Perfect Summer Salad

I can't believe that July is almost over. I have spent so much of this summer wrapped up in my health that it's skidded past me. It's silly, but while still bound to lay down much of the day, I feel like it will be fall and then winter before I know it.

So, I'm bringing summer inside with the perfect summer salad this evening.


Ingredients:

fresh sweet corn--cut right off the cob
red onion--diced
fresh basil--given a good chiffonade
apple cider vinegar
olive oil
freshly ground pepper and salt to taste

No specific amounts here, because who knows how much corn you have on hand (plenty, though, I hope this time of year!).

But this is how I put it together in a little word puzzle:

for each ear of corn, I add 1 T each of oil and vinegar.
for total amount of corn, I add half as much red onion.
I add enough basil so that it looks like there might be a bit of green in each bite.

It's so simple. As simple as summer food should be.

Hand Modeling

When I was little, it seemed like there was far more hand modeling than there is today. All of those ladies on the Price is Right swooping their hands and slender arms over and around and in the general vicinity of all of the amazing prizes in the showcases. A full living room suite [*hand flourish* at corner of showcase, then limbs skimming like agitated birds over coffee table top, the edge of a television set entrapped inside of a giant piece of furniture, alighting for just a moment on the back of the easy chair, then tripping along the back of a couch until the hostess perched cheerfully on the arm rest looking anything but right at home.]

Plus, disembodied hands showed up a lot more in commercials for jewelry, for Neet, for moisturizers, cars and on and on. Something about a long slender hand--the kind you imagine might be attached to someone who looks like Betty Draper--that made products fly out of the stores in the 70's and early 80's. Not so much now. Maybe because we're allowed to show so much more now on TV, the staid hand couldn't hope to pique anyone's interest in the way it used to.

But my childhood was filled with my brother and I mimicking those hand and arm movements. My parents bought a new VW bus, my brother swoops into the picture brushing his arm the length of the racing stripe down the side and finishing with a hand framing flourish around the VW insignia at the front of the van to family applause. We finally, at long last, years after all of our friends have gotten one, get a color TV, which I do a short spinning dance in front of and then lunge to the side with my arms lagging behind, framing the 16" TV screen with happy little jazz hands. It could be joyful. It could be sarcastic. It could be mean. But those movements we learned from glamorous, besequined women were a meaningful part of the anatomy of hand motions in my household growing up.

My mom was here visiting this last week while I recovered from surgery. But for one walk a day, I wasn't allowed to leave the house. So, we read and watched movies and talked and cooked, and I asked her to be my model for a load of mitts I have made to sell on Etsy. Bona fide hand modeling. . . and in the midst of it, she brought out some of the old moves we used when I was a kid.

It was one of the many reasons it was nice to have her here this last week and I miss her still.

Is that a mug?!?
That's a great mug!

Holy Cow! Frank Lloyd Wright was really talented!!

Flowers are so pretty! Oh man, did you see how pretty those were?

Nicely done, Mom. Nicely done.

Happiness

Reading John Crowley's Little, Big and I love it so far.

Early on (because I'm only to page 70 at this point) one of the main characters, while falling off to sleep, imagined he saw a sampler in a tiny house nightlight that said:

The Things that Make us Happy
Make us Wise.

That is undoubtedly true. . . here are somethings that make me happy.

pretty street art + complimentary colors

complicated cloud formations


flowers that have people faces


the tidiness of farming


L.P. enjoying a rolled down window.

train stations that try harder than most


blurry photos that just give you the sense of a thing

My grandma used to say that happiness was "liking what you had to do." I think that is also wise.

Pesto Day

We usually have a pesto making day a few times a summer. Early July, late August, and, if we're lucky, late September--however long it takes the basil plants to grow back every time we snip them down to their lowest few branches.

Mama--my nursemaid and companion after surgery--was nice enough to harvest the basil today, while I prepped everything inside for pesto making.

There's a recipe below, but I don't truly believe in pesto recipes. They're only ever there to give you a sense of what goes into a good pesto in general proportions. Because a pesto's ingredients are so few, how each ingredient tastes (and how those tastes vary widely between kinds of basil or garlic or types of olive oil or parmesan cheese) can change the pesto's final flavor drastically.

So, the recipe below is the basic, no fail recipe that will get you to a good balanced flavor, but then you should expect to add ingredients in small amounts to get to the flavor that you most prefer.

The two most important ingredients are basil (as fresh as humanly possible--right from the garden is best. Once basil leaves have been off the plant for more than 2-3 days, the flavor diminishes significantly and they should be discarded.)


And garlic. The garlic should be as fresh as possible as well. Older garlic tends to mellow, and since pesto is made to go on hot pasta, the heat of its final destination will mellow the garlic flavor a little. And I like my pesto to have some bite. Mama brought me fresh dug garlic from the farm in Cincinnati. . . lucky me.


And the garlic was soooooo pretty. I loved the purple inner papers.


Summer Pesto Recipe (makes 5 1/2-cup servings of pesto--or enough pesto for five pesto dinners for four people per dinner):

1 c. parmesan cheese (roughly chopped from a big block. get good cheese. it makes a difference.)
1 c. pinenuts
7 garlic cloves (or a whole medium sized head of garlic, peeled and smashed with the flat of your chef's knife)
8 c. basil leaves (preferrably sweet Italian basil)
3/4 c. + 1 T. olive oil (some people really care about the kind they use, but whatever flavor it could impart is pretty overwhelmed by the garlic and basil)
1/2 t. salt
5 turns of pepper grinder
1 t. honey (optional)

I suggest tasting as you go, so that you can get a sense of how each ingredient affects the flavor. But I usually put it together in this order: In a large food processor, pulse together the pine nuts, parmesan, and garlic until they look like cheaper parmesan shake-cheese you can still get at the grocery.

Then add basil with olive oil--you may have to do this addition in a few batches because the flat leaves take up a bunch of space. . . but hardly any once pulsed. So add a handful of leaves and some of the olive oil, pulse, repeat.

Definitely taste it at this point. If there's no bite from the garlic, you need to add more. If there's no nutty flavor, you will need to add more pinenuts. Then add the salt, pepper, and honey.

Honey is not a traditional ingredient of pesto and its purpose is not to make the pesto taste sweet. Both honey and molasses--much like salt--are excellent for making a thing taste rounder and more fully like itself. Trust me. Maybe make the pesto without honey, but then add a short drizzle to one half cup of it, mix it up and see whether you prefer it with or without.

We immediately put this pesto into small 1/2-cup tupperware containers and freeze them. I don't honestly know how long its advisable to keep them once frozen. But we have certainly thawed them out in early March the following year and found it to be just as good and tasty as it was the previous summer. And man, in the winter doldrums of early March in Chicago, nothing is better than eating food that tastes so green and homegrown to chase the blues away.

Recovery & Rehab

So, the big surgery is out of the way, and I'm now in recovery. My back hurts, but I'm meant to walk about as much as I can. These first few days, I've decided that's mostly scuffing around the house, in combination with one big walk a day(I'm only allowed to use stairs once a day, so. . . not a lot of other choices).

Mama is in town to take care of me, and so we used Freddie's ridiculously yummy ices as a draw for the walk midway point. I had lemon. She had raspberry.


And then on the walk home, we took a slow-mo gander at all of the neighborhood roses. . .







It's a little over half a mile one way. And so now, I'm bushed. But the ice was totally worth it!

Oh, the Cuteness

Trolling through Etsy this morning and very early on I found Runaway Dreams--a shop run by Julia and David, two artists in love in Mexico City. And their work is so cute it makes me want to chew my own arm off.

See:

"I'm floating" (Is it wrong to love that his balloon is tied to his hand rather than him holding on to it? It's kind of a creepy cute touch that I adore. . . )

"Getting ready for the party"



"Marcel--the mushroom collector"

Marcel apparently collects mushrooms for his girlfriend. I can hardly take it.

I wish there was a children's book starring the little hairy critters. I would surely by it--good story or no.

Check out their work on etsy at runawaydreams.

4th

Our buddies Jess and Jett joined us for our yearly Cicero 4th of July. Just the four of us this year because I need to keep things small and manageable. Maybe next year, we'll throw a real blow out.


Dan grilled burgers to go with broccoli salad and baked beans. . .

And there was cake. . .

And the night sky and Cicero provided the rest. . .

Marketing I Can Get Behind

I love finding original product images on etsy--not just the typical object perfectly lit against white or gray or other solid color background. The off kilter images are the ones that catch my eye and make me want to find out more about what the artist is doing.

So, today, I'm posting images from bless that dress's etsy shop. All of the images I'm posting here are images this fun shop from Spain is using to sell clothing. These skirts aren't my size, but if they were, these photos would undoubtedly have sold me.

I love that the images are beautiful and sort of nostalgic while also being pretty dark. . .





What is that. . . mustard gas? I'm completely jealous of these photo shoots.

On top of that, she's selling some pretty cute clothes! Go check it out.

Patterns 2: Counting

It's seriously the first pattern I remember actually having to learn--Counting 1-10. I guess the alphabet was next. Once you know them, it seems so logical, like it's always been there in the world and your head. Neither of which, of course, is true, which makes both knowing the numbers and the letters a little like magic.

What's equally magical is how hard it is to remember the challenge of learning your numbers or letters, though my friend Casey's son Ben reminded me one visit home to Cincinnati. Just learning his alphabet by singing the song at, I don't know, three-years-old? And he hadn't made it very far, so he sang, "A, B, C, D, E, F, Mommy. Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy. . . . " and so on through the entire length of the melody. Melody is apparently easier than both letters or numbers (even though it involves both).

Ridiculously cute and it also brought back all of those sessions in school learning how to write and read and becoming citizens in this weird patterned and coded world of adults.

But here's a little extra cuteness to round this out.

Prettiest Broccoli Ever

Courtesy of the Oak Park Farmer's Market. . .


Just didn't want you to miss it. . .