Easy Recipes for Summer Entertaining and Eating

June 3, 2023 Janet Lorusso

Since I just set up the deck for the season, which you can read about here ICYMI, I hosted a little cocktail hour for a few friends to christen the new furniture.

PSA: If you want to maintain an air of elegance at your outdoor party, please use real dishes and actual silverware for anything that isn’t finger food.

Pretty paper napkins are fine, but plastic forks? Not my fave. Even my IG byline says “actively banishing fluorescent lights and plastic forks from the planet” 🤣 So that’s where I stand on the subject. You, of course, can do whatever you want.

For easy and delicious summer entertaining, a charcuterie platter and a platter of dried fruit, gingersnap cookies, and candied nuts accompanied wine and Italian soda offerings.

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But to level up the choices, I added these three super simple offerings:

Blue cheese w/ honey drizzle

This one is really just an extension of the charcuterie platter, but stands on its own.

Offer a wedge of the best blue cheese you can find (I like Great Hill Blue, a local favorite), add a small container of good quality honey and a honey drizzler, along with pita crackers. For bonus flavor you can also offer some toasted walnut pieces.

Guests can assemble a cracker topped with a smear of blue cheese and drizzled with honey (and optionally garnished with walnuts) for an exquisite, sophisticated bite of salty-sweet.

Strawberry Crostini

This is so pretty in addition to being delicious! I was drooling when I saw this recipe from Barbara on the Mantel and Table Blog.

This is simple with slices of fresh baguette topped with whipped ricotta, sliced strawberries, a sprinkle of chopped fresh mint leaves, and balsamic glaze (or reduction or cream), layered in that order and topped with a grind of black pepper.

Barbara has the instructions for making your own balsamic reduction if you need it, but I already had a bottle of balsamic glaze from the supermarket in my pantry that worked well, and I’m all about short cuts that don’t compromise the flavor!

For the whipped ricotta, I used a 15 oz tub of whole milk ricotta, 1/4 cup olive oil, and 1/2 tsp salt and whipped it with an immersion blender (super easy and an essential kitchen tool!)

Watermelon Feta Salad

We had watermelon on hand and some leftover crumbled feta in the fridge, so this falls into the category of “ingredients we happened to have”, and it turned out to be a fabulous favorite. So much so, that I made it two days in a row…back by popular demand!

I turned to Serious Eats to see what ingredients they suggested and loosely followed their recipe.

For my no fuss version I included: cubed melon from 1/4 of a seedless watermelon, about 1/4 cup of crumbled feta, the juice of 1/2 a lemon, grated lemon rind from 1/2 a lemon (using the larger hole version of my favorite microplane tool), about 1 Tbsp mint leaves from the garden snipped into pieces, and a drizzle of olive oil and cracked pepper and then tossed it all together.

This is another sweet-salty combination and soooo good!

I’m delighted that we had nearly a week of summer weather to enjoy the deck before we plunged into cold and wet weather for the next few days. Holding onto hope we see the sun again sometime soon before we all mildew! For now, we are back to hot tea and lemon ginger scones…indoors!