Summer

Has this ever happened to you? You're strolling through the farmers' market on a balmy August day when you spy a table heavy with heirloom tomatoes.

There's a youthful, striped Green Zebra sitting next to a grandfatherly, bulbous Cherokee tomato the color of red wine. You scoop up a couple of each. Your mind is swimming with juicy possibilities -- tomato and mozzarella salad, tomato and goat cheese tart.

As you're walking toward the farmer to pay for your tomatoes, you spot a perfectly scalloped white patty pan squash. You've never seen a white squash before, so you select three. Then the farmer points out his captivating purple string beans. You say you'll buy a pound of those too. No one passes up purple string beans.

You hand your heavy sacks to the farmer who weighs them and says, "That'll be $28 dollars, please."

You blanch. You only have $20 left in your wallet. What do you do?

Blueberries just might be my favorite summer berry. When I was growing up, I enjoyed the blueberry pies my grandma made. I've never been able to recreate that delicious pie. And, for that reason, I come up with all sorts of ways, other than in pie, to enjoy the plump blueberries of summer.

I think it was four summers ago, at about this time, that I went on my first camping/canoe trip at Lake of the Woods. A friend, who was also on the trip, sent me a recipe for a blueberry relish sometime before we were scheduled to take off. I made the relish for her and brought it to Laketrails Base Camp on Oak Island in Lake of the Woods in the Northwest Angle of Minnesota, our starting point. Our fellow paddlers enjoyed the savory blueberry topping with goat cheese on toasted slices of baguette as a start to our meal the night before the big adventure trip under a full moon. There were times on our week-long adventure that we wished we would have had more of that snack.

Several years ago, when I was visiting an out-of-town friend, she served oatmeal in a very interesting way. She told me we were eating breakfast Portland-style. That’s where she had chilled oatmeal for the first time.

She called it Swiss Muesli, which I think of as a wholesome and hearty granola-type cereal. This was different. The night before serving she had mixed uncooked old fashioned oats with skim milk, brown sugar, dried fruit (she used dried blueberries and cranberries), low-fat vanilla yogurt, salt and chopped pecans. She covered the mixture and chilled it overnight. At serving time, she scooped the mixture into cereal bowls. No cooking and no heating involved. It was very good, and what a convenient way to serve a nutritious breakfast to overnight guests.

I’ve taken my friend’s breakfast idea a step or two further by making it with dairy-free milk and yogurt and portioning the mixture into wide-mouth jars for individual servings. This makes it an easy grab-and-go breakfast and a very convenient way to serve a house full of summer weekend guests or a husband who heads to the golf course very very early on weekend mornings.

I love pound cake. I love peaches. I love cooking and baking with buttermilk. Need I say more about my Peach Buttermilk Pound Cake? Not really. It’s a Peach Buttermilk Pound Cake, y’all! But then at the same time, I could elaborate volumes upon volumes simply on the amazing nature that is a pound cake! Oh, the dilemmas of Southern culinary literature! I digress...

Buttermilk is my “go to “ baking liquid for cornbread, biscuits, pound cakes and cakes too. There’s chemistry involved with the acidity and dairy quotients but I shan’t bore y’all with that. I just know that buttermilk is awesome. Instead of further elaboration on buttermilk and its baking prowess, I’ll tell y’all why I love it in this cake in particularly – the zippy tang. It is not strong but there is a slight undercurrent that keeps the cake from being too sweet. A perfect pairing with sweet to tart peaches!