What’s Been Cooking: August 2025
Hi there! It appears our “Jump to Recipe” button isn’t currently working, we’re working to get this fixed ASAP. – Alex + Nicole (8/31)
This post may contain affiliate links. As Amazon Associates and through other affiliate programs, we earn from qualifying purchases if you click on a link – at no extra cost to you. We only promote products we actually use and truly love!
Summer is winding down and we’re savoring every second of it. Here’s what we’ve been up to this month:
📸 New Photos and Videos
With football season around the corner, we’ve been busy filming our game day recipe series! You’ll see our favorite apps all season long on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube — make sure to follow us so you don’t miss it.
We’re also working on updating some old photos, including baked brie en croute. We successfully got some process shots, but no new photos of the end result. Our mistake? Using Murray’s ultra-creamy brie cheese, which is so buttery and soft that it exploded right out of the pastry. Not exactly a fail, though — it was still delicious. (Pro tip: enjoy Murray’s brie cold — it doesn’t even need baking!)
🍺 Local Food and Drink
We wrapped up summer by trying new spots and revisiting old favorites:
- Bent Hill Brewery (Braintree): This might be the best brewery we’ve visited in Vermont yet! Gorgeous farm views, great beer, and amazing vegetarian food like buffalo artichoke dip, buffalo cauliflower tacos, and maple churros. Complete with live music, it was the perfect summer night.
- Snow Farm Vineyard (South Hero): We’ve been missing the California wine tasting experience, so visiting the local vineyards here has been on our summer bucket list! We had a relaxing afternoon of sipping on tasting flights and loved every single wine. We took home a bottle of rosé, which I’m looking forward to opening before the summer is over!
- Donwoori Korean (Winooski): Korean fried chicken is one of our favorite guilty pleasure foods, so we’ve been dying to try this place! It totally lived up to the local hype. The wings, pork bulgogi, chicken katsu curry, and soju cocktails were some of the best we’ve had.
- Kona Beachside (Burlington): Lunch on Lake Champlain felt like a mini-vacation, complete with fried fish tacos and tropical cocktails. It was the perfect midday break on a hot beach day!
- Champlain Valley Fair (Essex Junction): Vermont ends the summer with a bang, with the best maple donuts and creemees at the fair! We look forward to it every year. This year we also tried a “garbage plate” from a barbecue food truck – loaded fries topped with pulled pork, maple bourbon BBQ sauce, mac n cheese, street corn, and coleslaw. It was just as delicious as it sounds!
🌱 Gardening Update
Our garden had some wins and losses this month.
Highlights: Our tomato plant is still going strong (it produced about 12 ounces of tomatoes every few days!) and we picked more Carmen peppers, Anaheims, and poblanos.
Challenges: Our pineapple sage didn’t make it, so we grabbed some healthy-ish cuttings and propagated them in water. Hopefully they’ll do a bit better in our herb garden with some extra shade. Our jalapenos are also super tiny this year, but super spicy!
Here’s how we used our harvest:
- Our favorite cherry tomato recipe, Ottolenghi’s roasted tomatoes and yogurt (from Simple)
- A creamy roasted red pepper chicken with Carmen peppers and fresh oregano
- Lots of bruschetta, including both our roasted tomato and garlic bruschetta and our new bruschetta dip recipe!
👩🏻🍳 Cooking From Scratch
August was packed with scratch cooking experiments and freezer prep:
- Pizza sauce: Restocked in Souper Cubes for easy pizza nights! We always have a stash of this in our freezer.
- Refried beans: Homemade always tastes better, and we love having beans on hand for all the Mexican recipes we cook. We stocked up on dried pinto and black beans and made a batch to start, but we’ll definitely be making more in the coming weeks! We’ve made this recipe for years and it always turns out great.
- Flavored syrups: Our go-to way of using fresh herbs! We made lavender thyme and basil syrups to use in cocktails. The lavender thyme was a great replacement for honey syrup in a Bee’s Knees, and the basil will go towards a big batch of gin basil mojitos for our September beach trip!
- Almond milk: Ever since learning that almond milk is just almonds and water blended together, we’ve been itching to make it ourselves! It was surprisingly easy and tasty. Next time we’ll soak the almonds overnight and strain with cheesecloth for an even smoother texture.
Thanks for following along! Don’t forget to sign up for our email list to catch all of our latest recipes and behind-the-scenes updates.
Follow Us On Social Media
If you have any questions regarding the information presented in this post, please refer to our Nutrition Disclaimer here.
Looking for kitchen inspiration? Head over to our shop to see what we cook with every day, plus recommendations for foodie gifts and eco-friendly products.