bread salad and apple crisp.

The summer hasn't been too harsh here in Buffalo, but I've still been making some simple summer foods. One of my favourites is a Tuscan Bread salad. The basic ingredients are: Tomatoes, olives, ciabatta, fresh basil, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Just dice everything up and toss in the lemon juice and olive oil. (I usually do 2 tbsp of oil to 3 tbsp of lemon juice, but you can adjust it to your tastes) Coarse sea salt is ideal in this, but I was all out, so I used some of my volcanic black sea salt. It wasn't bad, but I thought it distracted from some of the flavours.

The other night it was a little chilly and I was heading out for Indian buffet and Project Runway with some friends so I whipped up this Apple-Raspberry crisp to bring along:

I was fresh out of raspberries, so I used raspberry jam and left out about half of the sugar I would have used with the fruit filling normally.

It has loads of ginger and toasted walnuts in the topping. Yum!