Perfect Picnic Picks
It’s outdoor-eating season, which means your calendar is probably filled with dates for picnics, potlucks, and backyard barbecues. How to tempt everyone’s taste buds while keeping kitchen time to a minimum? Good news: Our easy, tasty recipes can be created in a flash and are guaranteed to impress your guests and hosts. Naturally, each one contains just the right proportion of sweetness!
Playing with fire
Turn on the grill, but don’t settle for the same old chicken, hot dogs, or burgers when you can make them mouth-watering. Brush on our Zesty Barbecue Sauce —made tangy with mustard and lemon juice—or baste with Smokey Barbecue Sauce, a complex blend of ketchup, beer, liquid smoke, hot pepper, and Domino Brown Sugar. If your family loves ribs, they’re sure to savor our classic Sweet-Sour Spareribs recipe. A can of crushed pineapple enhances the tangy flavor.
Another customer favorite, always on our most-requested-recipe list: Cedar Planked Salmon With Brown Sugar, easy to prepare on a ready-made cedar plank. (Find the planks at fish counters and hardware stores.) Don’t skimp on the brown sugar: you’ll want to cover the entire fillet. The combination of sweet and smoky is irresistible!
And talk about classic: For steak lovers, nothing beats our Grilled Spice-Crusted Steak with herb butter. The sugar goes into the spice crust along with coriander, garlic, and three kinds of pepper.
Looking for something more adventurous? Try our Caribbean Grilled Chicken and Pineapple, a sweet-and-savory combination of chicken breasts, lime juice, spices, and fresh pineapple. (Substitute canned pineapple if it’s easier.) Our Domino Demerara Washed Raw Cane Sugar adds balance and a subtle but satisfying texture.
Traveling farther around the globe, our Chicken Saté with Peanut Sauce, grilled on skewers, reveals its Indonesian origins in its flavors: ginger, lime, lemon, soy sauce, coconut milk, peanut butter. A quarter-cup of Domino Demerara Washed Raw Cane Sugar rounds out the flavor profile.
Our recipe for Rosemary Balsamic Caramel-Glazed Chicken Thighs, developed for us by Chef Emily Luchetti, calls for baking in a 350° oven, but you can grill the chicken directly on a well-oiled grate with the grill cover on. The recipe doubles and triples easily to feed a crowd.
Salad days
Salads and side dishes turn even a weekday cookout into a banquet. Be sure to exercise common sense when using mayonnaise dressings in hot weather; see our Quick Tip, below, for food-handling advice.
A picnic isn’t a picnic without a classic All-American Potato Salad, and ours is one of the best we’ve tried! For a variation, use a combination of small red and purple potatoes—and leave the peels on. For a colorful and healthful twist on an old favorite, mix up our Country Coleslaw, which adds carrots, green and red peppers, and a dash of hot-pepper sauce to the shredded cabbage. Country Macaroni Salad also gets a color and flavor boost from chopped vegetables; a couple of teaspoons of Domino Organic or Granulated Sugar mellows out the dressing.
Part salad, part dessert, our Summer Fruit Salad features fresh seasonal fruits gently tossed with a tangy, creamy dressing. And speaking of tangy, our All-American Baked Beans—which of course isn’t a salad at all—is bursting with flavor, thanks to molasses, mustard, liquid smoke, and Domino Dark Brown Sugar.
Desserts and drinks
For impressing a crowd (or just your nearest and dearest), nothing quite beats a home-baked pie filled with summer-sweet fruit. Two of our favorites: Fresh Blueberry Pie with Lattice Top and Fresh Peach Pie. But if you’d rather keep it quick and cool, we won’t argue! Our Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes require just a little baking (for the cupcakes) and are definitely worth the effort to assemble. Keep them in mind for summer birthday parties!
Planning a Fourth of July get-together? These Red, White and Blue Cookie Squares, made with fresh blueberries and raspberries and filled with Neufchatel cheese—lighter than regular cream cheese—are festive and scrumptious. Or bring out the ice-cream maker and whip up some refreshing Peach Pistachio Ice Cream or sophisticated Cuban Coffee Ice Cream with Chocolate Salsa. Easiest of all? Our No-Bake Fresh Fruit Tart, a snap to make with a packaged graham-cracker crust, a lightly sweetened cream cheese filling, and plenty of fresh summer berries, cherries, and grapes.
The perfect accompaniment to your outdoor feast? An icy, fruity beverage like our Citrus Fruit Punch, Spiced Homemade Ice Tea, or Very Berry Sodas. Check out the Hot Drinks, Cool Drink Recipes section of our website for even more great ideas!
Baker's Profile: Chef Allen Susser
In southern Florida, Chef Allen Susser is known for serving guests innovative seafood dishes at his namesake restaurant, where his signature "new world cuisine" blends the bounty of South Florida ingredients with Caribbean and Latin flavors. He's also famous for being named one of Food & Wine magazine's Best New Chefs in America and for winning the James Beard Foundation's Best Chef Award, Southeast Region, in 1994. Before he opened Chef Allen's in Aventura, he worked in some of the finest kitchens around the world, including Le Bristol Hotel in Paris and Le Cirque in New York City.
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Meet Michelle Stern, a Great American Bake Sale Rock Star!
Share Our Strength's Great American Bake Sale, an ongoing campaign against childhood hunger in the United States, continues to inspire bakers throughout the country. We wanted to share with you the story of one of those bakers, Californian Michelle Stern, who has already made a big impact this year.
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Quick Tip
To ensure food safety—always a high priority in hot weather—always marinate foods in the refrigerator, not on the counter. Pack foods directly from the refrigerator to the cooler, and use a separate cooler for drinks so the one containing perishable foods won’t be constantly opened and closed. Transport the cooler in the air-conditioned car, not the hot trunk. For more tips on barbecuing and food safety, read the U.S.D.A.’s fact sheet.