My dear friend Christy had a milestone birthday a few weeks ago, so we had a belated dinner to celebrate. I wanted to do something special but I didn’t know what. I knew the dinner would need to be gluten and dairy free too, but I still felt like I needed some sort of gimmick to help me narrow the scope. Because Christy is a talented artist, I decided to try to plan a meal with courses that corresponded to the colors on an artist’s palette. I wrote out the menu on paper bags (a pinterest-inspired project) and cajoled my sister into decorating a butcher paper table runner with her gorgeous drawings (check out that dandelion!), which come to her so easily (more pictures at the end of this post).

The ROY G. BIV flowers. Henry loved this and has asked to listen to the corresponding They Might Be Giants song over and over (he now calls it ‘the flower song’). What a tender lump!

The beautiful birthday girl and her eldest daughter, Ella! Ella is in fifth grade and is oh-so-charming. Pretty impressive considering fifth grade is the worst ever. Or was that just for me? All of my most embarrassing childhood stories happened in fifth grade. But let’s not rehash them here!

Red (okay, this turned out more orange than red, but go with me here!): Andalusian Gazpacho. I love this soup, and it uses everything that’s available at the farmers’ market right now- tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, onions, and garlic. Normally you would blend up this soup with the insides of a couple slices of soft white bread to make it smooth and creamy. I thought about just omitting the bread altogether (I’m sure it would have been almost the same), but ended up using a couple tiny slices of a gluten free brown rice bread instead. It worked great!

Adorable Josie! She’s such a talented artist- she was inspired by the gorgeous drawings my sister drew and spent much of the dinner focused on replicating them exactly.

Swoon!

Orange: My latest obsession- April Bloomfield’s Carrot, Avocado, and Orange Salad. I would never ever have thought of putting these ingredients together, but they are a magical combination. The carrots are roasted in a garlicky, coriander-y olive oil, and then tossed with segmented oranges, avocado, and lemon juice.

Blue/Indigo/Violet: Blueberry, Blackberry, and Peach Crisp. Yes, this course was a cop-out, but come on, man! These three colors are nearly identical! I used this recipe as a guide, replacing the apples and pears with berries and peaches, the flour with oat flour, and the melted butter with extra virgin coconut oil. I thought it was delicious! I served it with some Coconut Bliss vanilla ice cream (DF, GF), and it was a fittingly lovely end to a meal celebrating a very lovely friend.

Thanks again to Helen for the beautiful drawings! Happy Birthday, Christy!!

For years, the Natural Gardener was the first and last item on my list of places worth visiting in Oak Hill. Shitty traffic and shittier restaurants were items on my list of reasons to avoid it. But the tables seem to be turning there. It started a few years ago with Jack Allen’s Kitchen (from the chef behind Z’Tejas, and the father of the chef behind Barley Swine), which is a bit yuppie, yes, but has some really great offerings, including a fabulous burger. In recent months a few other restaurants have hitched their wagons to Oak Hill’s star: Your Mom’s Burger Bar has announced plans to open a second location there soon, the folks behind Curra’s have opened Senor Buddy’s, and most notably, Pieous opened there earlier this year.

Pieous sells fantastic wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas with lots of house made toppings (mozzarella, sausage, etc), slow-smoked pastrami, and enchanting desserts. We stopped by early on a Friday evening to check it out. Here’s how it went down!

These fine fellows had a good time watching the pizzas fly in and out of the wood-burning oven (my two fellows on the left I mean. I don’t know the fellow on the right, but he probably enjoyed himself too). These pizzas crisp and blister in the fire in about a minute.

This is the Smoky Italian- crushed tomatoes, house made mozzarella, house smoked Italian sausage, and spicy onions on top of their lovely Neapolitan-style crust. I just loved it. The sausage was perfect- I loved the fine texture- and the spicy onions made it really special. The crust is made with a wise old sourdough starter (very cool), and has a great pillow-y chew.

My darling boy! He devoted most of his time at the table to plucking bits of sausage from my pizza and putting them into the little pepperoni cups on Andy’s. He really really likes meat. [Side note- we went swimming at Deep Eddy today, and promised him lots of meat afterwards (we were going to go to La Barbecue). Well, he wore himself out at the pool and fell asleep as soon as we got in the car so we went home. As soon as we got him into bed he woke up devastated and kept repeating “EAT. LOTS. OF. MEAT?!” in his saddest, loudest voice. It was too late for La Barbecue (it’s getting a pretty sizable line these days!), so we went to Rudy’s- a gas station/BBQ shop joint which sounds horrifying but has its place in the world. Henry ate his weight in smoked sausage.]

My beloved surprised no one by choosing the pepperoni pizza. Really, though, this is the margarita pizza, with more of that house made mozzarella, topped with several fistfuls of a high-quality pepperoni. It was so great! Andy and I are huge fans of Neapolitan pies, and we both decided we liked these better than our longstanding favorite, House Pizzeria.

When the Pieous folks set up shop they inherited an old smoker from the previous tenants. They are putting it to good use by slow-smoking the most wonderful pastrami. I loved the pizza but I may have liked this even more- it’s moist, smoky, and peppery and what more could you want, really? They serve it with their house made sourdough bread, mustards, pickles, and onions.

Please forgive my terrible photo of this half-eaten blueberry pie. I snapped it hurriedly so I could steal some more bites before Henry and Andy gobbled it up. My dear friend Raven brought me a slice of their banana cream pie a few weeks before we went, and that pie, like this one, was just classy as hell. They use a lighter touch with the sugar than most pie shops in Texas, and you can taste that everything is made from scratch. The blueberries are the small wild ones, with none of the goopy cornstarch-thickened sauce I’m used to in a blueberry pie. They’re topped with a simple oat streusel and the whole thing is just perfect. They also sell chocolate chip cookies that are bigger than your head and look fabulous, in case you needed a final push to check this place out.

We got there around 6:30 on a Friday, and there was already a sizable line. By the time we left the line was almost out the door. Consider going on a weeknight or earlier on a weekend or risk them selling out of pizza or pastrami, which I hear happens fairly often. It’s such a charming place- I hope you’ll check it out!

Pieous

Happy Summer! I had that Joni Mitchell song, The Circle Game, in my head all day yesterday. It really is nuts to me that it’s already midyear. That it’s been 3 months since I’ve written a blog post. That I am one week away from being in my third trimester(!!!). The seasons, they go round and round.

I had the urge to celebrate the solstice this year with lots of kids and mud and fire and sunshine-y food, and my dear friends were kind enough to join me in making this happen. Some of my favorite moments:

Cousins making mud pies! Henry spent literally hours at this table. I love that little Clara is playing a wooden recorder in the background.

Ashley brought a beautiful craft- she sewed a loop into squares of linen, brought fresh flowers from her garden, and then the kids got to smash the flowers into the fabric with hammers and mallets. Then Ashley threaded some twine through the loop and used a fig branch to make a hanging rod for their flower art- so lovely! Needless to say, the kids really enjoyed smashing things with hammers.

How to roast food over a campfire when it’s 95 degrees outside- get yourself some hole-y rocks! I had big plans for throwing fist fulls of stuff into the fire to make sparks (you can apparently use plain old sugar for this?) and change the color of the flame (epsom salts are made of magnesium and will make a white flame, and borax will make a green flame?), but forgot about my little tubs of combustibles until after the party. Next year!

My favorite was watching all the sweet kids run around outside on a summery evening.  I am officially in full-on nesting mode.

Because I love food, and it’s 90% of what I think about when planning a celebration, here’s what we ate:

• Summer Rolls with Ginger/Miso/Carrot Dipping Sauce – I thought that picture of summer rolls was so lovely, but I didn’t really follow the recipe.  I just put all the veg I had into summer rolls (lemony sorrel, basil, grated carrots, peppers, and cucumber) and served it with one of my very favorite dressings. If you like the carrot+ginger dressing at Japanese restaurants, you will love this!
• Hummus with Vegetables – I follow Melissa Clark’s suggestion of serving hummus in a shallow bowl or plate and liberally dousing the top with good olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and pepper- it makes a huge difference.
• Sausage, Pepper, and Onion Skewers – I roasted some sausage from the farmer’s market at 400 degrees, then sliced it and skewered it with peppers and onions. That way, I got to do it ahead of time and folks could reheat/crisp the sausage in the campfire.
• Peach and Yellow Tomato Salsa with Tortilla Chips – Peaches, tomatoes, red onion, jalapeno, lime juice, and salt. I was happy with how this turned out!
• Corn on the Cob– Henry is a huge fan of Boggy Creek Farm’s corn. So much so that he took several bites out of each of the 8 raw corn cobs. Our fellow solstice-ees were very obliging and ate them anyway.
• Rainbow Fruit Skewers – This was Henry’s passion project- he talked about skewering the “strawberry! mango! kiwi!” for days ahead of time.
• Lemonade Jelly with Mint – A grown-up take on jello. I subbed mint for the basil because my garden is overrun with it and it turned out nicely. In spite of it being a bit on the tart side, Henry loved it. He seemed to relish the feel of it too- he ran his hummus-y little hands all over the cubes! Also, after sitting out on the table in our 80 degree house for an hour or two, this melted into a vaguely jiggly puddle. I’ll eat it faster next time!
• Hippie Crispie Treats – I made these without the extra chocolate on top and they were still wonderful. A lovely alternative to the traditional kind.
• S’mores. Naturally. Thanks, Joanna!