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Summer Stuffed Shells with Creamy Fontina Sauce
Cork and Knife
Our new cookbook is out very soon — and its focus is one of our favorite ingredients: booze!
We show you how to use the cooking properties of beer, wine, bourbon and more to make your dishes pop!
Baked stuffed shells filled with a delicious mix of Swiss chard, fresh basil and ricotta cheese, nestled under a blanket of bubbling, creamy fontina sauce. This is a rich and decadent dish that also happens to be packed with our favorite early summer vegetables. Best eaten outside, with simple roasted tomatoes and crisp white wine.
This post is sponsored by Cakebread Cellars. Thank you for supporting Nerds with Knives’ sponsors!
Whenever we cook for a crowd, baked pasta is our go-to. All the prep can be done ahead of time, so all that we have to do is pop the pan in the oven, make a quick salad and open the wine. This time of year, the farmer’s market is bursting with early summer vegetables like Swiss chard, baby peas, spring onions and basil. So to celebrate the season, we made our stuffed shells with a mix of our favorite greens and paired them with the most delicious fontina cream sauce. And then popped the corks on a couple of bottles of white wine and enjoyed the sunshine!
Our wine of choice to pair with a beautiful early-summer outdoor dinner is something light with a subtle floral and fruit character. We’ve paired up with Cakebread Cellars’ Napa Valley Chardonnay and our garden peonies opened up just in time to help us celebrate the season.
Sticky Lemongrass Chicken Thighs with Black Rice Salad
Cork and Knife
Our new cookbook is out very soon — and its focus is one of our favorite ingredients: booze!
We show you how to use the cooking properties of beer, wine, bourbon and more to make your dishes pop!
Sticky Lemongrass Chicken Thighs are marinated in our favorite Thai flavors, then roasted until golden brown and delicious. We serve them on top of a beautiful, healthy Black Rice Salad, studded with crunchy red cabbage and loaded with fresh herbs. This chicken will stick right to your favorites list.
After a long, hard Northeast winter, nothing makes me happier than looking out on the deck and seeing row upon row of fresh herbs, sitting up in their little pots all bright and perky, like, “what? I was always here.” No, Rosemary, you weren’t. And I know that for a fact because I paid a freaking fortune for a few measly sprigs in January since I just couldn’t bear to use the dry, desiccated jar of rosemary-scented dust that languishes on my spice rack through the winter.
Even though spring is yet young, the herb garden still feels like a cornucopia. Chives! Mint! Cilantro! Sure it’s still too cold for the basil, but don’t be greedy, it will be here soon. Anxious for a recipe that uses this green bounty, we decided on a Black Rice Salad which, along with crisp red cabbage, sweet golden raisins and crunchy peanuts, uses a full cup of fresh herbs. We went with cilantro and mint (because that’s what we have) but basil, when it’s fresh, would be fantastic too, especially spicy Thai basil if you’re growing it or can find it in the store.
Aviation Cocktail with Homemade Violet Syrup
Cork and Knife
Our new cookbook is out very soon — and its focus is one of our favorite ingredients: booze!
We show you how to use the cooking properties of beer, wine, bourbon and more to make your dishes pop!
We give the classic Aviation Cocktail a modern twist with our own homemade Violet Syrup. A mix of gin, lemon juice, violet syrup and maraschino cherry syrup, it’s as beautiful as it is delicious. The syrup is also great mixed with Champagne, or with club soda.
One thing we should mention upfront, if you haven’t gleaned it already from our occasional disorganized garden posts, is that we’re not really “lawn people”. We do have, behind the house, a stretch of grassed yard, but it’s not flat (so we can’t put tables or chairs out there), it’s kind of public (we live on a busy road with a lot of hiking traffic), it does nothing for the biodiversity of the area, and we hate mowing it. In short, it gets a little neglected. And because of that benign neglect, we have areas that sprout whatever the hell they want to, and luckily for us, in early spring, that’s violets. Lots, and lots, of tiny, pretty, violets.
So in our ongoing quest to rid our garden of weeds — by eating them — we bring you homemade Violet Syrup, possibly the prettiest concoction ever. And we’re using that syrup to create a version of the classic Aviation cocktail, which just happens to be perfect for a celebratory Mother’s Day brunch!
