Saturday and Sunday mornings have a certain routine Chez Besotted – wake up, snooze, wake up, snooze, wake up, make coffee, make bacon & eggs, eat. I would never want anything to disrupt the rhythm and tradition of the first 6 activities, but, every once in awhile, even my beloved bacon & eggs get a bit stale.

Mixing it up with pancakes or muffins can be fun, but my absolute favorite breakfast pastry is a hot, buttery scone. If your only exposure to scones is Starbucks ersatz leaden imposters, try a homemade (or real bakery) version, and you’ll see how far from reality the S-bux kind are.

This is my total cop-out post. For several weeks, I was busy baking up a storm and churning homemade ice cream, and then I stopped. Dead stop. I’ve eaten out the last several nights and been making my way through the mountains of baked goods already cluttering up my kitchen, and thus, have prepared little else for the last week or so.

And, when it came time for dinner last night, I realized that there was nothing suitable already made in my refrigerator. This does not happen. I usually have a buffet of left-overs ready for the nights that I don’t feel like cooking, or that are too muggy to contemplate turning on the oven, but not last night. And so my only solution, apart from becoming even better acquainted with the sushi delivery guy than I already am, was to recycle something from the fridge into a dinner-appropriate meal.

I was a little troubled the other day…. while I desperately did not want to turn my oven to 375° on a day so humid you could practically bottle the humidity, I really, REALLY wanted a ginger scone and did not want the store or cafe-bought variety, which tend to be nothing like a real scone.

Well, as fate would have it, my scones (yes, I did cave and turn the oven on) were also nothing like a real scone, but, in fact, turned out to be more like the perfect ginger cookie. Now, before you think that all of this balmy Boston weather has gone to my head and turned me into some sort of ego-maniac, dropping superlatives like “best” and “perfect” with nary a thought for accuracy, let me tell you that this cookie is worthy of any and all laudations that you care to throw at it.

PK, I took your advice from way back when and finally came out with a salsa recipe….

As much as I love baking, its precision and the inability to taste-test the recipe as I go stifles my…. creative flair. I love recipes that have a very basic base to which I can add anything that happens to cross my mind. That, coupled with the fact that Boston will be hitting 90° today (!) made it imperative that I start my Summer Salsa Experiments a bit early.

Salsa is a great dish for experimentation and for the novice cook, as it is very nearly impossible to mess up. I was about to write that as long as you have a base of tomatoes and onions, adding the rest of the ingredients is just a matter of personal preference, but, in fact, this recipe contains no tomatoes, so even that element is subject to change.

I have a confession to make…. I started Besotted with more than just the goal of jotting down my favorite recipes and rambling about my culinary experiences. I desperately want to get people back into the kitchen, and for them to do more than peel back the plastic on a microwaveable meal or ‘add water’ to make a meal magically puff up before their eyes.

It’s an absurd quest in our multi-tasking, over-taxed, over-stressed world, but I’m taking it on, and if there’s one recipe in my arsenal to battle the delivery-guy, grocery-store-prepared-foods, and the like, it’s this one, because it takes 15 minutes from grocery bag to table. Not only is it easy and quick, but the flavors – fresh chilis, ginger, garlic, and lemon – will instantly remind you why fresh always tastes best.