From Apartment Therapy → 10 DIY String Light Setups for Summer Entertaining
“Planning an outdoor party or gathering or looking to bring the summer outdoors in? Get crafting with one of these 10 summer string light projects.”
Do you have any delicious plans for the long weekend? We have some great recipes this week perfect for entertaining, indoor and outdoor. If you’re going on a picnic, make our easy potato salad recipe, or spice things up with pasta salad with roasted peppers, tuna and oregano. If you’re looking for something sweet, you need to try the two-ingredient toasted marshmallow strawberries, or go all out with a lemon poppyseed bundt cake. And whatever you’re doing, don’t forget to cheers to the weekend with a sparkling spring sangria!
Q: I recently received a bottle of cherry balsamic vinegar. Other than using it to dress salads, or perhaps to top a baked brie, I’m at a loss! What are some recipes that allow the flavors to shine/complement other ingredients?
Sent by Vicky
This Memorial Day Weekend, you won’t find me outside grilling or shaking out my tent. Nope, you’ll find this book nerd curled up on the couch (or perhaps, if it’s warm enough, a park bench) with my nose in one of these three just-released food memoirs: Delancey by Molly Wizenberg, A Farm Dies Once a Year by Arlo Crawford, and Under Magnolia by Frances Mayes. Think I can get through all of them before we have to go back to work?!
If Memorial Day has you restocking your home bar this weekend (if for no other reason than to make this amazing strawberry spring sangria), here’s something to consider: you don’t need a bar cart! You can have a sweet home bar setup with just a shelf and a few lacquered trays.
4.4 / 5 Stars | 5 Reviews
by Allyson R
“Fresh gazpacho is an easy way to load up on vegetables on a hot summer day. Chill in refrigerator before serving for best results.”
Guess what we’re making this weekend?
I have been obsessed with make soft pretzels at home since about 16 seconds after I learned that you could, 7 years ago. For something that looks so twisted, dark and complex, they’re actually simple to make, requiring only a basic bread dough (flour, water, salt and yeast), formed into pretzel knot (a rope with the ends twisted together, then folded back over itself), dipped briefly in a baking soda solution, salted, and baked until pretty. This is almost exactly the way they are made in southern Germany and surrounding pretzel-loving regions, save one bit: instead of a baking soda bath, the pretzels are dipped in a lye solution. Lye, as in the poison. As in the stuff used in oven cleaners, drain openers, the kind of thing you shouldn’t touch without a mask and latex gloves, the kind of thing no sane cook would bother with at home.
Or so this was the case nearly a decade ago. In the time since, as the DIY/handmade/homemade ethos has swept the food-curious population, things that once seemed adorably old-fashioned (pressure cookers, water bath canning, freezer jams, just to begin) or just plain nuts to do at home (making you own bitters, butter, or barley hops) have become delightfully mainstream, and I suspect directly related to this shift, the last five times I’ve read about pretzel-making at home, seemingly sane people with their whole lives ahead of them have suggested that you, another seemingly sane person who probably didn’t have Dabble In Harmful Chemicals Because This Food Blogger Told Me To on your holiday weekend agenda, should go buy lye, done some gloves and goggles and make Laugenbrezeln as if you were a 10th generation baker in Bavaria. No big deal at all.
… Read the rest of soft pretzel buns and knots on smittenkitchen.com
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