The Recipe: What a quick supper! Just cook the beef in the slow cooker (no browning!) with pantry ingredients, then toss together a quick sauté of vegetables and black beans. Add some diced avocado and sour cream. Gorgeous! The Conversation: The lesson I've learned from chefs about pantry ingredients. This recipe is so quick and easy that I'm adding it to a special collection of easy summer recipes published every summer since 2009. Watch for new 'summer easy' recipes all summer long. With a free e-mail subscription , you'll never miss a one! As of this month, I’ve written 175 weekly columns for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrangling home-cook friendly recipes from restaurants. Column by column, the weeks fly by, the years too. And week after week, I fall in love with a brand-new place, its chef, its food and most especially its story. Every week, that one place is my new favorite. I want to eat there! I want everyone else to eat there too! The...

An oh-so-easy but seductive zucchini salad, made slightly sexy with the spiral zucchini noodles which are taking the world by storm as a low-carb, whole-food pasta-like but grain-free noodle. Real Food, Fresh & Seasonal. Another Easy Summer Vegetable Salad. Budget Friendly. Low Carb. Weight Watchers Friendly. Naturally Gluten Free. Paleo. Not Just Vegan, Vegan Done Real . Did I Mention Irresistible?!

The Recipe: A real seasonal treat, a skillet of warm corn bread studded with fresh blueberries. It's what summer is all about ... For some years now, I've tossed fresh blueberries into summer skillets of corn bread. That wet "mouth pop" as the berries burst? Like fireworks for food. And I always intended to take the corn bread to a new place, slightly richer (more butter, naturally) and slightly sweeter (with honey, perhaps?) and definitely more corn-y (would fresh corn kernels mess up the texture?) – yeah, I obsess over think about such culinary conundrums. (Conundra? Two semesters of university Latin fails me ... ) I told myself that after I found that new and certainly "happy" corn-bread place, then, then, really, I'd share the idea here: it's way too good to keep for myself. But in the mean time, never once did the addition of fresh blueberries ruin a good corn bread. And then I came across a 2008 recipe from Canadian Living and if a...