you can score berries picked at peak ripeness. This means richly red, all the way to the center. Why is this so important? It means sweeter strawberries. More dynamic flavor. The strawberries we dream of.

Not Harry’s Berries, but a damn fine local berry, picked up at my local specialty market

I was contemplating a strawberry sweet and put a callout in the subscriber chat last week: Between a strawberry crisp, galette, or cake, the crisp won out. The strawberry crisp featured today is an ideal example of using only a few high-quality ingredients, adding nominal effort, to reap a huge reward. I love this recipe for many reasons. One of them is, you don’t need special skills or equipment to make it… No rolling pie crust, no babysitting a pan bubbling away on the stove, no springform pan. Nothing like that. Also, you can use fruit throughout the season and the crisp will be just as stellar: Blueberries, peaches or plums, or cherries can each be swapped for yummy results.

Another favorite early summer ingredient is definitely sugar snap peas. Their bursting crunchy juiciness is a total mood lifter. Sure you could cook snap peas, but why do that and sacrifice the textural contrast? The salad I’m sharing is an adaptation of a Catbird Cottage crowd favorite. I developed it, wanting to showcase homegrown snap peas and radishes, and have served it to guests here for years. I always return to it, because:

1. This salad is a jolt of enlivening flavors.

2. It is quite sumptuous for being so elemental.

3. There is always the element of surprise when people take their first bites - they are not expecting a symphony for its apparent simplicity.

For the main course, I chose scallops. Basically, I thought of an irresistible and gorgeous menu (desert island meal…?) and these came to mind pretty immediately. Scallops are one of my very favorite types of seafood, for their sweet, buttery, briny flavor and tender texture. When they are seared, the flavors become concentrated in an enviable, deep golden ‘crust’. The sauce is punchy, savory, and lush and, it is an excellent accent to the blistered green beans.

This trio of recipes are posted below for paid subscribers. Thank you for supporting my work!