secret recipe club: lemon lime meltaways

i'm starting to get too comfortable with this whole secret recipe club thing. you see, i joined as a way to find other great bloggers, get inspired by their recipes and photographs, and try something new every month. while i've definitely discovered new bloggers and been inspired by their photographs and food, i've become a slacker in the "try something new" department. lately i've chosen recipes that looked good, sounded good, appear relatively easy, and are foods that i know i would enjoy. no shame in that, but no real learning either. so watch out october, it's new foods all the way!

grilled ginger soy glazed chicken

i've made this recipe a couple times in the last few months. the first, it was too cold to even think about grilling - i think there was snow on the ground - so i made the sauce on the stovetop, sauteed chicken thighs in a pan on the stove, and doused them with the sauce for serving. second, we grilled chicken thighs and the third, we grilled chicken breasts. (i say "we" since i never man the grill, that's jason's domain.) while the grilled chicken thighs were definitely the tastiest - since four of us managed to down 3+ pounds of them for dinner - breasts were a close second. my advice: use whatever chicken you have on hand and get grilling! there are only a couple weeks left of good weather. at least where i'm from.

caramelized peach ice cream

i absolutely adore peaches. they're up at the top, hanging out with fresh picked strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, as my favorite fruit. heck, i love them so much i dedicated a week to them last year and two years ago i picked and canned twenty-something quarts of them and enjoyed peaches with yogurt for breakfast all through the dead of winter. i've shared other peach specific memories with you, but where there's one, there's always more.

white chocolate peanut butter [12in2012]

and let me tell you what, making peanut butter is simple. for any of you that love the all natural stuff, usually with a layer of oil on top that has to be mixed in, will be blown away by the homemade stuff. it just tastes so much better. obviously, since it takes all of 10 minutes (including clean up) to make.

initially, i set out to make two kinds: honey and white chocolate. but jason and i loved the white chocolate version so much better than the honey (instead of adding white chocolate, add a couple tablespoons of honey to your liking) that the honey peanut butter became honey white chocolate peanut butter. it's good right out of the jar, atop a homemade english muffin, or spread over apple slices.

penne with pesto, tomatoes, and crispy prosciutto

after reading through my dad's pesto tale last week, i had pesto on the brain. lucky for me, i also had a pint of fresh cherry tomatoes from my mom's backyard - lucky, since the chipmunks and deer managed to eat all of my tomatoes, plant and all, this year - and my basil was overflowing. i tossed the two together, topped it with some prosciutto i crisped up in a pan and had a simple, flavorful, thirty minute summer-on-a-plate dinner.