On the Go (Blackberry Hazelnut Spinach Salad, Prosciutto Crisps)

As I write this article, Aaron is packing moving boxes around me; the Gourmet Gents are moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts! I'm excited to move to the city, but I'll miss some things about our old home, especially its square-foot gardens of salsa and salad vegetables and kitchen garden brimming with herbs and berries of all kinds. We love using fresh, local ingredients and the late summer offerings are especially rich, as most fruits, vegetables, and nuts are just coming in season. A blackberry, hazelnut, and spinach salad let me make use of one last harvest from the garden beds and smooth chèvre cheese, salty-sweet prosciutto crisps, and balsamic vinaigrette fortified with blackberry preserves and hazelnut oil help you schmaltz things up.

Schmaltzy

Berries Jubilee (Shortcakes with Mixed Berry Flambé)

Strawberry shortcake is a classic dessert, and I've been obsessed with it for as long as I can remember. As a child, I'd wait with bated breath for dessert-time, ever irked when my mother insisted it was so-named because the table is "deserted" from having cleaned one's dinner plate and cleared the way. Even when I was little, I knew the difference between a sponge cake and a shortcake and, despite how groceries dutifully place the spongy yellow pucks next to the strawberries every summer, I would accept no substitutions. Proper shortcake should be like a biscuit or a scone. Not spongy, but crumblingly delicious, at once dry and yet delectably saturated with oil; with flaking crumbs that melt away on the tongue and leave nothing but happiness in their wake.

Pictured: happiness

My Modern Family (Plum-Berry Crumble)

Hello, ladies & gents!

Enthused by sheer culinary joie de vivre, and the fact that I had a ticking time bomb in the fruit drawer by way of a crate of blackberries, I bring another recipe tonight: plum-berry crumble. I had intended to save this treat for Wednesday. See: right now, every Wednesday night, my modern family gets together to watch Modern Family. I've already come to look forward to the event.

Sarah and her husband, Seth, keep their family farm around the hill and down a dirt road that slowly clambers up the mountain. At the moment there's a full herd of goats for the milking, a flock of laying hens, and three hives of busy, busy bees. They tap maple trees to render the syrup in the Spring and collect elderberries, blackberries, and raspberries in the Summer. We are very lucky.

We're also very unlucky in that Modern Family airs after our nephews' bedtime.

Weaponized cuteness