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Broccoli salad is a very versatile dish that can be made in an endless variety of ways. Here is a breakdown of the most popular ingredients and dressings.

1-Ingredients:

2 heads of fresh broccoli (cut the flower into bite sized pieces)

Chopped Vegetables (onions, celery, carrots and cauliflower)

6 – 8 strips of fried bacon (crumbled)

Cheese (any choice you want)

Fruits (grapes, cranberries, apples or mandarin oranges)

Nuts or sunflower seeds

Combine all ingredients together.

2-Dressings:

a. The standard dressing for this salad is a basic mayonnaise/vinegar/sugar mix:

1 cup mayonnaise

1/4 cup vinegar or lemon or lime juice

1/4 cup sugar (artificial sweetener may be used)

Yoghurt (optional)

Just mix all the ingredients together

b. An oil/vinegar dressing can also be used:

1/2 cup salad oil

1/4 cup vinegar (flavored cider or wine vinegar)

1/4 cup sugar(optional)

1/2 tsp. salt

Spices (optional)

Mix all the ingredients together

c. Your favorite bottled dressing can be used as well. Any creamy or Italian style dressing will work fine on a broccoli salad . A good one to try is 3-cheese ranch.

3-More Stuff:

Here’s a few various items that could be added to make your salad something original:

* Any canned vegetable such as peas, corn or beans(black, kidney, garbanzo, waxed, etc.).

* Fresh vegetables such as mushrooms, chives, bean sprouts, green beans, cucumber and bell peppers.

* Seafood can make it interesting: shrimp, scallops, salmon, and calamari are good additions.

4-The Method:

* Add broccoli flowers and any other ingredients you are using to your salad bowl. If you are using crumbled bacon or bacon bits add them just before serving.

* Add your dressing, mix and refrigerate 2-4 hours or overnight.

* Stir salad again before serving.

Lemon Meringue Pie appears to say hot temperatures, maybe as it’s as yellow as sun and has clouds of sweet meringue. Easy to like, it definitely was a real challenge to make till now. Here is a recipe that is fast and easy but still has that homemade flavor you covet.

Beginning with a lemon bar mix gives it a delightful citrus flavor, while eggs and sugar make it taste so fresh and rich. Serve the pie warm from the stove for oohs and ahs, or for simple Lemon Meringue Bars, simply make the recipe in an 8-inch square pan and serve chilled.

Lemon Meringue Pie

Lemon Pie:

1 package Krusteaz Lemon Bar Mix (1 pouch each lemon filling mix and complete crust)

3 whole eggs

1/3 cup water

Meringue:

3 egg whites

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

1/4 cup sugar

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

For the Lemon Pie:

In a lightly greased 9 inch pie pan press the full pouch of complete crust firmly into the bottom. Bake it for 8 minutes. In a Mixing bowl mix together the lemon filling mix, water and eggs until it is well blended. Pour the filling into the curst and bake for 22 to 26 minutes or until the center of the pie does not jiggle when shaken and the top begins to brown.

For the Meringue:

With an electric mixer, mix the egg whites and the cream of tartar in a medium speed until it is frothy. Add the sugar gradually (1 tbsp at a time), when all sugar has been added mix it in high speed until stiff glossy peaks form. Spread the meringue over the baked pie and bake an additional 10-15 minutes or until it is lightly golden brown.

Within it is warm; the fruit bowl sits lusciously on the window ledge, bursting with seasonal lots peaches, mangoes, grapes as well as the year round banana. All of the fruit is at point of perfect ripeness, begging to be eaten right now before it descends into a pool of pulp.

It might have stayed in the refrigerator and been brought out in cost-effective relays to ripen for a day, but there are a few things about a full fruit bowl, a guarantee of health and succulence, that time and time again makes me organize it as a still life, as I empty the shopping, only to be wrong-footed when it all ripens at the same time. Often the kids are only troubling to eat apples, which last for all eternity in the refrigerator. Even kids, who would not give a second peek to raw fruit, can generally be beguiled by a smoothie. It’s also a rare treat for adults, a simple thing to do for visitors who drop by, when it is too hot for tea. Any ripe fruit can be employed, even if it is a touch overripe, as long as it smells good and not fermenting. You get a mega-dose of vitamins, plus calcium from the yoghurt and milk, just about a meal in itself.

Giving a recipe for a smoothie is not exactly required. It is dependent on what you have in the house already.

Use this example as a template and evolve and change it as you like. So long as you use fruit that’s actually ripe, it will be mouth-watering.

The one necessary piece of gear is a liquidizer or blender, without that I’d just have to coerce feed the youngsters the fruit as is, it is way too laborious to puree fruit by hand on a hot summer’s day.

The joy making smoothies is the effortlessness. No set quantities, but as a guide I’d use one mango with 1 or 2 bananas.

Just peel and stone the fruit, fling it into the liquidizer with an enormous spoon of plain yoghurt and a cup of milk and blitz. If it is too thick for your liking add more milk. Chuck in some ice cubes for instant chill factor.

A tip for working with mangoes: without peeling, cut off both the long sides as near to the stone as you can, cut the flesh in a criss-cross fashion to make 1cm cubes, without going right thru the skin, then push the skin up to invert the cubes into a mango hedgehog. The kids eat them like this and a particularly sloppy business it, needs a bath after.

Suggestions for fruit combinations:

Mango and banana

Pear, berry and banana

Peach and berry

Strawberry and banana

Peach, apricot and banana

Any fruit in the whole wide world can be added to this list, experiment with whatever is in season and make up your own combinations.

Bananas make a good background for most other fruits and give a good velvety texture, besides being the most likely fruit to have around overripe. If you want to move away from the healthy fruit scenario, you can use bananas with a few teaspoons of hot chocolate to make a scrummy, decadent milkshake. Or go the whole way and put a blob of vanilla ice-cream in too. I remember as a child, my mother adding a raw egg to ours to build us up. It made it wonderfully frothy, but then nobody worried about salmonella in those days – I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a guaranteed source of salmonella-free eggs.

If you have berries of any sort stashed in the freezer, you can throw in a handful still frozen and watch the color transform as you blitz. Mulberries, blackberries, youngberries, blueberries all add deep color and plenty of useful nutrients, loads of anti-oxidants – instant immune boosters in winter, if you can keep them until then. I usually freeze strawberries as puree, when the strawberry harvest overwhelms us, so can bring it out for a change later on in the year. The other berries I freeze whole, stalks and leaves picked off, so they are ready to use. You can also buy frozen berries in mixed packs, which would work fine.

Whatever fruit you’re using, let the children press the buttons on the liquidizer and then dole out the smoothie, in glasses with straws, easy in the knowledge that the vitamin quota for the day is being filled.

There are a few things gratifying about the word pudding. It brings connotations of comfort, of taste bud – tantalizing things, rich and delicious.

Pudding counsels something chic, delicate, restrained – a sweet mouthful to close off a meal.

Our family goes in for puddings for important occasions and Sun. lunches. We do not have them each day, so when we do, we’d like it all : comforting over-indulgence at its best no refined twiddles of patisserie here, though we do not do the steamed, stodgy stuff either. We have got a number of recipes that are firm family favorites and need to be considered and a list of recipes from cookery books to try – so puddings oust the main course as the focus of discussion and decision making. The occasion dictates the main course roast lamb for Easter, turkey and gammon for Xmas , no quandaries there. Choosing just some puddings from the family repertoire, though , is a painful process. Xmas and New Year close together lightens the dilemma what we do not have for Xmas , we are able to do for New Year’s Eve, but on other occasions leaving out a specific fave recipe is too hard. We regularly finish up with a variety of four puddings ( though , before you are too frightened, we are customarily feeding 12 or more folks ) and as a consequence feel stuffed to the gills later, as gluttony necessarily overcomes caution and all 4 need to be sampled.

2 of our family staple recipes come from my mother-in-law, who as a mummy of 6 on a small budget had to use a large amount of invention to feed her folks. Guava fool ( pureed guava mixed with condensed milk and cream ) is one of her recipes that rates high on the must-have list thru winter when guavas are in season. Choccie pudding is a year round urgent, a chocolate custard poured over boudoir biscuits which soak it up and melt delectably into a velvety gloop.

I have proudly managed to add one of my folks pudding recipes to the essential list Summer Pudding.

My mummy still makes it, frequently with blackberries culled from the hedgerows, as well as the more normal redcurrants and raspberries. Here in SA we’ve got a different palette of berries to work with and most often use youngberries, mulberries with some strawberries ( strawberries all alone do not work, you want the acidity of some of the darker berries ). Here is the recipe:

Summer Pudding

1 loaf of slightly stale white bread

About 1kg of mixed berries: blackberries, raspberries, youngberries, mulberries, redcurrants the choice is yours. Apple can be added if you are short of berries.

Sugar (the amount of sugar depends on the sweetness of the fruit, if the fruit is sweet you would only need a small amount of sugar)

Into a pan put the fruit and a sprinkling of sugar and bring it to a boil or wait until the fruits are soft. Softer fruits only need a shorter amount of cooking, so check if the fruit needs a little more time cooking.

Cut the bread into thick slices, take off the crusts and line a pudding basin with it. It needs to fit tightly but don’t squash it.  Keep three slices for the lid. When the fruit has stewed, use a slotted spoon to transfer the fruit into the bread-lined bowl. Most of the juice gets left behind but keep it to pour over the pudding later. Fill the bowl with the fruit and top with a tight layer of bread. Place a plate or saucer on top and weight it, so the fruit compresses and the juice soaks into the bread. Leave in the fridge for at least a few hours, but better if overnight.

Now our main preoccupation on our smallholding is establishing enough fruit trees and berry plants to ensure a year round supply of pudding potential in our freezers, but maybe that would make them less special. The seasonal aspect of guavas and berries mean excitement when they come back into season, gluttony for a few weeks until common sense sets in. Then we put a supply away in the freezer for a few special treats later in the year, the season ends and is followed by the next thing. A pudding for each season, a season for each pudding.

Each end of term at my daughters’ kindergarten, reveals us baking cheese biscuits for their holiday. They’re the ideal answer to the quandary of providing a treat break for faculty banquets and holidays, that doesn’t break the school rules of minimizing sugar but is still fun for the children. They’re also an essential item at birthday parties for my youngsters.

The last birthday had me desperately rolling and cutting out these cheese biscuits, between making an attempt to get a roast lunch on the table before the afternoon party. The first plan had been for the youngsters to do all of the work, to keep them entertained and gainfully employed in the lull before the party, but the birthday girl was too busy playing with her new toys and the others too busy bewailing the fact it became so long before their birthdays, so I was left with the job at the very end.

This still needed a fair quantity of timely intervention, to get the dough to hold together before disappointment set in and make sure my youngest got an opportunity to cut out some shapes without eradicating her bigger sister’s meticulously ordered design. I also had to get a bunch of bread done while they were cooking, as we had finished up the last cut at lunch, but that used up the remainder of my energy reserves so I settled on baked potatoes as a little effort dinner. The stove was on anyhow for the biscuits and bread so it was all in help of energy conservation mine and the planet’s in equal measure.

Here is the recipe for the cheese biscuits:

100g/4oz finely grated cheese

50g/2oz self-rising flour

25g/1oz soft butter

A pinch of cayenne pepper

In a mixing bowl put together all the ingredients, knead the mixture for 5 minutes or until it forms a soft dough. Roll the dough on a lightly floured surface and using a cookie cutter cut into whatever shapes you have.

Bake at 200C/400F for 10-12 minutes or until golden. Cool on a rack.

The cheese biscuits go down very well with adults too. At the last birthday party one father polished off a whole plateful, rather than sample the birthday cake. They would make a great accompaniment to drinks before dinner. You could cut them into long strips and give one twist to make them into cheese straws, then sprinkle them with extra parmesan or find a more sophisticated shape as a cookie cutter – the star shapes would still be good. Mind you most laid-back adults would be just as happy as the kids to be eating pigs and bunnies!