Memorial Day Food Ideas

Holiday meals send me scurrying to my cookbooks, favorite websites, and consultations with my valued "kitchen cabinet" for menu combinations and recipes. Memorial Day is traditionally the start of the American summer eating season.  Whether it's a picnic, a barbecue, or a pot luck, many folks celebrate Memorial Day with family and friends, eating communally and enjoying each other's company.

I've brainstormed through my list of picnic/barbecue recipes and tips to gather a few for you. If you are planning a get together, or bringing a dish to a pot luck this weekend, I hope these will spark your creative juices (pardon the pun.)  

Easy appetizers

These dips, chips and spreads are easy and you can prepare them a day or two ahead of time. You can even freeze the hummus or the goat cheese spread and defrost them on Memorial Day morning. 

• Roasted red pepper hummus
• Homemade pita chips
• Goat cheese with sun-dried tomatoes, basil and olive oil

Sides and Salads

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Currant Scones

Even if my husband weren’t Irish-American, I would love scones.  Buttery, crumbly, and altogether lovely, they melt in your mouth.  During my vanillathon with Kelly last weekend, I started playing around with a favorite scone recipe that features candied ginger.  Substituting currants and vanilla for the ginger takes the scones back to their traditional roots, but retains the fantastic crumbly texture of the original recipe.  After a few tweaks and another taste test by the resident scone-master, these currant scones are now ready for prime time.

Why use currants and not raisins?  Both currants and raisins are dried grapes. The difference is in the type of grape they come from, and consequently the size and taste of the dried fruit.  Currants are dried red grapes, typically the zante variety native to Greece.  Raisins (including the type known as golden raisins in the U.S. and sultanas in Great Britain) are dried green grapes.  In general, currants are smaller and a bit more tart than raisins.  Traditionally scones are made with currants and I prefer them in this recipe for their size and taste.

Three Notes About This Recipe:

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Vanillathon - Does Homemade Vanilla Make a Difference?

Last fall, Kelly (of KellyBakes) and I made homemade vanilla extract.  We went in together on a bulk purchase of 4 different types of vanilla beans and then blogged about our extract-making.  Our plan was bottle some of our vanilla bounty for holiday gifts and bake together (using part of the remainder) to see if we could discern a taste difference between the various types of vanilla beans.  The vanillathon finally happened this past weekend, and while the results may not make a good New York Post headline, they will fascinate the bakers among us.  

I did try a taste test on my own before our joint effort.  For a group of expert taste testers, including Domenica Marchetti and Aviva Goldfarb, I made 2 batches (each) of Vanilla Cake and traditional madeleines from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From my home to yours.  I used different vanilla extracts for each batch and asked the testers if they could differentiate between the batches.  None of us could.  I would have called that result disappointing, except that the baked goods were quite delicious and even if we could not discern one high quality extract from another, the vanilla flavors were uniformly excellent. 

This weekend’s vanillathon began with a jaunt through the National Arboretum; after all, there is no better inspiration than Mother Nature at her azalea and apple blossom best.  After a side trip to Spike Mendelsohn’s We the Pizza (for very good, but not superior pizza and excellent freshly made fruit sodas) to fortify ourselves for the hard work ahead, we set to baking.  

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