Summer

Have you ever attended a grill shindig where chicken is the star of the show and what you are served resembles eau d'ashtray or worse the bird is literally still raw.  Bleck.

For some reason, people feel the need to char the heck out of grilled chicken, leaving it dry and literally unpalatable.  But you eat it anyway to be nice. 

And then there are those who remove the chicken from the grill too soon because they put the grilling sauce on way too early and now it's burning.  Their solution...take the uncooked chicken off the grill... a very dangerous choice.  There seems to be no middle ground.

When I was growing up, my mom’s favorite thing to do when we hit the road was to stop at the roadside stands and buy fruit and vegetables from the local farmers.  What she dearly loved was when we could actually stop at the farm and do the picking ourselves.

One of her favorite places to visit was Cherry Valley, east of Los Angeles, where she would find an orchard that would let us kids climb up the ladders, buckets in hand, and pick and eat as many cherries as we could handle.

Heading up north I remembered those experiences when I saw the signs for Restoration Oaks Ranch's Santa Barbara Blueberry Farm, with its U-Pick option.

Thirty minutes north of Santa Barbara and three miles south of Buellton (home of Anderson's Pea Soup), from May to early August, keep a lookout on the east side of the highway. There are signs on both sides of the highway but the turn off comes quickly, so be alert, especially on the southbound side where the exit is from the left lane.

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.

I'm from the South. I grew up and went to college in Tennessee, and worked for many years in Atlanta.  But I never felt like I was home until I moved to New York City.   The city fit my disposition and overall world-view nicely, not to mention the comfort that comes from living in a Blue state. So, it takes a lot for me to find a desire to go back below the Mason-Dixon.  Still, every Memorial Day weekend I return to kick off the summer. Why?  Why do I go back for five days of nonstop comments about the liberal media, the constitutional wrongs of the “war of northern aggression” and the amazing wonders of the NRA?

Believe it or not, I go to Tennessee to camp with my uncle, Tony, and his gun-toting friends from college.  Though debated every year, the general consensus is that the tradition began in 1992 shortly after Tony and his friends graduated from college.  They chose to go out behind my grandparent’s property to a bluff by a lake. Back then the menu for the entire weekend consisted of the fish they could catch, and cook over an open fire.  Occasionally a pizza would find its way back courtesy of the occasional visitor not interested in spending the night outside.  But the overall spread was limited.