— Terri Baker

Go Mediterranean. You've got lots of wonderful dips and spreads that are really super easy to do and wonderful. That last well, uh, that you can do ahead of time. So you, uh, Terry, are actually having fun and not stressing and just watching people enjoy your food. So roasted red peppers, uh, orange peppers, yellow peppers, whatever. You can do 'em on the stove top. You can do 'em in the broiler, you can do 'em on a grill. All of this can be done the day ahead. In fact, it even tastes better if you do so. Uh, so with that, uh, you know, peel the peppers down, cut them into nice long slivers. Take those slivers, chop up some capers. I put some anchovies in. You don't gotta do that. Uh, some collab chili or some, uh, you know, nice aleppo chili flake or even just crust, red pepper and maybe some ground fennel seeds in there. Mix it up some olive oil, a splash of vinegar in there. It's awesome. It's absolutely awesome. Serve that over cini. You're good to go. Baba ganus. Uh, you've got hummus, of course, you can just, you can just buy your own of course, or make something really fun. Uh, take some butternut squash, roast it in the oven hole. Uh, prick it a couple of times with a knife just so it doesn't explode on you. Yeah, yeah, thinking ahead right there all the way into the core. So the steam can come out. Uh, put it on a, a roasting pan, roast it until it's nice and soft all the way through. Make your hummus out of that tahini olive oil, lemon juice, uh, salt. You have an absolutely delicious roasted butternut squash hummus, right? Or you could roast the whole thing in your grill, uh, so that it gets nice and smokey and sexy, sultry, all the good flavors like and stuff. Yeah, you could do that. So then there's of course, plant-based. You can, if you're, if you're doing, uh, not vegan, you can do zeki sauce, things like that where it's, you know, mostly, mostly, mostly, uh, cucumbers. Um, I also like to do a, uh, a nice little salad with grated zucchini. So zucchini grated on a box, grater. Uh, and then you can either cook it down very briefly in olive oil or you can just season it with salt, toss it, and also with a little bit of olive oil and some lemon juice, and let that salt kind of carry the liquid out of the zucchini. Put it in a colander. Uh, that olive oil with the, the, um, oleic acid is also gonna help break that down a little bit. And the lemon juice as well. And you wanna break that down and it forms this nice still somewhat. El Dante, uh, mixed that with some raisins, some olive oil, some ground up. Sort of pulsed walnuts in there for some taste texture. Put that on cristini. Wow, that's really, really good. Also, pretty economical, but also a great way to use up zucchini because it's zucchini season and the only time you lock your doors in man is during zucchini season because you will end up with a lot of zucchini on your kitchen first time you go out.