Oh, hey! How’s it going? Are you still firing up the BBQ and wearing your bikini on repeat? Are you tearing into a watermelon and soaking up the sun the way Sheryl Crow intended? You are?! Well, good! Because contrary to what the candy aisle in my grocery store thinks, it’s still summer for, like, another whole month. Hey! Grocery store! We don’t want to see your Halloween candy. Let August be August, a hot, humid summer month. I don’t want to be reminded of pumpkins and cable knit sweaters. There will be plenty of time for that in October. But for now, there is this *seasonally appropriate* Tropical Cream Cake. It tastes like summer, it looks like summer, it is summer.
No, your eyes do not deceive you. These Sake Cured Salmon Blinis are topped with itty bitty seasoned quail eggs. And yes, they are marinated in the same marinade I used for the season chicken eggs in my 
Some of my earliest memories are centered around meat and potatoes. Every Sunday my family would pile into the car and head over to my grandmother’s house for dinner. Without fail she’d always serve a roast alongside a mountain of mashed potatoes. My sister was a roast beef kind of girl, but I was in it for the roast pork. I loved that roast pork not because it was brined or smoked to rosy pink perfection. My grandmother wasn’t that kind of cook. She grew up on a farm, fussing was not in her DNA. No, what I loved about her roast pork was the applesauce that accompanied it. It was one of the first times fruit and meat crossed paths on my dinner plate and it was certainly not the last. Today’s Apricot Stuffed Pork Chops are just another by-product of a food obsession hatched in my formative years.