Summer

From the New York Times

Summer may not be the best time to cook, but it’s certainly among the best times to eat. Toss watermelon and peaches with some ingredients you have lying around already, and you can produce a salad that’s delicious, unusual, fast and perfectly seasonal.

That’s the idea behind the 101 ideas found in this section. In theory, each salad takes 20 minutes or less. Honestly, some may take you a little longer. But most minimize work at the stove and capitalize on the season, when tomatoes, eggplant, herbs, fruit, greens and more are plentiful and excellent.

This last point is important. Not everything needs to be farmers’ market quality, but it’s not too much to expect ripe fruit, fragrant herbs and juicy greens.

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With summer drawing to a close, I'm still not ready to say goodbye. My garden, though less productive, has a lot of vegetables that are still ripening. But, alas, the cooler weather and shorter days will bring an end to summer's bounty. But with all the beautiful late summer produce that's currently available at farmers' markets, like squash, peppers, tomatoes, and more, there's a lot of summery cooking that can still be done.

Take the opportunity to make a tomato sauce, a soup, saute or stir-fry. I love stir-frying because it's such a fun and easy method for cooking up a meal quickly. Plus you can pack it with vegetables. For this summer stir-fry, I use zucchini, bell peppers, and oyster mushrooms. And one of my favorite herbs, Thai basil, makes an aromatic and flavorful addition. What could be a better dish for using up summer vegetables than this?

With Thai flavors, much like Pad Thai, I use sweet tamarind paste and savory fish sauce to flavor the dish. Soy sauce, garlic, and ginger round out the flavor profile. It's all served over rice noodles. But there's one thing to keep in mind. The secret to a well-made stir-fry is cooking the dish in smaller portions so that everything stays crisp instead of steaming under the weight of a full wok of vegetables. Take a few minutes to toss together this healthy and colorful dish. You won't be let down by these summer flavors.

It’s just that time of summer when I feel I haven’t had enough BBQ.

Ribs to be specific. Pork Ribs. For some reason and I’m not sure what it is. Either we’ve been eating lighter or the bbq-er in my house has been opting for fancier fare (like boneless chicken breasts wrapped in prosciutto – I’ll let you know how it turns out). And due to the Highway Jobs Incentive (or whatever you call that thing that’s tearing up our streets and making automobile travel next to impossible at night) as one of the many “405 challenged”, the trip over the hill to Boneyard Bistro seems daunting, forget Hoggly Woggly’s, and Baby Blues has become so popular that unless it’s dinner for ten and we can get them to deliver, take-out’s more trouble than it’s worth.

So, I’m declaring Sunday August 7th National BBQ Ribs Day! I don’t know who decides these things anyway. So, if it’s someone else’s National Day, like National Heirloom Tomato Day, I apologize, you’re just going to have to share.

The best ribs I’ve had this summer were Alan Ett’s (but I haven’t quite convinced him to give me the recipe). That’s not true, he told me the recipe, but I didn’t write it down. And I’m hoping this will inspire him to write it down for me and send it in, because they were divine.

BBQ Sauce | Lyndon Johnson's BBQ Sauce

Barbecue Beer Ribs | Brown Sugar Pork Ribs
POM Pomegranate Barbecue Ribs | Quincy Jones' Thriller Ribs

Sweet, tender, mild, succulent, moist, and juicy. These are some words that describe one of my favorite seafoods, the scallop. I love the shape and design of their shells, which I collect, but I love the mild flavor of their meat even more. Part of the bivalve family of mollusks, these shelled creatures are prized for their tender, white meat. Harvested at sea usually by dredging the ocean floor or by diving, a more ecological method, scallops have their meat removed before arriving in markets. That is why you almost never see them in their shells.

Luckily, I have had the opportunity to see scallops in their natural yet man-made habitat. When I was a teen I worked on a scallop farm out on Long Island Sound as part of a summer aquaculture program. The scallops were housed in lantern nets, suspended directly in the sea between buoys. On reaching the farm, boatmen would lift the nets out of the sea for the students to work on. We moved the baby scallops from their crowded lantern nets into new ones that afforded them the space to grow to full marketable size. While handling them, the scallops, like toy water pistols, would squirt us with briny water. Besides not being allowed to eat the scallops, it was a fun and memorable experience.