Considering how much free time I have had this summer, I have not been doing enough cooking!! Its very hard to cook for just one, so I called one of my good friends or a cooking date!!
The star feature that we built our dinner around was strawberry salsa with avocado adapted from this recipe.
mmm...fresh strawberries
I’m so glad that strawberries are in season again! Strawberries in the winter are so bland…these tasted like summer. Yay!
chopping up a white onion
All the ingredients in a bowl before being stirred up. Cilantro was not in the recipe, but I bought fresh cilantro at the farmer’s market that morning, and I was dying to use it! I highly recommend this addition.
Strawberry Salsa (adapted from Gourmet)
- 1 cup chopped strawberries
- 1/4 cup finely chopped white onion
- 1 fresh jalapeno chili, diced
- 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
- 1/2 teaspoon fresh lime juice
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon sugar
- a few springs fresh cilantro
Then, I cut up 4 corn tortillas and fried them in olive oil to make tortilla strips for dipping.
Note: I have recently learned that olive oil is not stable at high temperatures, so it can form cancer causing free radicals when heated. I actually bought some grapeseed oil at TJ’s that is supposed to be stable at high temperatures. My friend just laughed at me when I asked her if she had any grapeseed oil at her house, so we decided to live dangerously and use her olive oil for frying 
.
We also mashed one avocado to go with the spread. Here is the final presentation:
This was very easy and delicious! Make this today!!! You won’t regret it 
Drink accompaniment = mojitos!!!
The Perfect Mojito?
My friend found this recipe on ehow for the “perfect mojito.” For each glass, it called for:
- 2 tsp sugar
- 3 tbsp fresh lime juice
- 4 or 5 fresh mint leaves
- 2 oz rum (we used Barcardi Limon)
- topped with lemon lime soda
I was pretty sure that most mojito recipes use club soda, not lemon lime soda, but we went with this recipe anyway. It was dangerously sweet! You could not taste the alcohol AT ALL. Besides being too sweet, they were pretty good. But next time, I would use club soda.
I would also like to add that we had pretty amazing music in the background for our cooking date. The source?
That is Pandora Spice Girls Radio!!! I love Pandora. And this radio mix was too much fun. Lots of old school N*SYNC, Backstreet, Brittany, Destiny’s Child, plus some newer Rhianna songs, and plenty of Spice Girls, of course .
Hope you all had a great weekend! And for those of you who were teenie boppers during the boy band era, were you an N*SYNC or a Backstreet Boy fan? (I feel like most girls had a preference…I was all about N*SYNC!).
