This recipe for Peach Blueberry Cobbler came up as I was casting about looking for ways to use up buttermilk. It doesn’t use much buttermilk but that didn’t seem like a good enough reason to skip it!

I halved the recipe, mostly because I only had a half-pint of blueberries. This also meant it would fit into my ramekins, which is a great way for the two of us to portion out baked desserts like this.

This is very simple to pull together, and if you’re making it in a baking pan, you only dirty one bowl. The only change I made was to use lime juice instead of lemon, since I didn’t have a lemon. To fill the ramekins, I counted the peach slices but just let the blueberries go wherever they wanted. And I tried to get a roughly even amount of batter on top of each.

These were pretty perfect in 25 minutes in my oven (on top of a quarter sheet pan for ease moving them around). The fruit turned out the slightest bit too sweet, so if I make these again I might try dialing back the sugar a bit.

I made them in the afternoon, so the first night we ate them room temperature, and the second night we warmed them up in the microwave. Delicious either way!

At the peak of summer we try to eat as much corn on the cob as possible, because it’s so good this time of year. This year I’ve been exploring recipes that use fresh corn and recently decided to make this Corn, Bacon, and Parmesan Pasta from the Smitten Kitchen blog.

This recipe comes together in a flash, so you’ll want to prep your corn and bacon before you get going. I managed to get the bacon perfectly crispy without burning it, which was very satisfying. You’ll want to keep a close eye on how it’s cooking up, and as it starts to crisp, move it around the pan frequently. That way you won’t have any bits that are getting blasted by hot spots in your pan.

We used fresh cavatelli that we picked up at the farmers market. It’s sold frozen and was more than we needed for the recipe, so I had to take a few minutes to pry off 8 ounces, but that didn’t take long. It was a fun shape for this dish as pieces of corn nestled into the cavity.

This is a very simple and light dinner. We got two dinner servings out of it, but we didn’t have anything on the side. If you add a side salad; a green veggie; or a plate of heirloom tomatoes with salt, pepper, and olive oil; you could stretch to 3 or 4 servings. This would also be very easy to scale up.

One of Deb’s latest recipes is this Buffalo Chicken Cobb Salad, which I made less than two weeks after she posted it to the blog. I don’t do them super often, but we like an entree salad here and this combines our preferred cobb salad format with buffalo chicken. What’s not to like? (This isn’t a Deb, but another favorite cobb salad variation is this Autumn Cobb Salad, which will basically take any roasted squash you can throw at it.)

For veggies I used a mix of cucumber, celery, carrot, bell pepper, and tomatoes. But as she says, you can really do whatever combination of veggies you like. I did skip the blue cheese because I’m just not a fan. I thought about substituting cheddar, but I didn’t think we’d miss the cheese, and I was right.

I did a pretty simple baked chicken thigh for this. They got a brief marinade in some olive oil, salt, pepper, Penzey’s Mural of Flavor spice mix, and a splash of champagne vinegar. I prepped an entire two-pound package because I know we’ll use up the leftovers.

This came together pretty easily, though it is one of those meals where there’s a lot of chopping. But that also means there’s a lot you can do ahead of time. Basically you can prep this entire meal ahead of time, and I don’t think you’d even need to do it at the same time.

The Baby Wedge Salad with Avocado and Pickled Onions caught my eye immediately when Deb posted it to the blog this spring. I like to do taco night, but I struggle with a side dish. Last summer I was throwing together corn salads, which is fine but not quite what I was looking for. Normally I don’t gravitate towards iceberg lettuce, but the form factor intrigued me and I knew this would feel light and refreshing in the summer.

Overall this dish was a winner! The presentation is really fun, and the crunch of the iceberg is great with the various other toppings. It’ll look like too much of everything, but you want that abundance with iceberg. Especially since there isn’t really a dressing on this.

The one major hitch I ran into was that I accidentally burned the first batch of pepitas. If you’re also starting with roasted ones, start that one minute timer the second you start to see bubbling, and be ready to take them off the heat right away.

I also encountered a minor hitch, which was that I didn’t have enough red wine vinegar to pickle the onions. So I just used some from a big jar of them we keep in the fridge. The flavor profile isn’t quite the same since I made these with white vinegar, but I don’t think we missed much.