Summer

When you start shredding napa cabbage an amazing thing happens. It explodes. Napa cabbage grows so densely that a relatively small or medium head of cabbage not only weighs a ton, it seems to expand when you cut it up. So after shredding two heads there was no room to fit the already shredded red cabbage in the mix. I also realized there might be someone who didn't like cilantro and making two batches would allow for a little more choice of flavors.

The red cabbage cole slaw included shredded red and yellow peppers and carrots. The napa cabbage cole slaw included slivered green onions and cilantro. Both were quite tasty and tasted different though the Asian inspired dressing was exactly the same.

I like to make the cole slaw the night before I serve it. It tastes better if it has some time to mellow out a bit and soften. The other trick to making cole slaw is to add things like cilantro and green onion at the last minute, right before serving, because neither of those ingredients improve the longer they sit around.

This is a fantastic recipe that makes great use of fresh summer peaches. Cobbler is a classic summer dessert and just about as American as Apple Pie. The clever folks at Cook’s Country have mastered a method that prevents the cobbler from sitting in too much liquid.

Traditional cobblers are usually made with a biscuit-like topping and can be made with almost any fruit, although peaches are my favorite. I usually make biscuits with buttermilk or heavy cream, but the yogurt really works well here.

Top the warm cobbler with some vanilla ice cream and enjoy.

Proof positive that my patience (or lack of) is worsening by the year (and my memory, too): I checked our records (record-keeping nerd that I am), and, in fact, we picked the first of this years Sungolds and Early Girls EARLIER this year than last year–and the year before! (That’s tomatoes from the garden, not the hoop house. The hoop house ones came almost a full month ahead of the field tomatoes.)

So I must officially stop complaining about the tomatoes (and everything else) being late this year, especially because now they’re officially here! Time for salsa and bruschetta. Finally.

Finally, we’re harvesting our potatoes—Red Golds and French Fingerlings, too. Every morning Roy forks up a plant or two and we ooh and ah over the tubers that tumble off the roots. (The potatoes are Roy’s babies, so he gets to decide how many we pull up every day!) There are always a few that are only the size of marbles—I slip them in my pocket and roll them around in my fingers from time to time, as if they were lucky garden charms. The rest I weigh and portion into those cute little green berry baskets for the farm stand. Any extras I get to keep. And cook for dinner. Yum.

The other night I had a few of both kind left over, and they were all different sizes. So I cut them up into pieces about the same size so they’d cook at about the same rate. But instead of roasting them, I decided to cook them on the grill using a method I developed for Fine Cooking years ago.

Basically, it’s just cooking in a foil package (not a radical concept!), but the trick is to make a package of even thickness so that all the potatoes cook at about the same rate (see directions in the recipe below).

The big payoff here is that by putting the foil package over the direct heat of the grill, the potatoes get some great browning (and flavor) and cook through, too. I wrap the potatoes in three layers of foil so that they don’t burn, and I flip the potato package once during cooking so both sides have contact with the hot grill grates.