Dinner in the Garden 2014

For the last couple years, each summer we have hosted a dinner in the garden where we set up a formal dinner outside and celebrate the wonderful foods that we are growing in our own and local farmers gardens. We missed last year with all of our remodeling so we were excited to get back on our normal routine.  I love creating the menu and cooking some fun new foods and sharing them with our friends.

Seared Scallops with Tomato-Lemongrass Sauce

It's my last weekend at home without the family. The last two weeks have seemed like months! It will certainly be nice to have them home this week.

Had some more friends over this weekend and we had a fantastic dinner together. I started off the day by visiting the Mill City Farmers Market. It's a great little market along the river in Minneapolis. I'd heard a lot about it but hadn't ever visited before. Chef Shack also sets up there and I've been dying to get some of the great breakfast items they do there. After breakfast, I picked up some great produce including mushrooms, onions, rainbow chard, and even some fresh chevre. Produce from our garden included tomatoes, basil, chives, mint and cilantro. Picked up some scallops at Costco and we had our dinner menu.

Cooking The Market

One of our favorite date nights is to go volunteer at Kitchen In The Market, a local commercial kitchen and cooking school. When I was thinking of ideas to submit for a Foodbuzz 24x24 event, I immediately thought of taking a spin on one of their most popular cooking classes; Cooking the Market.

The idea behind the class is to create a meal based on whatever is currently available in the market, no matter what season it is. It's a fantastic class that always produces something different and fun to cook.

It has been a beautiful, early spring here for us Minnesotans but we're still not into the full on farmers markets quite yet. That doesn't mean that there's no local product available however. One of my goals in sharing this event with some of our friends was to show them the amazing products we have available right here in our local area, all year round as well as get them excited about the great food season to come!

Dinner In The Garden ~ A Summer Dinner Party

In true Minnesota summer fashion, it drizzled almost all day long. It was the day of our Dinner party and normally it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but this dinner party was planned to be outside, to celebrate summer, or what was supposed to be our summer. Then it broke. No more rain, a warm evening with just a light breeze. No bugs in sight and then the sun even broke out of the clouds and poured over our beautiful garden, providing the perfect evening to sit on the patio, surrounded by lush greenery and celebrate the fresh foods of the season.

Coconut-Vegetable Curry

This last week as I walked through the Minneapolis Farmer's market I decided to pick out some ingredients that I haven't used before or not recently at least. I ended up with leeks, thai eggplant, thai and cayenne peppers, beets, green beans, eggplant and zucchini. I knew it would require some more research to use some of these but I needed some new inspiration.