Summer is a glorious time to be an eater. And since we (hopefully) all eat, it’s a great time to be me and you.
There’s delicious, fresh food all around, much of it so fresh and ripe and tasty that it requires very little preparation. In winter, nothing tastes that great on its own, so it takes a relatively high dose of effort and creativity to turn out a tasty meal. In the summer, no such thing – just cook (or not) and eat. If you don’t want to worry about what goes together, don’t worry. It’ll taste great on its own.
This makes it kind of hard to be a blogger, since blog posts are supposed to have interesting ideas and revelations. Or at the very least, recipes. Talking about how I just had a great ear of corn with a little butter and salt doesn’t make fascinating reading.
But, if you’re a new or reluctant cook, or trying to green your lifestyle, it’s the perfect time to dig in, because it is that easy to cook good food. I believe that a huge part of living a healthy, sustainable life is cooking for yourself. How can you really support local food if you don’t cook? How much can you really lower your carbon footprint if your food is flown in from California or beyond? Cooking is a critical step, and yet in some ways it’s among the hardest obstacles to overcome. A lot of people I talk to are hesitant about cooking, or don’t know how to get started.
Tackling this problem is one of my goals with this blog – to show how you can cook good food without a lot of planning or effort. Summer is the best time to learn to do that, but first you need some good, fresh food. Start with your local farmer’s market, farmstand, or whatever source you can find. Right now is when the markets start really booming. I was stunned today at how much new stuff had suddenly appeared at my local market in the past week, and for $40, I came away with quite a haul:
- corn on the cob
- carrots
- blueberries
- green kale
- garlic
- tomatillos (more on these later)
- zucchini
- eggplant
- yogurt
- quark cheese
- farm-fresh whole milk and chocolate milk (really good chocolate milk – some of you will understand when I say it rivals Hartzlers’ chocolate milk)
To me, that seems like an impressive amount of food, especially considering it’s all fresh, organic, and amazingly good. You could probably buy more for that amount of money in the grocery store, but none of it would taste as good (by virtue of being transported from far away) or be as healthy (by virtue of the industrial farming behind it – modern hybrids grown in poor soil, which describes most vegetables at grocery stores today, have a demonstrably lower nutritional value than what you’ll find at the market).
Now that you have it, what do you do with it? Some of it needs – indeed demands – only the most basic treatment. For example, what could I possibly do with my corn besides shuck it, put it on the grill for a few minutes, and eat it with a little butter? That was half of dinner tonight. And even if you’re not a creative or confident cook, I bet you could find several ways to use blueberries or carrots without trying too hard (including just eating them straight!).
The less familiar foods might be trickier, and more intimidating to experiment with. Sometimes you’ll find foods at a farmer’s market that you’ve never eaten before, or even never seen before. I’d say, if they look interesting to you, buy them. You’ll figure out what to do with them. Often, the farmer who sells it to you can offer some advice on the best simple preparations: steam it; saute it with olive oil; roast it in the oven. These sorts of preparations are easy to learn, and most vegetables are kind enough to follow similar rules to tell us when they’re ready – usually cook them until they’re just tender when pierced with a fork.
In either case, you can probably make it taste good without doing much to it, and that’s good news, because it’s summertime, and we’d all rather spend less time cooking, and more time eating. Here’s to simplicity!