Scenes of Summer 2010: Summertime Seasonal Food
Last night's dinner at our place was taco salad: browned hamburger, kidney beans, chopped-up onions and salsa, all mixed up and cooked together, topped with some shredded cheese and some torn-up lettuce (torn up by a four-year-old who is getting experience in kitchen helping this summer), plus tortilla chips for scooping. Apparently, according to the four-year-old, this meal is “yummy” and, if we had only had chocolate chip cookies on hand for dessert, it would have been the perfect meal. As it was, she had to content herself with blueberry ice cream* topped with some actual blueberries.
My original thought had been to top the taco salad with some tomatoes from our garden - i.e., the containers on our deck that are growing: tomatoes, plum tomatoes, strawberries (theoretically), mint, chives, basil and sage, plus marigolds. The ripening schedule of the tomatoes, however, did not cooperate. The big ones aren't ready yet, and the almost-ready grape ones weren't actually ready until today. Neither tomato plant is producing a bumper crop, but we have eaten some of the grape tomatoes this summer: some went into a blueberry-tomato salad (blueberries, small bits of tomatoes and a vinaigrette dressing, also prepared with help from a four-year-old), and some were used as part of our Saturday night supper of BLTs, with toasted bread, lettuce, tomatoes and turkey bacon. I'm awaiting the ripening of the larger tomatoes to make a meal of cheeseburger pie with fresh tomato slices, but I don't think I'll get enough tomatoes this year to make and freeze tomato sauce, which was one of my thoughts when planting things on Memorial Day weekend.
I am starting to think about how to preserve some of the herbs for winter, though, now that it's August and sort of/kind of the beginning of harvest season. I chopped up a bunch of the basil a while ago and froze it in olive oil in an ice cube tray, with the idea being that I could then dump the olive oil-ice cubes out into a freezer bag and have them for flavoring soups, pastas, etc. during the winter. The challenge, however, is that I can't actually get the olive oil-ice cubes out of the ice cube tray: they froze hard.
We've eaten some of the basil this summer in spaghetti sauce (made with purchased canned tomato sauce and some of our herbs and spices), and....some other stuff I don't remember. Likely salads. The sage, I put into an egg bake dish at one point, and also cut up several leaves to go into the corn casserole I made for tonight's Night to Unite block party. (Scraped the remaining kernels off the ears of sweet corn we didn't eat for supper the other night, along with creamed corn, for a recipe from one of my old - 1997 - issues of Taste of Home magazine. I've been having some fun flipping through old summer issues for inspiration for seasonal recipes.) I've come to the conclusion that I don't really know what to do with sage; it's not necessarily an herb I'll be growing again.
The chives, on the other hand, have definitely proven their worth this summer. Easy to grow, easy to snip off, and adding a nicely sharp smell to things, they've been chopped up and added to potato salad, egg salad, chicken salad (made with shredded leftovers from a fried chicken dinner), ham salad (made with torn-up pieces of ham lunchmeat to use it up more quickly), tuna salad, pasta pea salad and plain-old pasta salad, among other things.
Yes, it's been a very salad-y summer around here. They're quick, they're easy, they're cold, they make great picnic food - and my little one likes them, particularly the hard-boiled egg-based salads. (My “recipe” pretty much consists of “hard boil six eggs, chop them up into pieces, add chives and pieces of whatever we're calling this salad, whether it's the chicken or the ham, add some mustard and some Miracle Whip to a proportion that looks good, stir.”) We had shrimp salad one night: shrimp served on top of lettuce with a dressing made from ketchup and lemon juice (my mom's recipe for “cocktail sauce” from when I was a kid and she occasionally served frozen breaded shrimp; I didn't have any horseradish on hand to add like she did, though).
We've also had “side dish salads” like the aforementioned blueberry-tomato, watermelon-cucumber (pieces of watermelon and cucumber with a cooked vinegar-sugar-and-pepper-flakes dressing) and creamy cucumbers (cucumber slices with a dressing of Miracle Whip, sour cream and sugar). Plus “fruit salad” (pineapple chunks, orange slices, sour cream and Cool Whip, plus marshmallows - as in, the ones that were leftover from our campfire roastings at church camp). Still on my agenda for the summer: I'd like to get in a steak salad. I've also been flipping through the salad sections of some cookbooks/old cooking magazines for inspiration - I've got some ideas for apple salads in the next month or so as we transition into fall, and I foresee a series of soups for my family this fall and winter.
At the moment, though, it's still summer, and I'm talkin' 'bout summer food. It doesn't seem like I've made as many batches of homemade popsicles as in past summers - we're on the second of the summer; I think the first were orange, and these (which are, admittedly, almost gone so that I need to make some more this week) are cherry-flavored. I did, however, find a mold set for a quarter at a garage sale - one of ours is cracking and will need to be replaced soon. (I guess 30-plus years is a good lifetime for these things; I'm currently using the sets that my mom had when I was a kid.)
We have also had ice cream sandwiches from a really good sale, and Nora has discovered smoothies: ice cream, milk and fruit blended up in the blender. She will pretty much eat any berry in sight, so that is where most of our grocery store-purchased straw-/rasp-/blue-berries have gone this summer, plus a couple of bananas. As mentioned before, I'm also having her help more in the kitchen this summer: she's supposed to set the table and clear her place, and she's been rinsing fruit off, slicing bananas, buttering her own graham crackers for snacks (and then, of course, dropping them butter-side-down on the floor...), tearing up lettuce, and putting bread in the toaster and pushing down the lever.
She also likes to help pack the picnic basket for our picnic outings by putting in the juice boxes (we drink a lot more juice boxes in the summer than we do at other times of the year - because we take them on picnics in the park). Our picnic fare usually includes some kind of sandwich - we had our tuna salad in pita bread pockets this weekend - plus, at various times, we've added cheese slices, berries, chips, and, always, cookies. (It's time to open another box of Girl Scout cookies from my niece's spring sales, since we ate the last of the Thanks A Lots at this weekend's picnic.) We've had a couple of these picnics at our park that has free music concerts several times a week in the summer. Nora hasn't necessarily wanted to stay for the entirety of the orchestra or brass band concerts, but she got some cultural exposure in and learned what a conductor is - and the playground where we go when she is starting to get too rambunctious is close enough to the amphitheater that I can still hear “76 Trombones,“ etc.
At the end of a day, I like to relax with a cup of something; sometimes, in the summer, it's lemonade sipped on the deck out of a tin mug (Nora has also been learning to make lemonade this summer: we use the CountryTime mix and have a Pampered Chef pitcher that she can just plunge the top up and down to mix up - and I make her do this in the sink). Sometimes, all year 'round, it's tea. I've finished off the purchased ginger peach tea from our anniversary trip in May - that's a flavor that I find tastes better as iced tea, so I'm much more likely to drink it in summertime, plus the “summer breeze.” Most of my summertime tea now is coming from the mint plant on the deck: I snip off a few leaves to make my own mint tea, which is good either iced or hot.
* What happens when you go grocery shopping with a four-year-old.
My original thought had been to top the taco salad with some tomatoes from our garden - i.e., the containers on our deck that are growing: tomatoes, plum tomatoes, strawberries (theoretically), mint, chives, basil and sage, plus marigolds. The ripening schedule of the tomatoes, however, did not cooperate. The big ones aren't ready yet, and the almost-ready grape ones weren't actually ready until today. Neither tomato plant is producing a bumper crop, but we have eaten some of the grape tomatoes this summer: some went into a blueberry-tomato salad (blueberries, small bits of tomatoes and a vinaigrette dressing, also prepared with help from a four-year-old), and some were used as part of our Saturday night supper of BLTs, with toasted bread, lettuce, tomatoes and turkey bacon. I'm awaiting the ripening of the larger tomatoes to make a meal of cheeseburger pie with fresh tomato slices, but I don't think I'll get enough tomatoes this year to make and freeze tomato sauce, which was one of my thoughts when planting things on Memorial Day weekend.
I am starting to think about how to preserve some of the herbs for winter, though, now that it's August and sort of/kind of the beginning of harvest season. I chopped up a bunch of the basil a while ago and froze it in olive oil in an ice cube tray, with the idea being that I could then dump the olive oil-ice cubes out into a freezer bag and have them for flavoring soups, pastas, etc. during the winter. The challenge, however, is that I can't actually get the olive oil-ice cubes out of the ice cube tray: they froze hard.
We've eaten some of the basil this summer in spaghetti sauce (made with purchased canned tomato sauce and some of our herbs and spices), and....some other stuff I don't remember. Likely salads. The sage, I put into an egg bake dish at one point, and also cut up several leaves to go into the corn casserole I made for tonight's Night to Unite block party. (Scraped the remaining kernels off the ears of sweet corn we didn't eat for supper the other night, along with creamed corn, for a recipe from one of my old - 1997 - issues of Taste of Home magazine. I've been having some fun flipping through old summer issues for inspiration for seasonal recipes.) I've come to the conclusion that I don't really know what to do with sage; it's not necessarily an herb I'll be growing again.
The chives, on the other hand, have definitely proven their worth this summer. Easy to grow, easy to snip off, and adding a nicely sharp smell to things, they've been chopped up and added to potato salad, egg salad, chicken salad (made with shredded leftovers from a fried chicken dinner), ham salad (made with torn-up pieces of ham lunchmeat to use it up more quickly), tuna salad, pasta pea salad and plain-old pasta salad, among other things.
Yes, it's been a very salad-y summer around here. They're quick, they're easy, they're cold, they make great picnic food - and my little one likes them, particularly the hard-boiled egg-based salads. (My “recipe” pretty much consists of “hard boil six eggs, chop them up into pieces, add chives and pieces of whatever we're calling this salad, whether it's the chicken or the ham, add some mustard and some Miracle Whip to a proportion that looks good, stir.”) We had shrimp salad one night: shrimp served on top of lettuce with a dressing made from ketchup and lemon juice (my mom's recipe for “cocktail sauce” from when I was a kid and she occasionally served frozen breaded shrimp; I didn't have any horseradish on hand to add like she did, though).
We've also had “side dish salads” like the aforementioned blueberry-tomato, watermelon-cucumber (pieces of watermelon and cucumber with a cooked vinegar-sugar-and-pepper-flakes dressing) and creamy cucumbers (cucumber slices with a dressing of Miracle Whip, sour cream and sugar). Plus “fruit salad” (pineapple chunks, orange slices, sour cream and Cool Whip, plus marshmallows - as in, the ones that were leftover from our campfire roastings at church camp). Still on my agenda for the summer: I'd like to get in a steak salad. I've also been flipping through the salad sections of some cookbooks/old cooking magazines for inspiration - I've got some ideas for apple salads in the next month or so as we transition into fall, and I foresee a series of soups for my family this fall and winter.
At the moment, though, it's still summer, and I'm talkin' 'bout summer food. It doesn't seem like I've made as many batches of homemade popsicles as in past summers - we're on the second of the summer; I think the first were orange, and these (which are, admittedly, almost gone so that I need to make some more this week) are cherry-flavored. I did, however, find a mold set for a quarter at a garage sale - one of ours is cracking and will need to be replaced soon. (I guess 30-plus years is a good lifetime for these things; I'm currently using the sets that my mom had when I was a kid.)
We have also had ice cream sandwiches from a really good sale, and Nora has discovered smoothies: ice cream, milk and fruit blended up in the blender. She will pretty much eat any berry in sight, so that is where most of our grocery store-purchased straw-/rasp-/blue-berries have gone this summer, plus a couple of bananas. As mentioned before, I'm also having her help more in the kitchen this summer: she's supposed to set the table and clear her place, and she's been rinsing fruit off, slicing bananas, buttering her own graham crackers for snacks (and then, of course, dropping them butter-side-down on the floor...), tearing up lettuce, and putting bread in the toaster and pushing down the lever.
She also likes to help pack the picnic basket for our picnic outings by putting in the juice boxes (we drink a lot more juice boxes in the summer than we do at other times of the year - because we take them on picnics in the park). Our picnic fare usually includes some kind of sandwich - we had our tuna salad in pita bread pockets this weekend - plus, at various times, we've added cheese slices, berries, chips, and, always, cookies. (It's time to open another box of Girl Scout cookies from my niece's spring sales, since we ate the last of the Thanks A Lots at this weekend's picnic.) We've had a couple of these picnics at our park that has free music concerts several times a week in the summer. Nora hasn't necessarily wanted to stay for the entirety of the orchestra or brass band concerts, but she got some cultural exposure in and learned what a conductor is - and the playground where we go when she is starting to get too rambunctious is close enough to the amphitheater that I can still hear “76 Trombones,“ etc.
At the end of a day, I like to relax with a cup of something; sometimes, in the summer, it's lemonade sipped on the deck out of a tin mug (Nora has also been learning to make lemonade this summer: we use the CountryTime mix and have a Pampered Chef pitcher that she can just plunge the top up and down to mix up - and I make her do this in the sink). Sometimes, all year 'round, it's tea. I've finished off the purchased ginger peach tea from our anniversary trip in May - that's a flavor that I find tastes better as iced tea, so I'm much more likely to drink it in summertime, plus the “summer breeze.” Most of my summertime tea now is coming from the mint plant on the deck: I snip off a few leaves to make my own mint tea, which is good either iced or hot.
* What happens when you go grocery shopping with a four-year-old.