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Yesterday turned into experimentation day in my kitchen. After a long, hot day Saturday helping my mom with a yard sale in Alleghany County, I was ready for a relaxing Sunday puttering around the stove -- and, as it turned out, the grill.

While rummaging around the refrigerator for random produce to throw into my scrambled eggs (artichokes, tomato, banana pepper), I saw the bag of green peanuts I bought at Global Foods in Blacksburg last week. They still looked okay, so I set them to boil in a big pot of water and dumped in an unhealthy amount of salt.

Those of you who read the blog regularly know this made the second time I attempted to make boiled peanuts as tasty as the ones at roadside stands. Well, by golly, I did it this time! They took on the trademark dark, chocolate color and the wonderful, briny flavor. Now all I need to do to perfect them is cut back a little on the salt next time and boil them or let them set about one more hour.

The key truly was to just boil the living crap out of them for hours on end. We finally ate them at 4 p.m.

Success number two came in the form of a cannellini bean paste for bruschetta. I'd had something similar at a restaurant at the Biltmore in Asheville and have been meaning to try and duplicate it ever since.

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Roanoke Times photographer Stephanie Klein-Davis sends me e-mails on a regular basis with story ideas about food, cooking or traveling. Like me, she seems to have one of those topics on the brain at all times.

Yesterday, she sent me an idea that piqued my interest immediately. Where are the best salads in Roanoke and the New River Valley?

Obviously, if you've got the freshest ingredients at home, then perhaps that most delicious salad is on your own dining room table. But if you are too hot or tired to make dinner yourself, where do you go for a great salad when you've really got the hankering?

Restaurant salads don't have to be healthy. In fact, much of the time, they are not -- particularly if they are loaded down with fried chicken tenders, cheese, egg, bacon and all that good stuff. But for the purpose of this blog question, let's throw healthy right out the window in favor of delicious.

I can think of two of my favorite salads right off the bat.

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You would pretty much have to be in a coma to be unaware of this season's bumper peach crop. (My apologies to anyone who is actually in a coma -- sadly, you are missing out on some good eating.)

At any rate, WFIR, WDBJ-7 and The Roanoke Times have all run stories this week about how last year's dismal peach crop has been rejuvenated into a boom crop this year. Our friend Amy Hanek, a frequent reader of this blog and a blogger herself, has also posted a couple of entries about peaches this week.

After an early warm spell and late frosts nipped last year's stone fruits in the bud, the stars aligned this year. Warm weather during pollination season, moderate rainfall during the fruits' developmental stages and Mother Nature's tendency to push for a comeback the year after a loss have put us in Peach Heaven.

You can find the best peaches, in my opinion, down at your local farmer's market. My husband brought home one of the biggest peaches I've ever seen -- it's nearly the size of a softball -- from Ikenberry Orchards this week.

If you've bought a big mess of peaches, it's possible that you'll get your fill of raw ones and need to cook a few up before they are overripe. Amy's peach crisp recipe, my mom's cobbler recipe and peach pie are all wonderful ideas. But I've been thinking about some less common recipes for peaches, too. Maybe something with a savory punch instead of dessert. I scoured a few cookbooks and located what I believe are some devilishly good-looking peach recipes.

A few of them are ridiculously easy, too. Take a look and see what you think. And, as always, if you've got a great recipe you can share, fire away!

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On the very same day I chose to blog about campfire cooking, this informative article, "Playing with Fire," was published in The Oregonian.
Author Leslie Cole writes that with a little planning, you can take your campfire cooking to a whole new level beyond hot dogs and burgers.
Her report includes some great-looking recipes for dishes like rum-baked bananas and chicken 'n' dumplings.
Check it out!

I'm terrified of spiders, don't care much for snakes, sunburn in the blink of an eye and attract mosquitoes like a stagnant pond.

So why do I still love to go camping? You're lookin' at it.

Campfire cooking is one of my greatest cooking pleasures. I don't know if it's the smoky flavor that some foods take on or the challenge of producing a decent meal with limited resources. Either way, when my mother and I went camping this past weekend up in Bath County, we made sure to pack a bunch of goodies for breakfast.

The potatoes came right out of the garden. We wrapped them in aluminum foil and put them down in the campfire the night before to let them bake. The next morning, we unwrapped them, cut them up and fried them with onions in the hot bacon grease.

A shortcut for campfire potatoes is to bake them in the microwave before you leave and pack them in the cooler for the next morning. They take a lot less time to fry up that way than a raw potato.

The eggs were scrambled later in the same skillet and the English muffins were toasted on a grill grate over the open campfire. They tasted of a hint of wood smoke, but we still slathered them with a friend's homemade blueberry preserves.

After a breakfast like this, it's tempting to crawl back inside the tent. But there's no way I'm doing that....there might be spiders in there.

Anyone else out there a campfire cook? Share your smokin' hot tips.

I must apologize to blog reader Jay for forgetting to address his question about green tomato ketchup. He posted another question about it on the blog this weekend hoping someone could share a recipe.

I've never heard of green tomato ketchup before, unless you count that unnaturally colored stuff they feed kids. The thought of it instantly made me hungry, though -- I can just imagine it being slightly tart, slightly sweet and delicious on all sorts of foods.

I don't have a recipe for green tomato ketchup, so the best I could do for Jay was a Google search, which turned up a few variations on the same theme. One calls for dry mustard, Worchestershire and pickling spices, another for red and green peppers and ground cabbage and another for tart apples. They seem to vary from a ketchup consistency to more of a relish or a chow-chow.

I don't know what the ketchup Jay remembers was like, but I'd be curious as to whether any of these recipes sound close. I also want to know what Jay remembers doing with the green ketchup.

Jay, if none of these looks good to you, run a Google search for "Green Tomato Ketchup" and check out some of the other results. Maybe you'll find what you're looking for. As always, if any other blog readers can help out Jay, please chime in.

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