TheKitchenSinkRecipes.com

I made this dish last week, on the eve of the holiday weekend, and, while it was spot-on that night, it felt all wrong as I flipped through the photos.  Who wants cauliflower over the Fourth of July weekend?  When burgers beckon, and fire crackers sizzle and sputter, and ice cream is mandatory, whether it be perched atop a sugar cone or plunked into a frothy pint of root beer?  When vegetables, if they must be eaten at all, take the much more summery shape of corn on the cob, or juicy tomatoes?  When fruit is suddenly available in all hues, and often in pie format?

Right: me neither.

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I’m sure there’s some way to spin these radishes—quick pickled in a brine that’s equal parts sweet, sour, spicy and salt—as Passover- or Easter-friendly.  Nary a speck of leavened bread!  A lovely addition to your seder, tucked up against a piece of gefilte fish!  A punchy addition to your otherwise ham-and-scalloped-potatoes laden Easter spread!  A pre-Easter lunch bite with a hue to match the eggs hidden around the yard!

If there were a baker’s equivalent to writer’s block, I’m willing to bet bakers everywhere are experiencing it exactly now.  I would know, because the condition afflicted me just yesterday—when, on the post-Christmas drive home from Minnesota, sometime after we’d crossed the border into Wisconsin but long before we’d passed into Illinois, the urge to bake something (anything) hit.  As I stared out the window at the rolling, snow-blanketed hills, contemplating the cows (Do they ever get to go inside?) and the farm houses (Would that surely lovely family be willing to take on a boarder (me)?) and the driving habits of those big, many-wheeled trucks (Really?  You two are going to drive in the right and left lanes, at the exact same speed, which is five miles under the speed limit?), I committed my afternoon to the kitchen.  What better way to welcome myself home?

But what to bake?  That was the problem.  Despite the seemingly endless miles of quiet highway ahead of me—ripe for a baking brainstorm—I couldn’t come up with anything.  As I said: baker’s block.

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We had friends for dinner on Saturday night and, for once, I did the sensible thing and cobbled together a menu full of tried and true recipes.  We had these nuts, before dinner.  We had a beef tenderloin recipe I’ve made a dozen times and which has quickly become one of my favorite dishes.  We had a pile of garlic-y, spicy, braised Swiss chard.  And we had oven fries, an evolution of an old recipe.  I did make a new cake (which I wasn’t crazy about — serves me right), but it was capped with this frosting, which I’ve made over and over again.

Perhaps spurred on by this trip down culinary memory lane, I spent Sunday giving this site’s Recipe Index an overhaul.  I had originally intended only to update the thing (which had fallen hopeless out-of-date), but I ended up giving it some reorganization and cosmetic changes, too.  It’s incredible to look back on all that’s been cooked and baked in that kitchen of mine, and a few favorites—such as those that made an appearance on Saturday night—really stood out.

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It’s the time of year when my thoughts are monopolized by Thanksgiving.  I dig out old November issues from my food magazine archives (which are getting out of hand, despite the fact that my Gourmet pile has stopped growing).  I flip through photos of Thanksgivings-past.  I compile a recipe index for this site.  I stock the spice cupboard with cinnamon and nutmeg and allspice.  I fill the freezer with to-be-rolled-out pie dough.  I select a dress for the day and make a mental note to pack yoga pants for the cozy, post-dinner portion of the day.  I read up on turkey varieties and new techniques for preparing the bird.

And, of course, I start to test out recipes.  This year is no different, even though I’m not hosting this year (unlike last year), but rather pitching in in my parents’ kitchen.

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Fall, to me, is home.  Not home, now.  But home home.  Minnesota.  It’s the blazes of crimson and gold and orange that wash the trees.  It’s the still-green grass, shivering under the first frosts.  It’s the big blue sky—so clear that it looks like a matte print.  It’s the chill in that air, the one that makes your eyes water and that has you tugging your sweater up up around your neck.  It’s the crunch of an a shiny apple and the heat of an oven in a homey kitchen and the sweetness of slowly-baked squash.  It’s the smell of wood smoke in the air and  grilled breakfast sausages at the Minneapolis farmers’ market and earthy piles of leaves.

Sure, the season happens in Chicago (my other home home) too, but for some reason it feels muted, dulled.  Maybe because the falls of my childhood were spent running around soccer fields and anticipating the school year ahead and jumping into giant piles of leaves and cheering at Friday night football games and paging through fat J. Crew catalogs and feeling so much older! than the I had during the previous fall.  Now, I spend my fall in front of a computer in a very tall building, running from dry cleaners to grocery store to gym to to to … , lamenting the shrinking daylight hours, fearing the winter that looms ahead—oh, and feeling so much older (note the lack of an exclamation point, here) than I had during the previous fall.

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We spent last weekend at Kevin’s grandmother’s house in Grand Beach—a little lakeside town just over the Indiana-Michigan border.  Grand Beach is only an hour’s drive or so from the Loop and it sits along the coastline of the same lake, but its tall, swishy, sunburned prairie grasses and its rolling hills and its fleet of golf carts, which commingle easily with cars on the roads, and its turreted vacation homes, many wrapped with wide porches, make it feel like it’s a world away from Chicago.

We’ve been going to the house for one weekend a summer for a while now—long enough to develop patterns and traditions.  Kevin’s parents usually drive out on Thursday or Friday, settling in and stocking the house with groceries.  Kevin and I usually jump in the car after work on Friday, arriving just in time for a quick cocktail on the deck as the big sun sends a brilliant twinkle across Lake Michigan as it dips below the horizon.  Then, it’s off to Timothy’s, a restaurant with screened windows and a piano player.  It’s always packed on summer weekend nights.

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We’ve reached the point of the summer where I feel absolutely lavished by the season—its hot air and its sweeping, sun-singed blue skies and its meals taken outside and its swooping fireflies and its suddenly-full hydrangea bushes and its slow-paced strolls and its thwacking flip-flops and its long nights and its melting scoops of ice cream.

And then, as if this all weren’t enough, summer, as it stands now, has this: CORN.  The corn is here!  Man, I love corn.  It’s very possibly my favorite piece of summer produce—eaten straight off the cob (conjuring, every single time, that fantastic scene in What About Bob, where Bob mmmmmmm‘s his way through Fay’s corn), shaved off the cob and eaten straight up, charred by the grill, toasted in a skillet, decadently drenched in cream.  You could say that as Bubba is to shrimp, I am to corn.  That’s quite a claim, I know—but I think it fits.

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My mom loves to tell a story about lobster.  When she was a kid, she couldn’t stand the stuff—something her siblings agreed on.  The kids’ aversion, though, was my grandparents’ boon.  They could each feast on a lobster, dunking the meat in drawn butter, while feeding the kids something much less glamorous.  They didn’t do it often, because it was expensive, but that they could afford to do it at all was only because the kids turned up their noses.

Somewhere along the way, the kids grew up and caught on.  They, too, wanted lobster and my grandparents’ little secret was blown.  A parallel story is unfolding these days—just with a different generation and a different delicacy.  The star of this story—the one that involves my parents and me—is creamed corn.

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Although it always delivers sunny skies, emerald lawns and delicious produce, summer, and what it means to me, has changed over the years.  As a kid, it meant late nights scampering breathlessly around the neighborhood, running through the cool arc of a lawn sprinkler, spending a couple weeks up at my grandparents’ house.

When the teenaged years hit, summer shifted to mean hours spent on the phone and sunbathing, a mind boggling number of soccer games, and a series of pushed boundaries where bedtime and boys were concerned.

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