Remember that breakfast rut I was in? No more. About a million years later than the rest of the world, I’ve discovered the appeal of smoothies. And thanks to all of your comments on that post, I’m not short on ideas for combinations for my morning drinks. But until last week, I was short one ingredient: an incredible blender. I tried making smoothies in my food processor, but the “smooth” part of the title started to seem like a misnomer.

Enter Driscoll’s, who offered to provide me with the ultimate in blenders, the Vitamix. Last week, I started blending my shakes in their CIA Professional Series, and I can’t get enough. My current favorite smoothie contains: banana, peanut butter, plenty of ripe strawberries and blueberries, a touch of honey, and milk (either 2% or homemade coconut milk–more on that blended endeavor soon). Thirty seconds in this powerful blender, and all those ingredients become a filling, healthful breakfast.

Now that I’m in love with an appliance, I’m happy to announce that Driscoll’s is going to supply one of you with your own Vitamix CIA Professional Series (a $500 value) to delight in. The winner also receives a $25 gift certificate to Whole Foods so that you can stock up on summer’s juiciest berries, to throw into your smoothies.

You’ve got three chances to enter the Vitamix + Driscoll’s + Whole Foods Giveaway:

• {one} Leave a comment below and tell me what item in your kitchen (from your butter knives to your blender, your prep bowls to your electric mixer) you love most.
• {two} Be a subscriber to the Big Girls, Small Kitchen newsletter and leave a second comment letting me know you’ve subscribed.
• {three} Tell your facebook friends and/or twitter fans about the contest – post the link and tag @Big Girls Small Kitchen (facebook) or @BGSK (twitter). Leave a third comment letting me know you’ve done so.

The contest will run for 10 days, and I’ll announce the winner in my June 28th newsletter. Good luck!

We got our first CSA box this week. The yield so far is manageable, but on Wednesday night, after the pickup, our fridge went from a vessel of condiments and leftover meatballs to a box filled with chard, kale, Chinese broccoli, arugula, and much, much more. It took about an hour to wash, prep, and store the whole yield. Work–but good work.

After that, there was a bit of prioritizing, weighing what I wanted to eat first with what would wilt and grow slimy if we didn’t cook it in twenty-four hours. Radish greens topped that list. Have you ever watched radish greens wilt in the fridge?

It’s gross. I wash, dry, and store them like this, which helps. But yesterday morning, I made a point of cooking them into my lunch. (You can also turn them into pesto.)

The onslaught of vegetables is going to change our cooking this summer, no doubt about it. I can’t wait to document it here! My first foray has confirmed what I suspected about our diet this season, though. We’re going to be eating a lot of bowl meals. All these fresh greens seem to beg for a simple preparation, a sauté, perhaps with herbs, set over a bowl of grains.

So before it’s too late, I wanted to share a base for bowl meals that’s not simply rice or quinoa but a mix of grains.

To make this combo, I set a pot of water to boil as if I were cooking spaghetti, and then pour in whichever grains, timing the cooking so that no one grain gets overcooked. I love the versatility of the method, because it accounts for the different cooking times of each element. The resulting dish also makes the lesser-loved grains, like millet, more palatable.

You guys, I solved lunch.

I recently wrote about my occasional breakfast ruts. Truth is, I’ve been in a lunch rut for my entire life.

I hate lunch, always have. While I know I should choose something light and low on carbs in order to minimize the post-lunch stupor I experience, it’s much more fun, when you’re craving a burger or are invited out to the Indian buffet, to partake in a meal as hearty as dinner. I know some folks who skip lunch altogether, but my growling stomach makes it impossible for me to accomplish that. So I end up paralyzed and indecisive, a little bit hungry or way too full.

This kale salad solves lunch by creating a killer balance of rich ingredients with nutrient-rich greens. The egg, walnut, and avocado collaborate to deliver satisfaction. The kale is their foil, bringing each bite to your mouth without the help of a piece of bread, my original delivery method. Plus, kale beats out lettuce as a base for a brown bag salad: you can dress the greens with a honey-tinged vinaigrette in the morning, and they soften up by the time you dig in at lunch, as opposed to getting soggy like lettuce.

When I think of hosting dinners, I think of Mrs. Dalloway. Everything set up perfectly—platters, food, and flowers—and from that beautiful core, the party flows.

Our parties are a couple clicks more improvisational than Clarissa’s. Sometimes, as I’m running to the supermarket for a last-minute lemon or a roll of paper towels we’ll use as napkins, I wonder how much this matters. From our imperfect core—a delicious if frugal buffet, a policy of BYOB, makeshift seating around the coffee table—good parties flow too.

All of this is to say that though we own some beautiful platters, functional dinner plates, and brand new silverware, plus enough glassware for eight whole people to drink from matching cups, as soon as our group will be larger than six, I switch to paper plates and cups. They’re not pretty, and they hardly set the scene for anything fancy, but since we don’t have a dishwasher, they eliminate about half the post-party clean up. That makes entertaining a million times more fun.

So, I’m curious: when you have friends over, where do you draw the line between attention to detail and convenience? The more I think about it, the more I’m considering taking the leap to using nice-looking paper plates, like Bambu.

P.S. How to host a noodle bar party.

Being a pre-teen with a mom who’s hipper than you is both humbling and awesome. While you would have preferred that you revealed to her that Nolita was the latest up-and-coming neighborhood for shopping and dining, when you marched into your Monday homeroom in a pair of the coolest high-waisted magenta suede pants anyone in middle school has ever worn, from a tiny downtown boutique your mom had discovered in a neighborhood your classmates didn’t even know meant “North of Little Italy,” the payoff for being bottom rung on the mother-daughter hipness ladder was clear. (Now that hipness is judged by one’s ability to name streets in the far-flung Brooklyn neighborhoods, it seems incredible that Nolita was ever under the radar, but in 1998 it was. Maybe I’ve lived in New York too long.)

Our downtown outings usually involved lunch at a hip restaurant. After a few jaunts, we adopted a handful of cafés as our own, nourishing beacons in still uncharted urban territory. One of our mainstays was Pommes Frites, of 3am craving fame (we went at 3pm). The other was Rice.

Rice, which closed recently, wore fusion cuisine like the best of its founding decade, the ’90s. Its concept was simple and brilliant. You ordered a bowl of rice–white, brown, Thai black, green–and then added toppings from anywhere in the world where rice is eaten, which is to say everywhere. I might eat Mediterranean lentils while you forked into vegetarian meatballs. I could order black beans and you could choose Indian curry. We craved that variety after walking through Nolita all morning. It’s one dish, the curry, that I want to talk about today, a dish that outlived the fusion trends and endured the crowds that began to stream into Nolita from neighboring SoHo, to remain just as hip today as it was back then.

The reason? Rice’s Indian chicken curry contained bananas. Salty sweet: sounds like 2013. The creamy sauce also coated raisins and mango chutney, and I’ve never forgotten the taste combination of  salty curry, filling meat, and echoing sweetness.

In summer, a pitcher of iced tea beckoning from the fridge can salvage the sweatiest day. When I need some sanity after a long summer commute, I try not to forget how cold drinks, from flavored teas to fruity cocktails, can help reduce the effect of the humid weather, sticky subway, and growling but necessary window air conditioner unit.

This summer, I’ll be mixing up new cocktails and downing no-recipe-needed cold beer. For this first heat wave, I rounded up my favorite drinks from summers past. What will you be sipping?

**6 Cool Summer Drinks**

1. Iced Strawberry Green Tea. A twist on iced green tea that makes the most of in-season strawberries, using them to create a syrup, which then sweetens the tea.

2. Chai Tea Latte. The milky, sweet, spiced tea qualifies as both a drink and an afternoon snack. Change up the formula as you see fit, adding more honey for your sweet tooth or extra cardamom for extra earthiness.

3. Sun Tea. Last season, I got obsessed with keeping a jar of sun tea in my fridge at all times. As hydrating as water, the tea kept me cool and quenched, especially the non-caffeinated versions. With sun tea, the tea steeps in the cold fridge, so you never even have to bother with boiling water.

4. Easy Peach Limeade. In this no-cook drink, peaches marinade in lime juice and sugar to create a nectar as beautiful in color as it is delectable in taste. Serve with crackly plum cake for a summer version of afternoon tea.

In a small kitchen, you don’t need a lot of equipment to cook great food. Still, you do need some pots, pans, utensils, and dishes–obviously. In the BGSK book, you’ll find a bare bones list of necessary equipment, but I’ve long wanted to bring you a similar resource on the web.

So we’re going one by one, stocking up our virtual pantries and maybe our real ones too.

Today I want to talk about the electric kettle. I own a DeLonghi Kmix Kettle. I use it every single morning of my life to boil water for coffee. That’s a no brainer, not having to deal with fire before having had my caffeine. Water comes to a boil quickly, even when watched. And that means the kettle comes in handy for other reasons, too.

Along with the mini food processor, the kettle sits out on our counter. When I know I’m making pasta or blanching kale for dinner, I’ll fill the kettle up with water as soon as I walk in the door. By the time I’ve changed into sweatpants, the water is boiling, and I can go onto the next step in my dinner plan.

Since a lot of electric kettles are plastic, and I don’t like to mix plastic with hot things, I also love that this kettle is made from stainless steel.

Here are some of the dishes where you’ll find that near-instant hot water makes following the recipe much easier.

• Iced Chai Tea Latte
• Chocolate Mousse Pie
• Couscous with Sausage, Greens, and White Beans