Earthly Delights

!Fifteen pounds of salmon for the taking!

MarxFoods.com of Seattle, Washington, is having a salmon recipe contest – “Win a Summer of Wild Salmon.” The creator of the best salmon recipe will receive a summer of wild salmon in the form of three 5-lb. shipments throughout the summer (totaling 15 lbs.).

MarxFoods.com would love to have you enter a recipe! Go to www.marxfoods.com. The contest deadline is Friday, June 20 at 11:59 Pacific Time.

This makes me think of the days when I lived in the Pacific Northwest and friends caught salmon that we then stored in our freezers until we could get at those big fish bodies...yum.

::the just in time for summer book review: Summer Gatherings: Casual Food to Enjoy with Family and Friends by Rick Rodgers

Reviewed by guest blogger Ginny Buccelli

I personally own several very large cookbooks that cover everything from appetizers to desserts and basic recipes I use often like coffee cake, blueberry muffins and turkey tetrazzini. They are great for the "what am I going to do with so much leftover chicken?" or "how do I make pancakes without Bisquick?" ideas. I also own a shelf-full of "specialty" cookbooks. There is one for light Mexican cooking, an all chicken, an all beef, a really old crock-pot cookbook I inherited from my grandmother (with only one recipe I like), a couple of variations on the latest diet craze-you get the idea. Until now there has been only one specialty cookbook in my house that I cook from often. I think that Summer Gatherings: Casual Food to Enjoy with Family and Friends by Rick Rodgers will give my favorite specialty cookbook a run for its money.

Come join us for a drink (Los Angeles):

This Sunday we'll be drinking Greyhounds and/or Sea Breezes and/or Amstel Lights at the Good Luck Bar in Hollywood. Reading that night will be L.A. novelist Nina Revoyr, Chicago-based poet Jason Bredle, local poet Louise Mathias and local fiction writer Dennis Fulgoni. Hope to see you there! For more information, go to www.rhapsodomancy.org.

Mmm...Milk

By guest blogger Hazel Kight Witham

The “Got Milk?” people have worked hard to reinvent milk’s girl-next-door image into the come-hither drink of A-listers. Think of all those pictures of celebrities with the famous white mustaches and the tag “It does a body good,” and you know what I mean. While this has raised milk awareness, for me milk has never done much more than play the straight man to my Isabella’s Original cookies (which, if you’ve tried, you know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, save yourself the torture of trying to quit). Other than the milkshake, I never considered all the recipes that put milk in a starring role.

Bret Thompson, chef-owner of Milk in Hollywood, could be the beverage’s star-maker. His high-ceilinged, white-washed shop on the corner of Beverly and Pointsettia makes you feel like you’re inside a frosty old-fashioned milk bottle. At Milk, Thompson supports local farmers and dairies to whip up homemade ice creams and deserts, as well as other healthy lunch and dinner items.