Quick Recipe: Easy Dinner for Gourmet Kids

Today was a heavy cooking day in this heat but we managed to eek out a few really great meals.  For a really simple dinner we had tomatoes and peppers stuffed with saffron barley.  The tomatoes were perfect from this mornings farmers market and I scooped them out and put them in the oven at 425 degrees with the peppers to get a head start while the barley was cooking.  We boiled the quick cooking barley for about 12 minutes with a bunch of amazingly beautiful saffron threads.  When that was finished we added a few chives, stuffed the barley in the peppers and tomatoes and put it all back in the oven at 425 for about 6 minutes, then turned the oven off but let them sit in there another 20 minutes while I was gathering children from various locations...


The salt and pepper string beans are our old standby recipe that we have used a lot the last few summers...simply string beans in olive oil with chunky black pepper, (watch out Dad, we did use that coffee grinder again!)  and coarse sea salt.