A quick totally fabulous dinner, this baked chicken and orzo salad is a great weekday meal that can be put together in 30 minutes. Do yourself a favor, and get a rotisserie chicken from your favorite outlet. In Billings, I personally like the chickens from Costco. They’re perfectly seasoned, plump and juicy, and can serve a family of four for five bucks.
This is the thing I really love about the Internet. As I sit through reading about more of the same, every once in a while a recipe makes my eyes go wide, my jaw drop, and I have to make it – RIGHT NOW! 
I was searching for inspiration and there it was staring me in the face. Tomato Cobbler with Biscuits looked too good to be true. Why had I never thought of doing something like this before? And, it just so happened that I collected a very large bowl filled with tomatoes from our garden that morning. Tomatoes are a fruit, right? They’re juicy and slightly sweet, and with a savory, crunchy topping? Oh my – sheer genius. It must have been fate. The other reason this is a perfect recipe is that you don’t have to use your prettiest tomatoes for the cobbler. A few blemishes here and there – just cut them out. 
Many of the recipes I found for this dish called for cherry tomatoes. Those looked pretty. Others had a variety of different colored cherry tomatoes, yellow, red, purple – very pretty. And if you don’t have a bounty of fresh tomatoes, you can make the casserole using canned tomatoes. How versatile is that? While this scrumptious cobbler takes an hour to bake, putting all the ingredients together is a cinch. I started at 4:30 and we were ready to eat by 6:30 – the cobbler needs to rest for 20 minutes before serving. The majority of prep time is baking and resting. Many of the recipes I found online called for thyme. I’m not a huge thyme fan, so I added basil and a little pinch of thyme. And the biscuits called for grated Gruyere cheese – I substituted sharp cheddar, because that’s what I had. Another interesting cheese substitution is blue cheese or gouda. I bet that would be delicious, too. Are you ready?
Broccoli Cheese Soup
It’s still 90° in Billings, but what can I say? It’s close enough to September and blessed cool weather that I got very hungry for some broccoli cheese soup. My husband, Richard, loves soup of any kind. He’s feeling a little under the weather, and I had a boatload of fresh broccoli and cheddar cheese in the fridge, so what the heck? The air conditioner is on, right? (Sorry my pic is just horrible. I think I inadvertently did something to the auto focus – yikes!)
This is such an easy recipe that it qualifies as a “Quick Dinner.” Seriously, 30 minutes at the most from begin to end. My rule is to always keep fresh broccoli or frozen broccoli on hand. And I always have a variety of hard cheese in the fridge and chicken stock in the pantry. Although, for this batch, I had a half-gallon of homemade stock, so that’s what I used. I’m eager to make homemade stock out of already roasted chickens from Costco, Sam’s or the multitude of deli counters where they are now commonly found. I think the richness of the roasted chicken would lend itself well to homemade stock, and they’re cheap – but I digress – that’s ready for another episode . . .
This soup recipe will serve four. The basic recipe calls for sharp cheddar (I used white), and Swiss. But you could substitute other cheeses you have on hand, like cream cheese, Velveeta or another mild cheddar, or maybe a smoked gouda or oaxaca – any cheese that melts well and might offer a little different flavor. How about pepper jack served with cornbread?
This is my Grandma Smith’s recipe for Country Green Beans. Our summer table was not complete without green beans as they were harvested fresh, bright green, and crisp. We often had them with barbecued chicken or pork chops. Sometimes, we’d have them for dinner as the main course, served with fresh corn on the cob, and crusty bread.
Perfect Sweet Potato Biscuits
My mother was a clever cook. Before it was chic to disguise vegetables into ordinary foodstuffs for young picky eaters, Mom used a variety of techniques to surreptitiously keep us climbing the food pyramid. Equipped with her trusty blender, she whirred a veritable smorgasbord of vegetables and fruits into drinks, soups, and binders for healthy and hearty dishes. Meatloaf was truly a “mystery meat,” but one we all loved and gobbled up, and unknowingly eating “kid poison.”
