Food

Four Pennsylvania cooks were declared winners in the seventh annual Pennsylvania "Simply Delicious, Simply Nutritious" Vegetable Recipe Contest Cook-Off.

First-time finalist Karen Parish of Fleetwood, received the highest score of the contest for her "Butternut Squash and Apple Soup." The other first prizes in the three other categories were won by Elysa Boffo of Camp Hill, Debra Deis of Harrisburg, and Kathy Rohrbaugh of Shrewsbury. The Cook Off was held on Friday, Aug. 6 at the Olewine Center for Culinary Arts at Harrisburg Area Community College in Harrisburg.

Following the axiom that bacon makes everything better, I decided to use it to jazz up that staple of summer celebrations fruit salad.

I started with a basic fruit salad of watermelon, strawberries and diced apples. I then dressed that with a simple vinaigrette of olive oil and lemon juice spiked with salt and pepper. You could stop right there, because a splash of acid (the vinaigrette) does wonders to bring out the sweetness of fruit.

Whenever the word "veggie" modifies "burger," many people taste skepticism more than anything else.

While it's true that many veggie burgers are nothing more than mushy patties of ground up produce, this portobello burger with sun-dried tomato mayo is a burger of a different class.

Summer is a busy time for our family and we were digging for fast, simple recipes every night last week. Thanks to some creative planning, each meal took 20 minutes or less to prepare and used inexpensive ingredients we had in the pantry or freezer.

My favorite trick is to plan meals that work together throughout the week. Instead of planning five to seven separate meals, use the ingredients from one in one or two other meals.