Garden Get Together

I'm having some girlfriends over today

and we're going to eat our lunch in the garden. So I'm starting with cold gazpacho soup

Next, how about a creamy fettuccine chicken salad? It's just perfect for a beautiful afternoon

Then I'm whipping up a luscious cherry vanilla ice cream dessert. Finally, a refreshing avocado goat cheese dip

Celebrate the sunshine today, y'all, and step outside, because today we're having a garden get-together

You know, I'm planning kind of a lighter menu for the girls because down here the girls just love their vegetables

So I'm going to make a nice cold gazpacho soup. And there's really no wrong or right for this recipe

It's kind of whatever you like. I've got about two pounds of diced tomatoes

So I've got all my tomatoes chopped, except for one. So we'll finish chopping him up

Now you can take this any way you want to. In fact, I've probably never made two pots of gazpacho the very same

And you know what else? I probably never said the word gazpacho the same way twice either

It's one of those words that, you know, kind of just really gets all caught up in my tongue

But anyway, I think y'all know what I'm talking about. All right, so I'm just going to chop this up a little bit

And you can see up here to my right, I've got one of those in-bowl blenders

because I want to just have everything chopped up, maybe just half of it, a little bit finer than the rest

so it'll produce that juice. So we got our bell peppers, and I'm chopping up a third of a cup of yellow bell pepper

just like I did with the red and the green. And this is cilantro now

I'm chopping up about a third of a cup. Now I'm going to mince up two nice fat cloves of garlic

I've got a cucumber over here, and we're going to take it

and you can seed it or not seed it. If you don't like the seeds in your cucumber

all you have to do is just run your spoon down the center

and that'll pull the seeds right out. Whether you seed or don't seed, that's up to you

I love the cucumber in this soup. It's just so fresh, and especially during the summer down here

because all of our vegetables are coming in so good and so fresh

Since I've seeded half of this, we'll use half seeded, and then the other half I'm going to use with the seeds in it

Mmm. Love cucumbers. All right

Now let's add all of our vegetables to our tomatoes. And look at those colors

Just come alive in there. and lastly I'm adding a half a cup of purple onion

and now we're going to take our blender and we're just going to kind of blend this up now some

people like their soup pureed I happen to like mine chunky I love to see all the interesting

components of the soup, and it's just pretty. So I'm just going to use this blender because I don't want to blend it to death

I just want to break it down a little bit. Whoops! I think I'm getting vegetables slung all in my face

Now, see, that looks just about right. I love the way that looks

All right. So a little salt. A little pepper. A couple of tablespoons of a sherry vinegar

Give it a little kick. I'm going to add about a fourth of a cup of olive oil

All right. And here an unusual ingredient that I going to be adding But I going to throw in one cup of breadcrumbs And that the great thing about recipes and cooking

You can do them to suit your taste. But those breadcrumbs are going to give it some substance to it

Now the last ingredient I'm going to add is a tomato water

All you have to do is drop you a couple of fresh tomatoes down into your food processor, puree them, and then strain them

So that's ready to go in the fridge for about four to eight hours

You want this to be nice and chilled. You know, the thing that makes this so good, especially during hot weather, is have this just ice, ice cold

Mmm. So good. I love what the cilantro does to it. It's delicious

I'm just dipping up my soup in a bell pepper. Makes a great little serving bowl

See how pretty that looks? Coming up, how about a creamy fettuccine chicken salad

Then I'm whipping up a luscious cherry vanilla ice cream dessert. And finally, a refreshing avocado goat cheese dip

Hey, y'all, welcome back. I want to share with y'all a chicken fettuccine recipe that I just love

I've got four chicken breasts on my cookie sheet, And I've cut them into strips, and they almost look like a chicken tender

I'm just going to drizzle it with some oil. Now I'm going to just salt and pepper it

A little black pepper. All right. Now I've got a couple of tablespoons of fresh chopped thyme

And I like that because it'll like hang on to our chicken good

So a couple of tablespoons of fresh thyme. All right, now let's move our chicken on to the oven

We're going to bake this in a 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes

So there we go. Now, I said, you know, I thought our pasta looked done, and it is

I'm using a fresh refrigerated fettuccine pasta. So we'll pull that out and let that drain

We'll sit that back down in there. Give this a couple of shakes

And into a bowl that'll give me enough room to move the pasta around in the dressing

All right, now to make the dressing so simple, I'm gonna use a half a cup of green onions

a fourth of a cup of basil, a fourth of a cup of parsley

two cups of mayonnaise, and I'm just gonna eyeball that. And this pasta will soak up that mayonnaise

And I think that's very close to two cups. It'd be about a half a container of this mayonnaise

And let me tell y'all where I first had this salad. I was invited up to Atlanta, our state capital, to a luncheon

And this is the dish that they served. After lunch, I thought it was just so good, I ran and found the chef

And I said, hey, I'm Paula Deen. I have a little restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, and I so thought your lunch was so good

and I just wanted to tell you. He said, well, I'm so glad that you liked it

Would you like the recipe? And I said, please, by all means

So we stood there in the hall, and he gave me the recipe

Now, to me, the ingredient that made this so good was the fresh basil he put in it

And this just goes right into our dressing. So in that goes

And I got a few more green onion tops. I think I'm just going to throw those in, too

So there they go. All right. Then I'm going to add about a teaspoon of house seasoning

So that got our salt our pepper and our garlic Then I going to add about that much of seasoning salt

And then I'm going to add a little fresh lemon juice. You know, it's so funny, I don't even remember what that meeting was about

Can't tell you why I was up there. The only thing I remember is lunch

You know, it kind of reminds me of my school days. I always did very well at lunchtime

So a little lemon juice. Mmm. I love it already. So I'm just going to take our dressing and toss it over that pasta

I'm going to just have to find the easiest way to do this, and I think I might start with the tongs

and let that dressing kind of just melt into that fettuccine. Looks good, doesn't it

All right, well, I've got some more chicken that I had put in the oven earlier

so it should be cooked off. Yeah, it's ready. Oh. And that smells so good

So, you know what we're going to do is... We're just going to pile this right back into our bowl

so we're just going to take our strips I'm going to kind of just nestle them

around our pasta just like that but look how pretty this looks

it's a little different You know, from like your normal chicken salad

Isn't that pretty? Look at that. Mmm. It's good enough

Coming up, my cherry vanilla ice cream dessert. And later, an easy and elegant avocado and goat cheese dip

Hey, y'all. I'm over here getting everything ready for our dessert. It's a cherry vanilla ice cream dessert

I have made a homemade cherry vanilla ice cream. Don't let that stop you with this dessert

You know you can certainly go to the store and buy a very good quality cherry vanilla ice cream

or any other flavor that you'd think you might want to substitute. Now, I've melted a stick of butter

We're going to use one cup of all-purpose flour. A fourth of a cup of light brown sugar

And we want to pot that down in there. And then the next ingredient that I'm going to add that goes with cherries

so, so well. And that's almonds. So a third of a cup

of slivered almonds. And I'm using the slivered, not the sliced. Okay

So, when y'all came back, I was melting a stick of butter

over here on the back stove. Now we're just gonna pour that butter

over our flour brown sugar and almonds. And this is gonna make like

almost a crumble. In fact, after we take it out of the oven, you're gonna look at it

and you're gonna think, gosh, that looks like pralines almost. So we're just gonna mix that up together

Just coating those almonds in the flour and the brown sugar. Okie doke

and then we're just going to drop this on the cookie sheet just like that

And it doesn't matter what it looks like because what we're trying to achieve here is we're just trying to get crumbles

very informal crumbles for our cherry vanilla ice cream. So no right or wrong here

Because I used a stick of butter, you know, we're not going to need any more greasing of that pan

So you can see as this sits here you know it gets even thicker And if you let it sit for a while then you can just almost pick it up and just crumble

it onto your cookie sheet. So we're going to put this in the oven, y'all, on 350, and we're going to let it bake for

about 20 or 25 minutes. So in the oven, this goes. And I'll show you what it looks like after it's cooked

Almost looks like a candy, doesn't it? What we're going to do now is we're going to take our caramel candy

and we're going to put about half of that down. Now we're going to take our homemade cherry vanilla ice cream

that I've allowed to soften just a little bit. This is so good

And we're just going to scoop it out and put it all over those candy pieces

You can do this with any flavor of ice cream. Butterpecan would be real, real good

Mmm, but the cherry vanilla. is so terribly good. And it just goes with those almonds

Okay. So there we go. We'll smooth that out the best we can

with the back of the spoon. All right. Now we're just gonna take the rest of our caramel pieces

and sprinkle right on top of the ice cream. and then we're going to put this back in the freezer

and let it get hard. And then we're going to slice it up

We're going to serve it. And we're going to sit back and we're going to say

Mmm, mmm, that's good. So all we have to do is wrap this with a plastic wrap

just like that. And we're going to let this chill in the freezer for about two hours

coming up my easy and elegant avocado and goat cheese dip hey welcome back

now while y'all are away scooped me up some of that ice cream

a homemade cherry vanilla ice cream dessert look at that And you can serve this on a plate, or you can serve it in a little stemmed custard bowl

Either way. Mmm. I can't tell you what that brown sugar and almond crunch does to this ice cream

You're gonna love it. That's so good and so easy. Well, come on down here

What I'm fixing to make now is the beginning of our party

This is an avocado and goat cheese dip served along with whole wheat pita chips

This is so easy. I'm going to use three ripe avocados. A couple of cloves of fresh garlic

In that goes. about a fourth of a teaspoon of salt, and then I'm going to stick in a half a teaspoon of cumin

So there we go. So I'm just going to take my little hand blender

I'm going to add three tablespoons of lime, four ounces of a softened cream cheese

All right, the last ingredient we're going to add is our goat cheese

And we're going to put in four ounces of goat cheese. And let's transfer our avocado and goat cheese dip to our tray

and serve this along with some pita chips. You can usually find these in your deli section

So look at that. Isn't that pretty? Let's see. Mmm

This is so good. I gotta run. It's time for the girls to get here

But you know I always send y'all out there loving best dishes from my kitchen to yours

Y'all have a great day