It is an actual scorcher here, so I’m officially moving into summer food.
🌞This week is very much: grill, toss, spoon, repeat.
Buttermilk chicken burgers with avocado dressing
With the bank holiday here in the UK and Memorial Day weekend in the US, this feels like the right time for the kind of meals that work in hot weather: something grilled, something colorful in a bowl, a good dressing or sauce, and maybe something strawberry-ish for after.
And because this is Candyflosslife, there’s still plenty going on for gut health: fiber, herbs, wholegrains, colorful plants, and all those little extras that add up over the week. The important bit is that it all tastes good first. No one needs to know it’s doing anything sensible in the background.
Buttermilk Chicken Burger with Avocado Dressing
If the grill is coming out this weekend, my buttermilk chicken burger is a very good place to start.
It’s not battered or deep-fried, just chicken breast marinated in buttermilk, garlic, herbs, and spices, then grilled until golden at the edges and tucked into a bun with creamy avocado dressing. Add crunchy lettuce, tomato, pickles, grilled veg, oven fries, or whatever else makes it feel like a proper long-weekend plate.
The avocado dressing brings the creamy burger feeling, but with olive oil, herbs, lime, and avocado. A few extra plants in your burger without making a big speech about it.
It’s colorful, smoky, creamy, herby, and properly useful. Eat it for lunch, serve it with grilled chicken, pile it next to burgers, or take it to work the next day.
I make it with wholewheat pasta because it adds extra fiber and works brilliantly with the roasted peppers, herbs, olive oil, and creamy dressing.
And the gut-health bonus is simple: more wholegrains, herbs, and colorful plants in a genuinely good pasta salad.
Roasted Peppers Pasta Salad with a Mediterranean vibe
Something Strawberry-ish
And because it’s late May and strawberries are starting to look very hard to ignore, dessert needs to come along too.
If you want a weekend bake, my French strawberry cake is the one. Soft, juicy, simple, and full of strawberries without needing layers, frosting, or any major life admin.
Or, if you have rhubarb hanging around too, the rhubarb and strawberry crumble muffins are more of a coffee-in-the-garden bake. Sweet, tart, crumbly on top, and very good with a second cup.
Fruit in dessert still counts as fruit, by the way. I will be taking no further questions😊 .
🍓🍰Strawberry Cake
This French strawberry cake spells the start of the English summer for me.
If you’re cooking outside, eating in the garden, packing lunch for Tuesday, or just making the most of strawberry season, I hope there’s something here you can use.
Did you try something from this week’s newsletter? Burger? Pasta salad? Strawberries? All three sounds very reasonable to me. Hit reply and tell me how it went!
And drop me a line about your garden (by the way, I just got my tomato seedlings, there are a few new varieties I'm trying, so time to plant them eeek!), your weekend menu, or your favorite way to cook with strawberries.
Or just reply with what you'd like to see me making! I READ EVERY EMAIL!
