9:42 p.m. - 22 July 2003
Sweet Treat
Sweet Treat: What food do you crave during the summer? Or, alternately, what food can't you stand when the weather grows warm, even though you usually love it?
It’s cliché, I know, but it’s not really summer until the grocery stores have big boxes of locally-grown watermelons. Actually, although Lee has managed to polish off a couple of watermelons by himself this summer, I have yet to have any. I think it’s partly because I associate watermelon with my sisters: sitting on the porch, juice running down our chins, trying (and failing) to spit the seeds. Usually we just managed to get them stuck to our chins. I know one summer we apparently managed to get some of them on the ground, since the next year we had a watermelon vine growing along the edge of the patio.
I also crave blueberries, although I never eat them plain. Even though I have a bazillion cookbooks and recipes for blueberry muffins, pies, pancakes, etc., I almost always make a blueberry bread pudding with them. Occasionally I’ll make blueberry cobbler, but I don’t consider my birthday complete without a big bowl of blueberry pudding.
And then, of course, there’s ice cream. We’ve been buying ice cream left and right lately, mostly because every time we’ve gone grocery shopping it’s been on sale: usually buy one, get one. We’ve been trying to be good, so there have been a number of fat-free, sugar-free, and other healthyish alternatives to real ice cream sitting in the freezer. A nice big bowl of ice cream, eaten right before bed, is just what I need when it’s 100+ degrees, as it has been here for the last several weeks.
Finally, there’s the garden. Every year, I vow to not plant as much squash and zucchini, and every year, I plant the same amount. This year, however, is proving to be an embarrassingly huge crop. Every other night, we go out and pick several pounds of the stuff. Right now, there are six jars of chopped zucchini in the freezer (to be turned into zucchini bread at a later date), a large jar of the same in the fridge, two containers of sliced and roughly chopped zuchhini in the fridge, and at least ten pounds of fresh zucchini on the kitchen table, awaiting their fate. The plants themselves are tremendous: a few of them are easily three feet tall, and they’re threatening to overtake the pepper and tomato plants. The peppers aren’t doing as well this year, but the tomatoes are making up for them. The green beans are done, as is the corn. The sunflowers that I thought were supposed to be 18” high are topping out at 4’: the heads are easily almost a foot across. I selected this variety because it’s supposed to produce a lot of seeds, so all the birds in the vicinity should be pretty happy this winter. I’ll just set out one head and let them fight over it. And I’m glad I got the “compact” butternut squash, since I don’t think I could take it if I’d gotten a “sprawling” variety. I’m rearranging the 10’ vines every other night as it is.
Next year, though, I won’t plant so much. It’s too much for two people to possibly consume, but the veggies from the garden always, always, always taste better than anything that has to be transported in plastic.
This has been an entry for Summer Writing List
