Postcards From the First Day of Summer

1) This is the time of year when the bloom of garden excitement begins to fade. You know, the weeds are coming back after initial clearing but there's not much in the way of food. At least not yet. It appears, though, that my early efforts may pay off in the form of yellow squash. Note to self: look up summer squash recipes.

2) This month's issue of Country Living featured a cover line that read something along the lines of "Summer's Perfect Wine" or somesuch. Turns out the editors have become fond of a particular "summer white" which I have loved for some time.

 We usually pick up a couple cases for summer fun but this year we bought three. One doesn't mess around in the face of media madness, you see. If you were to come to my house for dinner between, say, the end of May and Labor Day this is what I'd pour for you.

At $8ish dollars a bottle, Famega Vinho Verde is hands down the best affordable fizz you'll ever buy. Do you think less of me for waiting to take delivery of my three cases before recommending that you, too, seek it out?





3) I'm reading cookbooks again after a long hiatus. Through a convoluted path I've become a late addition to the Claudia Roden fan club (if there isn't such a thing, there ought to be - Claudia, call me!). Although I am not particular to Spanish cuisine, I'm relishing a slow, deliberate read of The Food of Spain. This book is absolutely amazing. Literally epic in scope, the first 100 or so pages is nothing short of a culinary history textbook. Roden traces Spain's intertwining Christian, Jewish, and Muslim histories that are the underpinning of every summer's breathless tapas articles. Truly extraordinary and I insist that you go buy a copy immediately, if not sooner.

4) We're enjoying a very nice lack of extracurricular activities at the moment. Baseball and dance are over and there's little movement on the scout (girl or cub) front. The next six weeks stretch luxuriously mayhem-free. There are some camps on the calendar, of course (in our town, parents who do not abundantly enrich their offspring during summer break are considered reportable to the U.N.), but until football and cheer begin August, it's nothing but old-fashioned summer fun around here. Firefly-chasing, popsicle-licking, tree-climbing, dog-hugging summer fun.

It's glorious.

Guests Merry With Your Cheer

My sister and her family are coming to visit this weekend. Among the routine logistical back-and-forths, the plans have involved a long Facebook thread about what we'll eat while they're here and where we'll buy it and how it will be prepared and whether or not I'll bother pleasing anyone but the two of us.

This kind of selfishness will surprise no one who knows me even a little bit well. It also has some precedent when applied to my sister and myself. We're the duo that, once upon a time, flew clear across the country to visit with our father's sisters and spent the entire long weekend with them eating pancakes at this very specific place and having dessert at that very specific place and so on (that we were young at the time and somewhat in their care comforts me in that it means we come by our obsessions honestly). Among other memories, I carry with me the yogurt and berries we ate at some posh hotel (the only breakfast we could afford), the peach daiquiris our grandmother served (it was the last time I saw her before her death less than two months later), the picnic lunch our aunt packed for the plane ride back to Philadelphia (shrimp & cream cheese spread on mini bagels which lasted until we just barely cleared the runway in San Francisco).

Some years after that trip we sat together in our parents' kitchen with the man that she would soon marry. Why we were there and our parents were not I don't recall, but I do remember what we ate. Brie and roasted garlic (hey, it was the 90s), a pesto made with half spinach and half basil (it shrunk in the micro), smoked salmon. That my future brother-in-law loves my sister was abundantly evident because knowing him better now I can say that there's no way on earth we'd get away with putting that array of foodstuffs on the table these days.

She'd like to do a bit of canning while they're visiting so I'm hoping to cue up some brandied blueberries or blackberries. That's an easy choice because we won't need to monitor a jelling point or whatever and can thus accommodate the distractions our collected five children will no doubt visit upon us. We'll also visit the local farm market, the merits of which she's listened to me extol for years now. I'll buy a couple chickens to grill and maybe some peaches to make into soup. Friday night I'll grill some cheese (yes! it's true - man, I love this stuff) and wrap bacon around jalapeños from the plants out by the old stone wall. We'll open the olives that are already marinating and the red onions I mixed up earlier this evening. Collectively, they'll be the perfect foils for a hot, humid Philadelphia summer evening.

When my sister comes to town.

Maintaining My Amateur Status

Despite the post of my Mid-Winter’s Lament a few weeks back, I didn’t until just this week really understand just how much of prior years’ canning we’d been using. Sure, the jars were piling up, but since I’m not one of those canning types who catalogs and indexes my output – which is strange, considering how much of a control freak I am in nearly every other aspect of my life – I don’t have any kind of metric or tracking tool against which to check our usage. If I don’t know that I made, say, 40 quarts of applesauce last fall and I don’t know that I just opened number 39, I have no way of knowing that I’d better slow down with the counting on having more around. Clearly, I’ve got what we business-minded types call a process gap, one that is only just now making itself known.


I opened the last jar of tomatillo salsa last night and nearly forewent adorning the dinner burritos because, hey, it was the last jar and you can’t just use that on anything. The aforementioned applesauce is actually long gone and the peaches are not far behind. For plain old tomatoes, I’m down to a few pints which, given the cold winter’s impact on domestic tomato production, I am treating as part of my 401(k). Blackberries? History. Brandied apples? No more. Preserved lemons? The way of the Dodo. Spiced honey? Holiday gifting took care of that one. I still have plain cherries, raspberry jam and one jar of tomato salsa. There’s also a jar of apple butter (which I don’t even like and cannot remember what possessed me to make it), a quarter pint of pickled jalapenos and a few more half-pints of pickled mushrooms. That’s it, that’s all she wrote after years and years of canning activity.

Even if I don’t keep records of pantry inputs and outputs, it’s not hard to understand what happened. Life and stuff, that’s what happened. Leaving aside blights and weather and the price of whatnot, my rate of canning slowed as the children grew and developed lives of their own at the same time as my professional life ramped up a bit. Since I am disinclined to use my small amounts of leisure grocery shopping for basics (shopping for party food or stuff to put into jars is completely different, although I don’t do much of either for other reasons), well, here we are.

Since we have, quite literally, been dining on past years’ productivity and industriousness, if I am ever again to enjoy meal-related leisure I need to get back to work, canning-wise. True planning is difficult to do this far in advance because we never know how weather, bugs and diseases will affect crop production. It's all well and good to commit oneself to 50 pints of peach ketchup but no bets should be made until the crop is in hand, so to speak.

It wouldn't do at all to set your heart on the peaches only to find out that, this year, you're more gifted in the hot pepper area. Better instead to focus on ideas - maybe you could use more jam or sandwich enhancers or fruits suitable for side dishes. Focusing on concepts allows you to bop and weave with your canning - you'll get your jam, but maybe it'll be blackberry instead of strawberry. Pickles might end up as green cherry tomatoes rather than hamburger dills. See what I mean? Bop and weave right around whatever the garden, the weather or your mood throws at the affair. For my part, I'm focusing on finished items rather than ingredients - salsas over plain tomatoes, brandied fruits over plain berries, for example, things I can use more or less as-is without further massaging after the jar is open.

We'll see. It's clear that I need to do something in the way of planning and this is pretty much as far as I'm willing to go. I don't know what I'll put on the pantry shelves this year, but I do know it'll be something great.

Not Tonight Dear

All weekend I mulled a new post, a kind of What I Did Over Summer Vacation, wherein I planned to detail this year's pickled mushrooms (splendid), the sweet cherries (ten pints of pure sunshine) and perhaps do a little mourning over my tomatoes, newly beset by blight as they are.*

Instead I am indulging in a fit of crankiness brought on by a short but spectacular storm that has left us with sub-optimal media and internet conditions and which came on the heals of a plumbing challenge (read:  leak from upstairs into the downstairs and all over my desk) which left the one totally reliable computer with a keyboard that no longer recognizes commas, the numbers 1, 4, and 7 or the letter K.  Tomatoes aren't the only things blighted around here.

So.  Will return.

* The blight situation brings into stark relief a point I've made a time or two about canning's value proposition.  If I have to purchase tomatoes for preserving when commercial options are available for around a dollar a can, what should I consider to be a break even?  Or should I even care when by purchasing I've supported a local farmer, giving her the means by which to combat the blight and make our 'hood safe for nightshades once again?  But then if I add in the energy costs and lids and time and...whatever.  I'll probably buy at least some tomatoes to make the less plain items - your salsas, your roasted veggie sauces, and so on - and buy my regular old diced specimens (the price of which seems likely to be somewhat more than a dollar darn tootin' soon) at the grocery.  With the decision at hand for many of us, I'll ask you to be honest about the costs and rewards...and not to forget to factor in your own enjoyment.  Surely it is worth something, yes?

Summer In the Kitchen (or Not)

Laurie Colwin related in her delightful cooking memoir Home Cooking the story of a friend who wondered about the herald-of-spring quality in the picnic staged by students at the seminary across the street from Colwin's apartment. "What is it about Episcopalians," the friend asked. "Is it their genes to barbecue?"

I think that when the friend in the story said barbecue she meant grill, although I cannot say for sure because I knew neither party to the conversation. The key to understanding what she meant, I suppose, is knowing whether or not the noun or verb form of barbecue was meant. Given the context, this Episcopalian is going with the verb and is very happy to do so. Grilling may not be in my genes but it's certainly among my preferences for getting good food on the table with a minimum of fuss, a maximum of flavor, avoidance of burgers and dogs where possible, and leaving ample time to pursue some of the other great joys of summer (swimming, gardening, sitting on the back porch watching fireflies, and - shocker! - canning).

In the warmer months, I rely upon three tools (a grill basket, a small cookie sheet that was perhaps meant for a toaster oven, and a set of skewers), a selection of condiments (if you're wondering what on earth made you concoct a batch of jerk sauce now you know) and two bread products (8 inch flour tortillas and garlic bread). From this modest list of necessities, great things can be achieved.

The basket can hold diced potatoes or cauliflower spears or mushrooms or whatever. Sprinkled with a bit of olive oil and seasoned with salt, pepper and/or some of that Adobo spice stuff (the bitter orange is really great) and plunked right on the grill, you've got a side dish fit for all comers. The skewers make short work of cooking any combination of meats/fish or veggies, all marinated overnight in Chiavetta's Italian Dressing or the jerk sauce (or even the Hot and Sweet Dipping Sauce). Thread 'em up and put them right next to the basket. They'll cook in minutes in a well-heated grill.

The teeny cookie sheet holds more fragile veggies - zucchini ribbons, say, or maybe red onion strings - salted and peppered and sprinkled with a spare amount of red wine vinegar (or that cheapie balsamic stuff in the green bottle). That, too, can go right on the grill. As for the bread, wrapped in foil (or not), either tortillas or garlic bread will warm sufficiently within minutes.

And that's dinner, prepared and served in roughly 40 minutes, with little cleanup in terms of pots and pans (the foil, once cooled, can be rinsed and used again and again and...). Salsa or steak sauce (Helen Witty has a recipe I've been meaning to try) are nice, as is a bit of yogurt with mango pickle or diced hot peppers. If I've got some good fruit, I might add a bowl or maybe a plate of sliced tomatoes and cheese for company, but these are frills and not at all necessary. A glass of wine, however, improves even this wonderful meal immeasurably.

When the dishes are cleared away and the minor post-dinner cleaning chores are done, it's no small gift have time to spare, something that I suspect even the grilling-suspicious Laurie Colwin and her friend would understand.