What’s Been Cooking: July 2025

Somehow it’s already August?? Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve been up to lately in the world of food.

4th of July Weekend in Vermont 🧨

The holiday weekend brought sunshine, good food, and fun days at the lake – complete with festive star-shaped sugar cookies! I’ve been waiting for a reason to break out the dough that’s been in our freezer since Christmas. This was the perfect excuse, and the cookies turned out great. Note to self: double every batch of cookie dough and freeze half for later.

We also celebrated 9 months of marriage with a cozy charcuterie date night. Alex made us two loaves of bread, one plain and one stuffed with bacon and cheddar! (His go-to recipe is from this cookbook, our holy grail of bread baking). The bacon cheddar bread was just as good as it sounds, and even better slathered in the bacon garlic herb cream cheese we had left over from making these jalapeno poppers.

Our charcuterie spread included: 

• 3 kinds of Cabot cheese (gouda, cheddar, and habanero jack), Vermont Creamery goat cheese, and the aforementioned bacon cream cheese
• Pepperoni and chorizo
• Green grapes and apple slices
• Roasted red pepper pesto
• Local hot pepper jam (check out Sidehill Farms if you’re ever in Vermont!)
• Firehook sea salt crackers

It was, unsurprisingly, way too much food. But the leftovers made for great snacks 🙂

Soccer Games and Stadium Food ⚽

Our local soccer team, Vermont Green FC, had an incredible season. We made it to two sold-out home games this year and indulged in free ice cream samples from Ben & Jerry’s, and the best chicken shawarma wraps from Saba’s House.

Fresh pita stuffed with fries, pickles, garlic aioli, and the best chicken shawarma around – yum. This hit the spot for a pre-game dinner in the stands, and instantly had us dreaming up new recipes! A shawarma inspired dinner bowl might be coming soon… stay tuned!

Pasta For Days 🍝

We’ve been diving into video content lately, which meant eating a lot of pasta to film a new summer dinner series.

Recipe videos have felt pretty intimidating up until recently, but after listening to an Eat Blog Talk podcast we finally felt ready to tackle this next step in growing our socials. Now that we have more time on our hands (no more wedding planning or cross-country moves!), taking on a new project is a lot less daunting.

Shooting while cooking hasn’t been without its challenges. We’ll be making our spinach cottage cheese pasta again this week since we messed it up last time trying to get a specific shot… but we’re so excited to share the final reels soon! Follow us on Instagram and TikTok to catch them next week.

We hope that seeing how our recipes come together will be a helpful resource!

Baking Adventures 👩🏻‍🍳

While we’ll never tire of cooking, the amount of recipe work we do for The Candid Cooks can be draining at times. To bring the fun back into the kitchen, I cracked open Mind Over Batter, a baking therapy cookbook Alex got me for Christmas a few years ago.

We’ve been watching a ton of The Great British Baking Show lately, which inspired me to try my hand at baking something totally new: chocolate chip babka! 

This cookbook really harps on the idea of enjoying the process and not worrying about perfection. My babka certainly wasn’t perfect (“a bit stodgy,” as Prue and Paul would say), but I had so much fun making it and it made the apartment smell amazing. Kneading the dough, wrapping the chocolate chips into the strands, and twisting them into knots was certainly therapeutic, with delicious results.

Next up? Peanut butter pretzel pie. After making the babka, I bought this pie pan from Amazon so that I’d have no excuse not to make another new recipe from Mind Over Batter next time I’m craving something sweet.

A Plentiful Harvest 🍅

Our garden is in full bloom! This is the most exciting time of the summer, because it means we have super fresh produce to use every single week.

We’ve harvested zucchini (including one that was absolutely massive), tons of sweet cherry tomatoes, Anaheim peppers, and jalapenos this month. Here’s what we cooked with all of it:

• A side dish of sauteed zucchini (olive oil, pinch of salt and pepper) that was so buttery it literally melted in my mouth.
• Zucchini and tomato pasta, which you’ll be seeing on our socials next week in video format!
• The best roasted veggie risotto we’ve made yet, using the zucchini, tomatoes, Anaheims, and some white onion from the grocery store.
• Two batches of verde sauce to go on our pork enchiladas, using a few of our teeny-tiny jalapenos (I’m hoping they start to grow bigger as the season goes on).

This is our first year growing cherry tomatoes, and I’m so impressed (and honestly surprised) with how well it’s working out. They’re so juicy and flavorful!

We have even more tomatoes that we just harvested a few days ago, and we cannot wait to use them in our favorite Ottolenghi recipe this week – roasted tomatoes and yogurt from his Simple cookbook. Everything tastes better from the garden! 

Farmer’s Market Fun 🧺

One of my favorite summer activities is going to the Burlington farmer’s market. It’s always packed with great local vendors. This month’s haul included:

• Maple cinnamon nut butter from The Nutty Vermonter (I can’t wait to use this on Alex’s homemade bread!)
• Strawberry rosemary blackcurrant jam from V Smiley Preserves (see above, re: bread)
• Red Ale from Kraemer & Kin (two of which are already gone)
• Woodland Gin from Killington Distillery (I’m looking forward to making a gin mojito with this and seeing how it compares to our other local fave, Barr Hill Gin)

If we didn’t have our own garden, I’d have been picking up all the fresh produce from the farmer’s market as well. We used to love going to the local markets in California and grabbing fresh herbs, peppers, and tomatoes! Freshly harvested, local produce is always the way to go if you want to maximize flavor in your dishes.

Cheese, Please 🧀

Thanks to a new partnership with Murray’s Cheese, we’ve been taste-testing some incredible brie and burrata this month! 

Both of these cheeses blew us away. Their burrata is unlike any other we’ve tried – super thick and creamy, and kind of tastes like whipped cream with a hint of earthiness. AKA, delicious. It went to two rounds of burrata toast last week (one to film for social, and one to just enjoy for date night).

Their brie is also super soft and buttery. We used some to try making a macadamia nut crusted brie, inspired by one we ate on our honeymoon in Hawaii. It didn’t work out exactly right, but we plan to keep working on this one so we can share a recipe soon! We’ll be reserving another wheel of brie to take new photos of our roasted garlic baked brie en croute, since we recently discovered a better and prettier way of folding the pastry.

Keep an eye out for updates to a few of our cheese-focused recipes soon. We’ll be recommending Murray’s from here on out – because as always, high quality ingredients are the easiest way to level up your home cooking!

Thanks for following along! If anything here resonated with you, or made you hungry, feel free to leave a comment below. We read and reply to every single one.

For more behind the scenes content, follow along on Instagram where we share daily stories featuring our current dinner line-up and sneak peeks into our everyday life.

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