This is KPBS Midday Edition. I am Maureen Cavanaugh. Vacations are winding down and kids are going back to school. You have been to a few backyard barbecues and had a refreshing cocktail and dined alfresco. Have you wrong every last drop and taken the every last bite of summer foods? To do justice to the end of summer eating, who better to join us than Karen Golden, her blog is San Diego foodstuff.Thank you.I want to start with this beautiful summer salad that you have. It is a barley salad topped with Vicks. Pigs are everywhere. How does the salad come together?It is a great salad because it feels like a whole meal. It is based on barley. Whole grains are great to make you feel you are eating something substantial even if you are not cooking something some stackable -- substantial. This comes my woman in Boston who writes books on whole grains. I found this recipe and I just loved it. I love the figs. Pigs, they have such a short season that they are real treat when we get into what is the high season of pigs. That is pretty much end of summer and beginning of fall expect you cook the barley the same way ?Probably longer. You have to -- if you buy a package of barley, follow the instructions. Otherwise come you can find recipes online. You will make the barley separately. The wonderful thing about this barley is that you add a strip of lemon zest to it which adds an interesting labor. It perks it up. You will add pepper Cohen and sea salt. The barley comes labored at that point once you have cooked it. Then, you were going to combine figs and celery and green onion and toasted pine nuts. It gives you a great texture and the barley has a nice chewy texture but you will get crunched in the salary and the toasted pine nuts. It turns into a wonderful combination that you finish off with a tarragon lemon dressing.That sounds great. You have another salad.The Belela Salad, tell us about that.They tell you not to go to the market when you are hungry .I never listen to that. I by interesting things. I saw this Belela Salad at Trader Joe's. I realized this is something to make at home and I started looking at recipes when I got back to the house. I found there is a variety and variations on the thing but this is a basic Mediterranean salad. Most of us have these ingredients in hand. It is easy if you do not make dried beans, to cook dried beans, you can get canned garbanzo and black beans. It is tomatoes and red onion and parsley and mint. It is similar almost to a tabouli almost without the greens that you would find.These are nice salads that we could make on a hot day at the end of summer and really enjoyed the summer items that are available right now. Cherries are available. That season goes by fast. How can home cooks make the most of cherries ?Cherries, we would think would be a dessert. Sure, you can do a lot of things with cherries with making sorbets or making a pie or that kind of thing. But you can use it for savory dishes also which is a wonderful thing. I made what I call a cherry berry salsa. Instead of using traditional tomato -- it would be a tomato base, I used cherries and blueberries. I could've used other berries as well but I had those at home. I used pretty much the same ingredients that you would use to make a salsa. I used cilantro but I also used honey to kind of draw out the sweetness of the berries and the cherries. I used something that people who love Mexican food really enjoy which is a seasoning called [ Indiscernible ]. I sprinkled it on and that was it.You paired it with porkchops ?Yes. It was wonderful because think about how porkchops, you have an apple or sauce made with apple or this would be a great thing if you did fajitas or something and you could make tacos with of a heaters and that salsa.The weather is expected to warm up this weekend. We talked in the past about your chilled suits. Do you have any new chilled recipes you would like to share ?Yes. In terms of chilled soups, yogurt is your best friend and so is your lender. This is making smoothies. You can use yogurt or coconut milk, some do not require any of that. I recently -- I had grown some green onions. I made the idiotic mistake of pulling them almost all out at once for some reason. I wanted to see what they were and if they were growing. I had great onions and a made a soup. I combined those ingredients with fresh dill and lemon juice and yogurt and sour cream. I needed some ice water and up with them in the blender and into minutes I had soup. I sautéed some pickle crimes in butter and I put them on top is a garnish. That was good. That was the extent of the cooking.That is probably what anyone will want to do. That is extent of anyone's cooking in a next few days.Absolutely.One of my favorite things to do is use cucumber which is a cooling thing anyway and make cucumber soup with yogurt and you just need the cucumbers and I would recommend Persian or Japanese or the hothouse cucumbers that you see wrapped in plastic. Chop that up with garlic and onion. That is really good. You can add dill and chopped tomatoes at the end. I mix that up with yogurt. It is such an easy sort of refreshing soup to have. You can take -- you can buy precooked shrimp and toss it in at the end if you want protein. Get a big Hank of good sourdough bread. That is dinner.There are a host of summer food recipes on our website from Karen at www.kpbs.org. I have been speaking with Karen Golden, her blog is San Diego foodstuff where you will find more. It is so good to see you.Thank you for having me.
August is almost over and that means summer vacations are winding down and kids are going back to school.
By now you might have been to a few backyard barbecues, had a refreshing cocktail or two and dined al fresco.
But have you wrung every last drop and taken every last bite of the delights that summer foods have to offer?
San Diego food writer Caron Golden is marking the end of summer by sharing some of her go-to summer meals.
Chilled Spinach and Green Onion Soup
