What’s Been Cooking: June 2025

Hi friends! It’s been a busy month of cooking, gardening, and enjoying summer in Vermont. Here’s a peek into what we’ve been up to lately.

New Recipe Development

Coconut Shrimp 🍤

No surprise – we’re still coming up with recipes inspired by the food we ate on our honeymoon last October! Earlier this month, we finished up our coconut shrimp recipe and have been saving it to share with you in July since it’s such a great summer appetizer.

This one took a bit of experimenting. The first time we made it, we burnt the coconut breadcrumb coating so badly – but the flavor was otherwise great! After fine-tuning the frying temperature, we found the sweet spot for crispy, golden brown coconut shrimp. Keep an eye out for this one next week!

Our New Favorite Flavor Combo 🫐🍋

We discovered the delicious combo of Greek yogurt and lemon zest after making a recipe from our Ottolenghi Simple cookbook. It’s amazing what a little salt and acid can do to literally any ingredient! Around the same time, we had some old blueberries in the fridge from a photoshoot Nicole was doing for Omie that we turned into compote (thank you Love and Lemons for the recipe), and our new favorite treat was born. Check out our Greek yogurt dessert parfaits for the recipe.

Air Fryer Pork Belly (A Massive Fail) 💔

Our beloved taxi driver from our honeymoon told us that she loves cooking pork belly in the air fryer and that it turns out so crispy and delicious, so we were itching to try it ourselves. We took notes from some recipes we found on Google and went for it – and it was a total disaster.

It turned out incredibly dry. The fat didn’t render, so it had a rubbery texture while the meat was super tough. As soon as we took a bite we were like, “why did we think this was a good idea?” Pork belly is one of those meats that really demands to be cooked low and slow so that the fat has plenty of time to render and the meat doesn’t turn out tough. Lesson learned – we’ll never try air fryer pork belly again. I guess we’ll never know what secret our taxi driver had for making it work in the air fryer… unless we go back to Kauai and ask her (we’ll take any excuse to go back!)

To make matters worse, we had also planned to eat roasted potatoes and a roasted corn and tomato salad with our pork belly. We were so exhausted cooking dinner that night that we didn’t exactly think these through before we popped everything in the oven. The potatoes ended up dry and tough, and the roasted corn and tomatoes literally tasted like ketchup and corn because we didn’t think to add any seasonings other than olive oil and salt.

Safe to say it was the worst dinner we’ve cooked in a while. So we ordered Dominos for dinner instead, and our poor overcooked pork belly went into the trash (which broke our hearts 🙁). Normally, we would have kept it and tried to repurpose it into something else (Alex thought we could make chili with it), but we were traveling the next day and didn’t have many ingredients available in our fridge.

Other Cooking Adventures

Costco Haul and Freezer Restock ❄️

Every few months, we head to Costco and stock up on all the meat. It’s so much more economical for us this way, and it allows us to do a bunch of freezer prep to save time later on.

We bought about 6 pounds of ground beef, which we used to make burger patties and slow cooker meatballs. We wrapped the patties individually in plastic wrap, then stored them in a zip-top bag in the freezer so we can have burger night whenever! The meatballs went into our Souper Cubes freezer trays for easy pasta nights and sandwiches.

We also bought about 18 pounds of chicken breast, which we like to trim and then portion into various size baggies; a huge pork shoulder that we cooked in 3 batches with our slow cooker pulled pork recipe (and then froze); and a big slab of pork belly that we sliced into 8 equal pieces, individually wrapped, and stored in freezer bags.

It’s safe to say our freezer is completely stuffed! We’re always playing Tetris with both our freezer and fridge to make sure we can fit everything. If you have any fridge/freezer organization tips we need to know, tell us in the comments!

Remaking Some Of Our Favorite Recipes 🍓

We’ve been on a mission to update old photos and blog posts on our site. Which means we get to enjoy some old favorites! This month, we updated our spinach and artichoke pasta, carnitas burritos, and strawberry jalapeno mojito (using fresh farm-picked strawberries and mint from our garden – so much flavor!).

One of our favorite parts about food blogging is how much our skills have grown – not just in the food we cook, but in our plating, presentation, and photography as well! It’s so fun to see the progress over the years. We’ve come quite far from our days of snapping a quick phone pic of our plate at the dinner table before eating.

Bee’s Knees Week 🐝

Our local distillery, Barr Hill Gin, hosts Bee’s Knees Week every year. This is an event where they plant pollinator habitat for every bottle of their gin that’s purchased, and for every cocktail drank at a participating bar or shared on social media. We participated this year by sharing 5 days of gin cocktails on our Instagram page! In case you missed it, check out our profile here to find the recipes. (We also shared a recap of the week on email – if you’re not on our list, make sure to subscribe here!)

Our First Harvest 🌱

Our garden bed is in full bloom after all the rain we’ve gotten this season! We officially harvested our first Anaheim pepper last week. We had planned chicken tinga tostadas for dinner, so we sliced it into rings and quick-pickled it in lime juice and salt to use as a topping. So good! We did this all the time last year for tacos, and it always adds so much flavor.

Our pineapple sage plant has really been exploding, so we’ve been trimming it back every week or so. We used it for a mojito-inspired cocktail with gin (see our post on Instagram for the recipe) and have been collecting sprigs in bud vases for some nice greenery on our kitchen table.

Summer In Vermont ☀️

Summer finally showed its face here in Vermont – so we’ve been taking full advantage of the sunshine and warmth! We’ve had some great outdoor dinners at local restaurants including Spot on the Dock (an outdoor bar at the marina), Vermont Pub and Brewery, and Fiddlehead Brewing, and enjoyed our first maple creemee of the season. If you don’t know what a creemee is, it’s Vermont’s extra creamy version of soft-serve ice cream, and it’s delicious!

We also visited our local pick-your-own farm last week to stock up on fresh strawberries. We came home with about 6 pounds of berries, plus some of their house-baked biscuits and Cabot whipped cream. Along with snacking on the biscuits with strawberries and cream, Alex made us some strawberry limoncello compote and mini strawberry limoncello cheesecakes to enjoy! It’s been a delicious end to the month.

Products We’re Loving

Side Towels

A few months ago we purchased this set of 100% cotton kitchen towels to become our designated side towels for cooking. It’s been a total game-changer! We use them to dry off produce after washing, wipe down cutting boards and knives, and wipe our hands during cooking so that we can cut down on using paper towels (yay for minimizing kitchen waste!) and not worry about staining our nicer kitchen towels. The set came with 12 towels, so we can get a new one out every night, dirty it up as much as we need to, and throw it in the laundry basket after dinner. 

Maya Kaimal Foods

This month, we partnered with Maya Kaimal on Instagram to share a 30-minute vegetarian curry recipe using one of their simmer sauces. We love these sauces for the nights when we need a quick and easy dinner! They sent us a few flavors to try out, so we used their Spicy Vindaloo sauce the other night with chicken, potatoes, and onion. It was so delicious and we can’t wait to try more of their flavors. If you have a favorite Maya Kaimal sauce, let us know what it is in the comments!

Caraway Cookware

We joined the Caraway affiliate program this month and got their Essential Cookware Set to try out before sharing our thoughts with you. If you haven’t seen this brand all over Instagram, it’s one of the higher end non-toxic ceramic cookware brands out there.

After testing out some of our recipes with their pans this month, we can definitely say they’re worth the price! We love how non-stick they are (super easy to clean) and they feel very premium. We’ve only used them a handful of times so far, but they definitely seem like they’re going to last a long time. Stay tuned for a product review coming soon, and check out our navy blue essential set here if you want to learn more!