8 Blueberry Recipes To Make This Summer

From muffins and pancakes to salads and desserts, fresh blueberries taste good in just about everything. Take advantage of summer's blueberry bounty with these tested and perfected recipes. You're going to fall in love with these lovely little cornbread muffins. The blueberries burst while they bake, creating pockets of juice that keep the muffins tender.

Perfect for summer entertaining, this elegant fruit salad pairs well with pound cake, vanilla ice cream -- or both! If you're looking for a more traditional blueberry muffin, look no further. Bursting with fresh blueberries with a tender, cakey crumb and sparkling sugar crust, these really are the best. Fresh berries make an elegant addition to this salad of baby spinach, pecans and goat cheese.

Get ready for oohs and aahs. This dazzling, delicious trifle can be made in under 30 minutes -- just be sure to plan ahead as it needs to sit in the fridge at least 8 hours before serving. This fruit-packed smoothie is a little sweet, a little tart and a whole lot of healthy. Make it for breakfast and you'll feel satisfied until lunchtime. If you prefer your blueberries in pancake form, try these buttermilk pancakes studded with fresh blueberries. And don't skip the homemade blueberry syrup -- it only takes a few minutes to make and is definitely the best part!

If you are willing to face down a couple of common culinary fears, this trick will make your pancakes dramatically more light and foofy. You can separate eggs, I promise. Crack the egg and gently pop it open. Hold the two halves over the bowl where you want your whites, and tip the contents of one half into the other half. The whites will spill over into the bowl. Do it a couple more times, until the yolk is more or less alone. Tip it into a different bowl.

Whipping egg whites is easy, but you need either superhuman endurance, or an electric mixer. Put the cold whites in the mixing bowl with a pinch of salt and a pinch of cream of tartar, if you have some. Turn the mixer on high. Check back in a minute. They should be starting to form wispy peaks at that point, but we don’t want wispy. Keep mixing. They’re done when you can swipe your finger through them and leave a trough.

“Folding” egg whites into batter isn’t as scary as it sounds either. Dump them into the batter. Use a rubber spatula to gently scoop the batter up from the bottom, and sort of flip the scoop of whites and goop over. Rotate the bowl a few degrees and repeat until it’s all swirled together. Use a light touch. It’s not going to be uniformly mixed, and it’s not going to look like any pancake batter you’ve ever seen, and that’s OK.

Not only are Aunt Jemima products racist, they’re also bad for you. A third-cup of mix, which produces roughly four very small pancakes, contains 25 percent of your daily allowance of cholesterol, 33 percent of your sodium allowance. The other brands aren’t better. The first two ingredients in most mixes are flour and sugar, usually followed by unpronounceable additives, and often, environmentally catastrophic palm oil.

You can do better. Flour contains gluten, the protein that gives good bread its chewy quality. But you don’t want chewy pancakes, do you, That’s why my pancakes borrow a trick from Chinese cooks, who often use cornstarch, which doesn’t form gluten, to make a very light, crispy breading for things like sweet n’ sour pork.

By substituting cornstarch for part of the flour, you can make a considerably lighter, more tender pancake. It also absorbs some of the extra liquid from the eggs, and helps the edges get crunchy. Most pancake recipes call for milk or buttermilk, but that can make pancakes heavier. What if there were something you could add that would be just as tangy, while also making the batter even lighter,

Cousin Ed to the rescue! 9 bottle of undrinkable quadruple-hopped stout. What you want is a lawn-mowin’ beer. A wheat beer would be fine, but not necessary. A simple, cheap macro-brewed American lager with no agenda or personality will shine here. Put your chocolate-mesquite IPA down and go steal a can of Bud from your dad’s garage mini-fridge. The alcohol will cook off while they’re in the pan, but there’s no need to tell your family that.

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