tomato time!

This is it!  It’s here.  The time so many of us are waiting for all year long, the height of tomato season in the Northeast.  

For starters, tomato red is a spectacular color, my favorite.  I wear it with gusto on my lips and toe nails.  It’s splashy, it’s visible in the green foliage like red balls on a green Christmas tree, the red with a bit more yellow than blue, and a very warm hue.

A tomato that has ripened in the sun to the point where it plops into your hand at the slight touch of the vine, one that grew in mineral rich and moist soil, with an even and saturated red all around, has a deep, intense and mellowly sweet flavor.  Such a tomato bursts open when you sink your teeth into it, the seeds splashing onto your hand or shirt, the warm juice dripping down your chin.  These late summer tomatoes conjure up a few dishes that we only make during those few precious weeks, instead of attempting a pale version with glassy, lightly reddish, almost crunchy year round supermarket tomatoes that are picked green and spend too long on a truck and in a vegetable bin.  

family style bruschetta for sharing

Panzanella is such a summer dish, that simple Italian tomato salad with bread cubes which soak up the mix of tomato juices and dressing made of Balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, and torn basil leaves, an easy and satisfying summer lunch to be enjoyed on outdoors on a shady terrace.

Gazpacho is another ubiquitous summer treat, the raw and chilled Spanish blender soup that takes no time at all to make, a combination of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, salt, pepper, olive oil and some red wine vinegar.  The secret is in using enough salt, pepper, vinegar and the chilling which all bring the flavor out. In Spain it’s served with a few croutons on top, but better no croutons than croutons from a box.  Cube some good crusty sour dough bread, a few days old is fine, and toss it in a pan with some garlic and olive oil until crunchy.  Mmmmmmhhhh.

gently oven roasted cherry tomatoes

Back to Italy with Bruschetta, Panzanella in a different form.  Finely cubed tomatoes with salt, pepper, olive oil, a bit of vinegar, perhaps a bit of chopped basil, served on a crostini, a small piece of crusty and toasted country bread that you have rubbed with a garlic clove for that subtle hint, enjoyed in the late afternoon with a chilled glass of rosé. Heaven in a nutshell!

One more - jammy cherry tomatoes that are just starting to melt into the pan as they begin to disintegrate under the heat of the stove or in the oven, with nothing more than salt, pepper, olive oil, a bit of chopped garlic and a few sprigs of rosemary, conjuring up Tuscany in my mind.

Enjoy them now, these beautiful tomatoes, a few more weeks, before the long wait until next summer begins again and that perfect tomato taste fades in your memory. 

color blindness and rainbows

Arrogance is when you don’t know what you don’t know but think you know.  While that needs to be met with compassion, it has big consequences if you’re in a position of power or authority.  Charles Eisenstein wrote a brilliant new essay, The Banquet of Whiteness, in which he considers racism and other cultural beliefs under the broader umbrella of arrogant whiteism.  He unpeels our hubristic blind spot of perceived superiority and rightness we are literally not aware of because we come from a place of majority consensus and relative power (the term echo chamber has been used).  Hence the perpetuation of racism.  Hence the hunkering down on outmoded ways of looking at certain cultural patterns.  Hence our narrow way to think and do science. Hence the worldwide monoculturalization of Western beliefs with which we are suffocating the rest of the world (see an older related post - pizza every night?).

When diversity is still a calculated numbers game of including a specific minimum percentage of non-white students or employees in an organization, when we still belittle other cultures’ worldviews and how those inform the people who live with them, when we still favor the one Western medical model over alternative, traditional or indigenous therapies regardless of effectiveness, we are still ideologically blind and biased.

Before the recent anti-racism movement hit me in the face, I believed that if all lives mattered it was inclusive enough to mean that black lives mattered under that larger all lives umbrella.  But looking at racism that way belittles and denies the need for people of color to be heard, to be emotionally supported in their slight and plight, and for us white people to shift our attitude and do something about it.  I just saw a very helpful post on social media that illustrates the point.  If you share with me that your mother just died, and I reply that all our parents die, I pass right over your feelings of sadness and make them irrelevant. 

When we truly become more accepting and integrative in our thinking, when we truly become more tolerant and broad minded, when we truly use the scientific method of asking a query and neutrally exploring all potential answers (instead of working towards those results we foresee within our own belief paradigm), when we truly look at our culture and actually admit what works and what doesn’t (without primary regard for profit), if we truly look at people’s merits, talents and capabilities regardless of skin color or other attributes we might judge somehow, we may find that the earth is not flat but round, or that we revolve around the sun, and not the other way round.  Then, our world would be a rainbow of diversity and creative human expression, a joyfully imaginative jumble of humanness in all its wonderful and potential expressions.   

That will be a great leap forward for humanity. 

on creating your beingness

Every time I reread Neale Donald Walsch’s book Conversations with God  I find new treasures.  Despite the simple and easy dialogue, the content is very profound and chockful of amazing thought provoking quotes – all yellow and orange underlined in my copy from the many read throughs.  One in particular spoke to me last night which has to do with the body-mind-spirit connection and how it plays out in your life.

The book’s premise is that you are not here on earth to “learn lessons” or “work through karma” but to create your beingness.  In other words, you get to create and explore who you are through what you think and do, which shows up in what you experience in life and the circumstances you manifest.  And since one lifetime is not enough to explore the multiple facets you wish to explore, you get to do it over and over like in Groundhog Day or reincarnation.

Looping back to the quote, you can choose to explore life in your physical body in three ways, each more complex than the previous one - a single-faceted body way, dual-faceted mind-body way, or triple-faceted mind-body-spirit way.  Take a look at the photo of the quote above to read how each of them manifests in your life and you’ll be able to tell in which way you are exploring your current life.  How cool is that?

a slow shift

Wednesday’s NY Times article “Twilight of the Imperial Chef” reports on cracks in the restaurant business’s “militaristic brigade system” and demanding star chef narrative.  There is increasing pressure from within to be less tolerant of erratic, autocratic and abusive (sexual and otherwise) behavior of fickle, eruptive and self-serving white male chefs, under the creative genius excuse.  Instead, it’s being increasingly acknowledged in an inclusive way that all restaurant staff, front and back house, chefs and helpers, are instrumental in getting a good meal on the table and creating a memorable customer experience.

In 2015 Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group initiated a shift to fairer wages and offering benefits in the restaurant industry, with higher menu items and no required tipping, a big change for an industry where tipping transferred part of the waiters’ compensation from employer to customer.  It’s not been a unanimously adopted and totally successful model, but then such fundamental changes take time to be adopted widely.  

The MeToo movement has finally exposed the previously condoned, pervasive, sexually motivated, and  demeaning treatment of women by men in positions of power – inequality in favor of some and at the expense of others.  The Black Lives Matter movement away from racism is finally being acknowledged by its culprits, the whites who enslaved colored people, and former colonizers – a movement away from inequality in favor of a few at the expense of many others.  The pandemic has brought forth a greater interest in universal healthcare – a movement away from an unequal healthcare system that favors some at the expense of others.  The same can be said for many other emerging movements, whether education, environmental, or social related.  Notice what else is popping up once you pay attention to this new pattern.

All these patches of a new cultural quilt we are currently weaving together, are more We oriented and inclusive than the cultural narrative we seem to be exiting.  These movements regard your rights, as just as essential as my rights in an effort towards equality instead of wellbeing for some at the expense of others.  This is a huge shift away from the conservative Me-centered attitude with little regard for You, and we see the collision of both playing out politically on a grand scale right in front of our eyes and ears in real time.   Collectively, many seem to be waking up to the realization that it’s not ok if some are privileged at the expense of others, and we begin to understand that we can only truly feel good in our own skin if all people are taken care of equally.  It is very difficult for emotionally mature people to see others suffer. The emerging millennial values of transparency, authenticity, cooperation, meaning and value based living, and sustainability, espoused most noticeably by the 25-40 population segment, is who brings forth this new way of thinking because they live it.  Are you seeing it? 

light, bright, and chilled

Backyard dinners under the stars with a handful of friends are safe, summery, and a festive and convivial activity for the age of Corona, as are picnics, whether on the beach, on the trail, in a park, or even on your terrace or in your backyard.  Here are lots of easy and light, summery food ideas that also transport well.

For the light part, salads are easy and satisfying.  Remember, a salad doesn’t need to mean only lettuce.  How about that somewhat unusual salad of tomato and watermelon cubes?  Or Panzanella, the Italian tomato salad with lots of basil and a very balsamicky and garlicky vinaigrette that comes together with the tomato juices and seeps into the bread chunks that make this a whole summer lunch. Add cold cooked legumes for substance to any green salad.

ingredients for a tomato and watermelon salad

For the bright part, raw fare is refreshing in any form, whether fruit, salads, smoothies or shaved vegetables.  Raw shaved zucchini, raw grated sweet potatoes, or an Asian inspired cole slaw, all with smart dressings, are light and a bit different.  Crunchy jicama sticks are great as a snack, or can be added to a salad for some fun texture.  Leftover grilled vegetables served at room temperature with homemade mayonnaise, tahini or Green Goddess dressing, are bright, light and delicious – think grilled mini peppers, asparagus, slim carrots, spring onions, fat and crunchy red onion slices, sweet potato slices - the charred taste is inimitable and so summery, and the reds, purples, greens, oranges, and yellows are gorgeous.

ripe mango with prosciutto

For the chilled part, cold soups are delicious and so simple to prepare in a blender. My Northern German grandmother used to make cold fruit soups for summer lunches, sometimes served with little rice grits dumplings, although now I might prefer a swirl of raw milk yogurt instead.  On the savory side, any “vegetably cream of” can be served chilled.  Think cold cucumber/avocado, cream of asparagus or spinach sup, which take just minutes to prepare.  You can drink them out of a tall glass like a smoothie, or serve them like a traditional soup in a colorful bowl with a spoon.  Lemon, salt, and lots of herbs make these milder soups taste peppy. A cold Spanish gazpacho soup on the other hand is bold and red and zesty.  For protein I love cold poached salmon with a sauce, or cold poached Chinese jellied chicken. Cold quiche or frittata are very tasty too.  

Grilled fruit is a wonderful summer dessert.  Apricots, peaches, pears and pineapple all caramelize over the fire when grilled slowly and patiently, and get that slightly burnt taste that is so summery.  Served as-is, or with vanilla ice cream, plain raw milk yogurt, unsweetened whipped cream, or slightly sweetened cashew cream, they are heavenly delicious, a slight bit unusual, and yet oh so simple. 

White wine spritzers, dry rosés, cold dry red wine, and the new hard and flavored seltzers are all more interesting than water, very refreshing, light, and less taxing in the summer heat than harder or sweeter drinks.

Look for more picnic and barbecue summer food ideas on the Press Page link to the Love to picnic? and Be The Host With The Most At Barbecues articles for more summer fare ideas.  All the proposed foods are very transportable if you want to take them with you to the beach or park.  Enjoy!

grilling peaches