Summer

Cheese and tomatoes go together like, well, pizza.  But sometimes you don’t want all that bread.  Sometimes you want something satisfying, fresh, that’s hot and quick.  Insalata Caprese is great, but when I want something a bit more substantial and warm I make Scamorza Affumicata alla Griglia.  

Or grilled smoked mozzarella topped with seasoned cherry tomatoes.  It’s the easiest dinner ever.

Take a few cherry tomatoes, cut them in half and toss with good extra virgin olive oil, salt, the pepper of your choice (I love Aleppo pepper) and some oregano (I have a bunch of dried Sicilian oregano that I use by crumbling a bit into the bowl.

This quick and easy dinner was inspired by Aida Mollenkamp‘s Chile Basil Coconut Ceviche. Black Cod arrived from the fish CSA this week, I just bought a can of coconut cream and I was awash in fresh lime juice.

It was, as they say, beshert, meant to be. It never occurred to me to combine coconut milk/cream with lime juice to “cook” the fish. Black Cod is so luscious that I normally wouldn’t use it in ceviche but somehow the idea of combining like with like (rich fish and rich coconut cream) seemed like a good idea.

I looked in the fridge to see what I had that would appeal in the same way Aida’s mixture of mango with coconut appeals. I had a luscious Weiser Ogen melon. Score!

We live in Boston. To get ourselves through winters that go from November to May, we hold dear dreaming of warm weather. Any restaurant with two feet of sidewalk sets out tables in March. They say it's to be ready for baseball season. This is wishful thinking since there are no home games until well into April. Snow plows don't disappear until May. Still.

When we think warm weather, we want fish. We get fish all year but somehow the best time for shellfish is summer. Lobster, shrimp, crabmeat, clams and oysters are at their best when we want them most. Here's a seafood recipe with lobster, shrimp and crab that brings summer to the kitchen full blast. It goes equally well at cookouts and air-conditioned dinner parties.

The trouble with going to the farmers’ market is that everything looks so gorgeous I buy enough to feed everyone in my zip code. Then I go home and realize that I actually have to do something with all this bounty, as in, cook it, at which point I have been known to utter a mild curse.

Last weekend I visited the relatively new market at the Beverly Glen Circle. The produce and friendly purveyors were so seductive, I found myself leaving with armloads of bell peppers, eggplant, red onions and masses of heirloom tomatoes, herbs, stuffed flatbread, artichoke spread and even some truffle-scented sea salt, although I’m clueless as to its practical use. If you’d seen me schlepping all those bags to the car, you’d have mistaken me for someone who actually likes spending most of the day in the kitchen.