TheKitchenSinkRecipes.com

My cell phone rang on Friday as I was sitting at my desk, in my office.  I looked over at the buzzing black device and saw that it was my mother calling.  It’s unusual for her to call in the middle of a work day and a knot of worry immediately formed in my gut. 

And, it turns out, it was an emergency.

A cooking emergency, that is.  She had the afternoon off from work and was busily preparing to cook dinner for a bunch of my parents’ friends that night.  She’d laid out her menu and was ticking items off her to do list, but when the time came to get started on dessert, the apple crisp she had planned no longer seemed right.  The cooler days earlier that week had given way to a return of summer temperatures.  A hot dessert—one starring autumn’s favorite fruit, no less—would not do.

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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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Oof.

Now that was a week.  Or two weeks?!  No, it can’t be!  But, I guess it has been.  After posting on July 15, the midpoint of the month, the balance of July proceeded to swallow me whole.  There was a lot of time at the office and then waning hours of daylight spent soaking up the warm, un-air conditioned air.  There was a trip to Cleveland for work, which involved a mediocre hotel and less-than-mediocre food.  But then, oh then, there was a trip to the mountains, to Park City in particular, for some dear friends’ wedding.

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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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This recipe had me at first glance, which occured on my early morning commute last Wednesday, while I sat bleary eyed in one of El train’s carpeted plastic scoop seats, iPhone in hand.  As is my Wednesday morning ritual (a real midweek treat, actually), I pulled up the New York Times dining section on my phone.  I quickly spotted a link for Melissa Clark’s recipe for a twice-baked sour cherry pie.  I opened the link, swooned over the recipe and its accompanying photo, and passed the phone across the aisle to Kevin.  I took his resulting wriggling eye brows and broad grin as assent.

The pie would be ours.

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I love the days that lead up to a holiday.  There is the last minute shopping, the many cocktail parties, the cookie-baking bonanzas, and the hall-decking that precedes Christmas.  And then you have the menu planning, the pie crust stashing, the gourd shopping that portend Thanksgiving.  And don’t forget the dress-shopping, ham procuring and jelly-bean-popping that mark the days before Easter.  But, given the date, it’s the build up to the Fourth of July that I’ve got on the brain at the moment.

Can you feel it?

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Cherries and I having a bit of a moment.  They showed up at the markets, suddenly, unexpectedly.  I remember them coming much later last year, but such memories are a tricky thing—they’re hard to trust.  In any event, the cherries have been here in abundance for the past couple weeks and I just can’t seem to get enough.  I’ve been happily eating them out of hand.  Firm, glossy and garnet, I’ll pluck one, stem pinched between my fingers, from the bowl, pop it into my mouth, revel in the tart, summery, juicy flesh and then, lips pursed and with a phwoottt! I’ll spit the pit into a cupped palm.  Discard the pit and stem; repeat as necessary.  I’ve spent several recent evenings repeating until my heart, and belly, were content.

But why stop there?  The cherries have me dreaming up baked goods.  They conjured a simple yogurt cake in my mind, a recipe born in a split second, in a dreamy thought.  I tinkered with the idea two Sundays in a row until I had a recipe, right there on paper, and a perfect cake, right there in the pan.

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Happy summer all!  To ring in the first day of summer, I posted a new Summer Recipe Index, which you can access by a link over on the lefthand column.  It’s got recipes for BBQ’s and picnics, recipes featuring corn (quite possibly my favorite type of summer produce), and recipes for fruit desserts and (obviously) ice cream.  Check it out here!

I have the most intensely wonderful memories of summer evenings at my parents’ house.  The sun sank, the porch lights flicked on, the smell of hot charcoals scented the air, the crickets built to a slow crescendo.  Hours earlier, the action was in the front yards that lined the winding street, where kids pranced through sprinklers, pedaled down the sidewalk and played game after game, while their parents mowed the grass and weeded the flower beds.  When night fell, though, the action shifted to the backyards, where families had retreated for dinner on their patios and decks.  Burgers, grilled chicken, kabobs, corn on the cob, salt-and-peppered slices of tomatoes, steamed green beans: simple food, most of it cooked fast on the hot grill.

There are a number of criteria for selecting a perfect party food, don’t you think?  For starters, it should require only one hand to eat it and, relatedly, should not require a plate.  In most cases, this rule applies because your other hand is occupied by a beverage.  I could also see one employing her second hand to wield a camera, hold a kid, shake a stranger’s hand, high five a friend’s hand, flash a thumbs up across the room (I do this; I say goodness and whoopsie and you don’t say, too—now you know), hold a hand of cards, gesture wildly.  You get the picture — party food, at its best, is one-handed (and plate-less).

Second, and almost as important as the uni-hand feature, a perfect party food should be pretty.  Beautiful, breathtaking, stunning, even.  This is not the time for your favorite slap-dash dinner (which, incidentally, very likely requires two hands and a plate, or a bowl at the very least).  This is not the time for a monotone palette of brown and beige (ahem, I should really follow my own rules).  This is the time for color and flair.

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