Not Derby Pie

Now that it’s full-on summer, we’ve been hosting Friday night dinner parties on our deck pretty often. We usually start before the sun sets, but it grows dark pretty quickly; fortunately, I picked up a couple vintage votive holders at the Lucketts Fair that provide just the right amount of light. (If you live in the DC/VA area and haven’t been to Lucketts, go. It’s an antiques fair with hundreds of vendors, set on fair grounds out in VA. Beautiful furniture and plenty of carnival food. A great way to spend the day.)

Dinner parties are so much easier in summer, when it doesn’t get dark until late and I’ve got plenty of time to prep between work and dinner. There’s a formula for these parties, at least this year. Before work on Friday morning, I whip up a cold soup. Cold pea soup is my new favorite: 1 package thawed frozen peas, 1 serrano pepper, 2 tomatillos, 1/2 cup cilantro, salt: all in a blender, and really: that’s it. It takes no more than 10 minutes. I pour the soup into jars, stick them in the fridge, and head off. After work, I pick up fish from Cannon’s and head home. I prep the fish, toss together a salad, and quite often make my easiest cake ever as well. Schedule permitting, I may also saute some mushrooms or roast some tomatoes. These days, the produce is so fresh and flavorful, it’s best to keep things simple.

For an embarrassingly large number of these dinner parties, the main course has been molasses roasted salmon. What can I say? It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s delicious. And it’s not as though our guests know that I’m a total one-trick pony. (Until now.)

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Yes, I could write a book on sour cherries. Perhaps I will one day. I love them, I love them so much. When buying my 15^th and 16^th quarts of the season at the Foggy Bottom market last week, it dawned on me: Internet, sour cherries are my favorite fruit.

Back at the homestead, I searched the interwebs for other people’s odes to sour cherries. Sadly, most people seem to enjoy them just fine, but no one has gone on the record as the crazy obsessive I seem to be. It’s fine, though: if you’re not in the sour cherry camp yet, I’d bet a Hamilton this focaccia has the power to convert.

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I somehow tricked myself into thinking that DC wouldn’t show its true colors this summer. We’ve been coasting on 75-degree days these past few weeks, toasting the end of the workday with glasses of Lillet on the deck. All along, I’ve wondered whether real DC summer weather — think swampy, sticky, hot mayhem — might just pass us by. Of course, that was silly. It’s 7:30 am and already 92 degrees outside. We’ll be hitting 100 today. The chard and lettuce are doing great on the deck, but if I went out there, I’d wilt.

That’s why I’m sitting inside, in cutoffs and a tank, doing not much of anything. On days like this, there’s nowhere else to be.

And then there’s this coffee. This coffee, which requires not a single appliance, not even a second’s worth of a lit stove. On days like today, it’s a godsend.

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Some people burn everything. Others forget to add salt. Me? My pasta water always boils over. But my biggest achilles heel in cooking is the constant temptation to add too many ingredients.

It starts simply enough: asparagus with miso. But then I shake in a few dashes of soy sauce, and maybe some mirin, and wouldn’t some rice vinegar be nice? Oh, and sesame oil too. Before I know it, I’ve created a murky mess.

I didn’t make a list of kitchen resolutions this year. At least not formally. But one commitment I made a while back that I’ve been trying to keep is to stay simple whenever possible. If I can make something delicious with five ingredients instead of seven, or three instead of five, I do. Especially now that summer has rolled around and the farmers’ markets are juicily bursting with fresh favas and eggplants and peas and peaches and oh, tomatoes, I’m trying to celebrate these ingredients more simply. Tomatoes, salt, olive oil. No kitchen sink.

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This was one busy weekend. Saturday, D and I drove down to Charlottesville for a R. and S.’s wedding. The couple are Indian, and their wedding officiant said theirs was the most traditional South-Indian wedding he’d ever done. Everything – from the chairs, to the umbrellas protecting against the sun, to the guests’ saris – was vibrantly colorful. The bride, decked in red, gold, and loaded with jewelry, henna, and fresh flowers, was breathtaking. Between various prayers, customs, and games (yes, games! Like, see how quickly the bride and groom can throw rice on each other…beyond fun), the ceremony alone was over three hours; fortunately, it’s customary to mill about. Guests roamed the grounds, and eventually moved their chairs to the shade on the periphery of the ceremony. The whole thing was wonderfully informal. Plus, there was an endless supply of fresh juice set up in back – we’re talking guava, mango and spicy green mango, watermelon, you name it – and, of course, plenty of chai tea. The wedding took place at Castle Hill Cider, a winery with a gorgeous barn overlooking hills and a pond. There are many worse things to do than roam those beautiful grounds, drink fresh juice and chai, and watch a happy couple get married. It was a memorable day.

Sunday morning, bright and early, I headed out to the ‘burbs with my dad and our friends J. and B.’s kid A. to pick some berries. It was sweltering – especially in those strawberry fields, which get absolutely no shade – but we stuck it out, and I came home with 3 pounds of sour cherries, 3 of strawberries, and a big tupperware of beautiful, sweet blueberries.

The blueberries were the easiest to pick by far. There were plenty of them, and they grew on bushes about waist height. Every bush was loaded with plump, ripe specimens, which we happily popped into our buckets.

Cherries were harder: most of the trees were picked over. Fortunately, they had a ladder in one of the fields, so we climbed into the trees and picked beautiful, gem-red cherries from the top branches.

By the time we rolled around to strawberries, we were pretty beat. But the berries – wow. They tasted like hot jam. We nibbled a couple, drank a lot of water, and soldiered on. The spoils were worth every minute.

The produce are well on their way to deliciousness. I did manage to keep a few strawberries and a few cherries for pie, but that’s it. Between 8 jars of various jams and plenty of nibbles while I was cooking, most of the berries have been used. Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be sharing a few of my favorite recipes from this round of preserving. First up: cherry vanilla jam.

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Summer squash season is in full swing. As anyone with enough sunlight to grow the stuff will tell you, it grows like a weed. One plant is more than enough to feed two people for the whole summer. Folks with more zucs than they can eat often tell these not-quite-sad stories about struggling to use up their summer squash quickly enough. It’s hard to feel bad for them when one little basket of zucchini costs $4 at the market, but I count my blessings – among them, a beautiful herb garden that’s got enough chives for omelets all summer long, and three different kinds of mint, all growing at record pace.

Last week at the market, I bought a basket of baby summer squash with the blossoms still attached. Generally, I’d snip off the blossoms, coat them in batter, and fry’em up, but I’d gone to boot camp – people, this boot camp is serious – and I was feeling virtuous. So instead, I chopped them, tossed them with some mexican cheese and slices of the zucchini, and stuffed them into quesadillas.

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A couple weekends ago, the near-constant downpour we’ve had in DC subsided.  The break was only temporary, but as the proud owner of a new herb garden, I’m telling myself it’s good for the plants. With things breezy and clear for a couple days in a row, we decided to have some of our most favorite people over for Saturday lunch on the deck. I’d planned a low-maintenance menu of dishes I could prep in advance, then pull together relatively quickly when we got home from synagogue on Saturday. Macaroni salad with ramp pesto and pre-blanched asparagus. Chilled baked salmon (which I’ll be telling you about soon, because it was delicious). And, of course, cold soup.

I’m quite fond of cold soup as a concept. You make it, pour it into a jar, and then you wait. Wait until you need a weekday lunch; wait till friends come over and you want to serve them a little something; wait until, I dunno, you’re hungry. You pretty much can’t go wrong with a cup of cold, smooth soup on a warm day.

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