Many people spread jam on their toast. But in the summer season, why not use fresh berries instead?

Pair those berries with your favorite dairy spread: cottage cheese, cream cheese, crème fraîche, fromage blanc, fromage frais/quark, goat cheese, mascarpone, sour cream, yogurt.

In France, these would be called tartines: open-face sandwiches.

You don’t have to toast the bread. Toast adds crunch and texture, but if fresh-baked bread is calling to you, enjoy it straight from the loaf.

You can also enjoy these tartines as a snack. They’re just right for a mid-afternoon tea break.

RECIPE: FRUIT TOAST / BREAKFAST TARTINES

Ingredients

Who needs jam when you have fresh fruit? Photo courtesy Vermont Creamery.

1. Choose some delicious bread: date nut bread, Irish soda bread, multigrain, peasant bread, pumpernickel, raisin bread, rye, sourdough, spelt, whole grain or other bread with great flavor and texture.

You can also use crispbread, like Wasa. Mild breads like challah, English muffins and white bread are best left to another occasion. See the different types of bread.

2. Pick your dairy product: cottage cheese, cream cheese, crème fraîche, goat cheese, Greek yogurt, mascarpone, sour cream, quark or other spreadable dairy.

3. Pick your fruit: berries, dates, figs, mandarin or orange segments, mango and sliced stone fruits (apricots, nectarines, peaches, plums) are our favorites.

4. Toast the bread (or not); spread with the dairy, top with the fresh fruit and enjoy. If you need more sweetness, drizzle with honey or cinnamon sugar.

VARIATIONS

 
*Yes, tomatoes are a fruit, but they are eaten a vegetable. Here’s why the tomato is fruit, not veggie.
  

We found this “sundae” on the Smucker’s Facebook page.

Maybe you want a more formal dessert to bring to the table. Or maybe you just want to have fun. Either way:

1. CUT the ice cream sandwich at angles and place in a fancy dish.

2. GARNISH with chocolate sauce, whipped cream, berries, sprinkles, candies (M&Ms, Reese’s Pieces, chocolate chunks), whatever.

3. ENJOY the experience.

Want to create an ice cream “mixed grill?” Add a scoop to the center of the “sundae.”

We haven’t liked every fruit squeeze pouch brand we’ve tried. Some of them, even though they’re all natural, don’t taste that way.

But Smucker’s new Fruit-Fulls taste just like the orchard. For 80 calories, they’re a delicious, sweet grab-and-go treat.

Made from Washington State apples, Fruit-Fulls are simple: just pure, sweet blended fruit, essentially applesauce, with no sugar added. The flavors include:

 
All are delicious, although we’re partial to the more complex flavors of Apple Mixed Berry and Apple Strawberry—more fruit flavor.

Fruit-Fulls are available at stores nationwide, packaged in boxes of eight four-ounce pouches. Learn more at Smuckers.com.

Fruit pouches were meant to be enjoyed “from the pouch,” but we used the convenient nozzle to:

 
TIP: Hide these from the kids or there won’t be any left for you.
  

Among the hundreds and thousands of punch recipes out there, here’s one from chef David Venable of QVC. He adds a bit of fizz with lemon-lime soda.

The frozen fruit in the recipe offsets some of the ice so the punch doesn’t dilute. Another anti-dilution tip: Freeze some juice into “ice cubes.” Finally, consider the drink dispenser below, which has a central core to hold ice cubes apart from the punch. The cubes melt into the core and can easily be refreshed.

For adults, you can keep a bottle of vodka, gin or tequila next to the punch.

Here are 10 punch making tips from THE NIBBLE.

Ingredients For 12-14 Servings

 
*Here’s a recipe for homemade grenadine.

Preparation

1. COMBINE all of the juices and the syrup into a large pitcher and place into the refrigerator. Chill for at least 2 hours to allow the flavors to blend. Just before serving…

2. POUR the fruit juice mixture into a large punch bowl (or a drink dispenser as shown in the photo). Add the lemon-lime soda, frozen strawberries, and peaches. If desired, serve the drink over ice cubes.

 
MORE PUNCH RECIPES

 
THE NEW PUNCH BOWL: A SPIGOT DISPENSER

Forget the punch bowls of yore. For entertaining, this plastic beverage dispenser with spigot (see photo) is the neater option for pouring. Outdoors, it keeps the bugs out of the punch bowl.

The model in the photo has a center ice core—a plastic insert for ice that doesn’t melt into the punch. Learn more about it on Amazon.com.

New Petite Crème, a creamy yogurt
alternative without the tang of yogurt. Photo
courtesy Stonyfield.

The category of Greek yogurt has exploded in the U.S. Is there anyone who isn’t eating it? The Greek category accounts for 47% of all U.S. yogurt sales.

Yes! A large enough number of people don’t care for the tang, such that Stonyfield, a subsidiary of French dairy giant Danone (of Dannon yogurt fame) that specializes in organic yogurt, has introduced a product to capture their business:

Called Petite Crème (PEH-tee CREHM), it’s a French dairy product called fromage frais (fresh cheese), known in Germany and elsewhere as quark.

Fromage frais is high-moisture-content, unaged cheese: drained, coagulated milk (simple lactic set curd) intended to be eaten within days of its production. It is most popularly eaten for breakfast or with fruit for dessert. In the U.S., it is waiting to step right in where the yogurt-averse fear to tread.

Fromage frais has a creamy, soft texture and fresh, sweet flavor, although the fromage frais cheeses of the U.S. are less flavorful than those made in other countries from unpasteurized milk (U.S. law requires all cheeses aged fewer than 60 days to be made of pasteurized milk to eliminate potentially harmful bacteria; pasteurization kills off friendly, tasty bacteria in the process).

Petite Crème has the consistency of yogurt without the tang and debuts in seven flavors:

 
The Stonyfield line is certified kosher by OU.

The all-organic ingredients include cultured pasteurized nonfat milk, sugar, cream, cornstarch, vanilla or other flavors and guar gum. What’s missing? Live and active cultures, like Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus.

In yogurt, the cultures ferment the milk, causing the thickening. With Petite Creme, cornstarch and guar gum (a bean-based powder) the job.

The nutritional content is similar to Greek yogurt: 10g protein per 5.3 ounce cup.

 
We recently had the opportunity to taste all the flavors and have two personal favorites: Mon Cherry Amour, with intense black cherry flavor, and Plain & Simple, the original fromage frais.

Be sure to try the plain version as well as the fruit flavors. Photo courtesy Stonyfield.

Fromage frais, quark, yogurt: What’s the difference? Cheese and yogurt* are made from a common ingredient—milk. But depending on how that milk is handled, thousands of different recipes result.

Cheese is produced from milk due to the activity of special dairy bacteria and the action of rennet. These act on the proteins in milk, causing them to coalesce into a gel-like curd which is the beginning of cheese.

 
Minor changes in any of these areas can have a dramatic affect on the final product.
 
*Yogurt is not a fresh cheese. The definition of cheese requires rennet. Even though yogurt has a texture very similar to fromage frais and quark, there is no rennet in yogurt. Rennet coagulates the milk, causing it to separate into solids (curds) and liquid (whey). Curds and whey exist separately even in fresh cheeses like fromais frais, where they are not visible to the naked eye.