With Cooler Days

Can, bake, simmer, saute

In a length of summer heat that’s wound itself around the recent weeks, a cluster of cool days drops in, announced, anticipated, and very, very welcome. Starting off cloud covered and rain spattered, they wake you from the flattening heat (and maybe flattening life) and remind you about joy. You feel again the thrill of lighting a blue flame under a burner, setting the deep pot filled with water over it, and hearing it come to simmering life. To preserve in a bubbling water bath, all those golden peaches heaped in that box, and all the strawberries and rhubarb simmered into jam.

A breezy evening makes you revel in turning the oven dial to a moderate temperature, lining a loaf pan with parchment, and shredding zucchini from the pile that’s been growing daily on the counter. You stir the zucchini with sugars, flour, oil, and spices, and bake some bread. The familiar movements of making and baking tends to your soul, and biting into freshly baked anything again sets the world to rights.

By the third cool day, you don’t think twice about simmering a pot of fragrant rice and sautéing garlic with sliced zucchini (there it is again), to serve alongside the grilled salmon for dinner, with nary a salad in sight. And then, because you can’t quite help it, after dinner, as the crickets start to sing, you mix up a batch of that granola recipe you’ve been wanting to try: toasted oats and almonds, sweetened with maple syrup, and then - my own addition - ruby drops of dried cranberries. Maybe just maybe it’ll be a dead-ringer for the granola that you bought that time at the farmer’s market which, after one spoonful, became your favorite.

And we all know that, when the remaining summer days wind us in their heat again, a bowl of granola is all we really want for dinner, anyway.

P.S. And if you, like me, are near your ears in zucchini, we should make this next. (If you’re looking for the link on the Orangette blog to Cafe Lago meatballs and Marcella sauce, here you go! The sauce recipe alone can be found here.)