TRIGGER WARNING this post is Instagramtastic! So if that bothers you beware.

Several years ago I bought my boyfriend a grill pan for his birthday and it’s mostly been stored under the sink, wrapped in a paper bag from Whalebone Surf Shop, ever since. We pulled it out for some reason or another not long ago and it’s been in constant rotation ever since. As renters, we don’t have a grill of our own (my boyfriend left his behind at his last apartment because his former roommate got custody of it); our downstairs neighbor has kindly told us to please use hers anytime but we don’t want to push it. So it hit us like a bolt of lightning one night: DUH, THE GRILL PAN.

Sure, it smokes and scares the dog and it’s a pain to clean, but there’s nothing like those delicious charry grill marks on a piece of chicken to really scream SUMMER.

Anyway late last week I grilled zucchini, yellow squash, onions and red peppers to make a pasta salad with pesto and cannellini beans. I got a little too enthusiastic with the oil and there was a small…very brief…fire…but all was well.

We also made pizza at some point. That might have been last week sometime and not TECHNICALLY over the weekend but still, yay! Pizza!

The one on the left is spinach, blue cheese and lots of ground pepper. The one on the right is parmesan and Hungarian salami. Both the one on the left and the one on the right were delicious.

There was also a salad, which is this salad, subbing romaine for the watercress and add radishes. Oh and I skipped the pita. But that recipe is a very good one and I’ve had it for a long time. If you ever have to take a salad to a dinner party, this is one I highly recommend. It’s pretty and green and doesn’t contain anything too offensive for picky eaters.

Have you given any love to the humble radish of late? Radishes are delightful, and about $.80 per bunch. That’s a small price to pay for color and crunch in a salad. Or just eat them by themselves with butter and sea salt.

On Saturday night my boyfriend grilled some pork chops, which were really great, and he also sauteed these little shishito peppers. We ate them with plenty of lime juice and some of that sea salt I just mentioned.

And finally, I’d love to write up an entire separate post on the mint chocolate chip ice cream I made, but I think you’re probably tired of the ice cream posts. Suffice to say it was my favorite flavor that I’ve made so far, and that’s saying a lot considering how much I loved the hot chocolate ice cream. I used this recipe, with fresh mint (I added two drops of peppermint oil because I was a little short of the four cups of fresh mint that it calls for) and chose Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips, which I chopped up before stirring them in to the churned ice cream. The herbal flavor of the fresh mint is not to be beaten. And forget green food coloring…though if you have to have it, who am I to judge? I still eat macaroni and cheese made with florescent orange powder.

I think I like this method of adding the chocolate chips a bit better. I like the variation in the size of the chips that you get in more  commercially produced mint chip ice cream (Mitchell’s, made here in Cleveland, is my favorite). But that will have to wait, because I’ve a request for more strawberry ice cream and I’m very curious about David Lebovitz’s brown bread ice cream.

It sounds strange, but I’m more than willing to take a few chances when ice cream is involved.