Summer Balance: Avocado Peach Summer Salad and Mojitos

Hi!

Well - we have finally moved into our new apartment and we are so happy about it! It is in a great location, with farmers markets within a 2 minute walk almost every day. There are many restaurants and bars nearby, and it feels much more like "home" than the welcome center ever did!

One of the better things about our move... we now have an OVEN! Not just any oven - probably one of the nicer ovens I've used in my time as a baker. You don't have to wait for it to preheat: there's a fan inside the oven, so you can put your dish in and the fan heats to the correct temperature while the oven is warming up. In our Salt Lake house, I was working with a super old gas oven that I had to light myself with long matches. The oven didn't have a built in thermometer, so you had to use this old thermometer that sits in the oven to see whether or not it was at the temperature you needed it to be. And, it took FOREVER for the oven to preheat- especially in the winter. (However, it was nice in the winter because it warmed up the basement a bit 😂)

I am excited to be baking more, but I have really enjoyed cooking lately as well. So I decided to start off my blog posts, I'm going to review some recipes from a few blogs/ book/ etc. This week's blog post is focused on tasty summer recipes, starting out with this delicious Avocado Peach Summer Salad from What's Gaby Cooking! Click on the link below to make it yourself! 😊

What's Gaby Cooking - Avocado Peach Summer Salad

I want to try and start off my week's with a salad every Monday or Tuesday to kind of set the tone for the week, and this salad was perfect for a Monday!

The salad was made up of butter lettuce, fresh avocados, peaches, nectarines, and cucumbers topped with a lemon shallot vinaigrette. It was light and fresh and perfect for a hot summer day.

The recipe called for chives on top, but unfortunately the chives I had purchased for the recipe went bad in less than a day 😐😑😐 so I left them out. I think a green onion substitute would have been tasty as well, but I was sh** out of luck with those, too. 😂 Oh well.

My favorite thing about this recipe is - it's PEACH AND NECTARINE SEASON! And I got the most beautiful peach I think I've ever seen 😍

I mean - look at the color of those slices! Definitely not what I was expecting when I cut into it, but I was pleasantly surprised. 😊

For presentation of the salad, the recipe called for a large platter and uncut leaves of butter lettuce. Unfortunately I didn't have a platter/ large plate, so I used this bowl instead. I think it still looked nice! However, I felt like it made serving the salad a bit more complicated. I ended up cutting the lettuce in the bowl and then using tongs to serve the salad.

There are only a few changes I would make to this recipe for future use: for one, I like having chopped lettuce instead of whole lettuce leaves. Second, I liked the vinaigrette, but I felt like it could have been a bit sweeter - even with the sweetness of the peaches and nectarines. The vinaigrette recipe called for grated parmesan. I think I would have liked it a bit better if I left the grated parmesan out of the vinaigrette and just put it in the salad. Overall, it the salad was still quite good!

The night we made our salads was the first night we really had a big event/outing since moving to France.... or in the past YEAR since friggin' COVID started! We went to the Nice Jazz Festival and got to listen to some lovely jazz music. To go with our salad, I made some cool and refreshing mojitos.

At the beginning of COVID, we were fortunate to live in a house with nearly 6 other people, so we did not get as lonely as many people did throughout quarantine... but I will say, we started to drink a bit more, because there wasn't much else to do. So, I decided I should try and start making better, higher quality beverages that we would appreciate.

Once I started making some drinks, I was wondering why I haven't always been doing this. And then I moved to France, without a job and remembered - it's kind of an expensive hobby. It's also, obviously, not the healthiest. However, I think I drink less ever since I've moved to Europe. Just by choice. My body is happier when I don't drink very much. This is why cocktails are perfect: I can be satisfied with just having a single cocktail. 😊

In hopes of learning some new cocktail recipes (and improving the cocktail recipes I already know) I purchased an ebook on Amazon called "Mixology."

You can buy the book here!

I'm going to be honest about my thoughts on the book so far: it's okay. Maybe I should have gotten something a bit more advanced, because this book is very clearly for beginners. Everything is explained very simply, and it seems like some of the steps included in making drinks are almost too detailed. But - for a beginner, that is perfect! I would say this book is perfect for someone who has never made a drink before. I have learned from the book already, like the different types of strainers to use, some of the equipment that is very helpful in making drinks, certain techniques etc.

In conclusion - we like mojitos! I will definitely make these again - but without club soda, because in France we just have tonic water and sparkling water. (as far as I know)

Thanks for reading 😊