Asparagus Salad with Lemon Dijon Vinaigrette

This dish just screams summer to me. There's something about asparagus and lemons that make me want to go digging in my garden.
I saw this recipe on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website and I knew I had to get Lee to make it!   The tangy sweetness of the dressing and the earthiness of the asparagus and the salty, meaty goodness of the carpicola all complement each other so well!
The original recipe called for coppa for the meat, we couldn't find it, but just about any kind of smoked meat will work here and we found capicola at an excursion to Kendrick's Meat Market in South St. Louis.  If you have not been there... man, you need to go.
We had a lot of dressing left over so we put it in a Leifheit Decorative Canning Jar and have been using it on salads ever since!  It's so good!

Sausage and Crab Stuffed Mushrooms

My Uncle Bill would hate this recipe.  Uncle Bill hates mushrooms... the texture, the taste, all of it.  My Uncle Bill is about the last person you would expect to have a nemesis, but mushrooms are truly his.  When we were kids and we would get pizza with him, he always got sausage and onion instead of our family's usual sausage and mushroom. I thought he and my aunt were exotic. 

I figured out later that they were not exotic, they were crazy.  Mushrooms are the best. 

One of Lee's first dinners for me included stuffed mushrooms and that pretty much sealed the deal for me.  This recipe is a little different from the original, but no less delicious.  It's a little lighter than the traditional all sausage or my favorite cream cheese and crab.

When mixed together, the crab and sausage are a powerhouse of tastiness.  


This is a great make ahead dish,  Lee was making sausage for breakfast and saved a portion of that cooked sausage for this recipe. He also mixed everything and stuffed my mushrooms early in the afternoon and refrigerated them until I was ready for dinner.