Summerish

Posted on May 11th, 2009 

I am so ready for summer!

It is so foggy here in Santa Cruz right now. I know that we don't need
to worry about it yet. Memorial Day weekend it usually rains here. I
know this because my neighbors spend the week prior to the three day
weekend shining up their jet skis and stocking their motor home. The
Friday afternoon before the long weekend, they pull out with their haul
and head on down to Lake San Antonio, a lake I have never been to
because I fear it is covered with jet skis. Anyway, every Saturday
afternoon on the long Memorial Day weekend they return because it is
raining. We watch them pull the load and the crew back into the driveway
and unpack the fun. I am not gloating, it is merely an observation I
have observed for the last twenty eight years that we have lived in our
house. This year however they stayed down at the lake, maybe they got
the sun that we all so desperately missed.

I am just praying for a repeat of last summer, soooo much sun and fun.
It was great weather most of the summer. It is always foggy in the
mornings and evenings here, but last summer we were almost able to
forget that one drawback of coastal living.

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California,
specifically a suburb called Agoura. It wasn't much of anything but
rolling grassy hills and housing tracts. Summers were hot, extremely
hot! My mom worked at a public swimming pool in the summers because my
dad was a teacher and I guess someone needed to work during the summer.
My sister and I thought we were the luckiest kids around. We got free
admission to the public swimming pool everyday, all day. We each lived
in our bathing suits, that quickly lost all their color and elasticity
from the copious amounts of chlorine in the pool. We wore our hair long
and green. We took every swimming lesson and water ballet class numerous
times. We prided ourselves in knowing all the pool safety regulations
and dispensed our knowledge with enthusiasm through the end of
megaphones whenever we could get our hands on one. Whenever the
lifeguards needed a victim to rescue for a drill, it was one of us. We
were the envy of the public swimming pools kids, because when the pool
closed from noon to 1:00 PM we got to swim with the lifegaurds while all
the other overheated kids waited outside the chain-link fence watching
us. It was a fine childhood.

It was during one of these summers that I took my first cake decorating
class at Lanark Park Recreation Center. Little did I know that the
complaining that I did over having to sift a one pound box of powdered
sugar later in my life I would consider a tiny amount of powdered sugar
to sift. I made a "Humptey Dumptey" cake that I was so proud of. I have
never made one again, but I bet I could if I tried.

Of all the summer memories it was the warm summer evenings that I love
and miss the most. The dinners outside in the cooling early evening. Our
miniature poodle George lying with her belly on the shady evening grass.
Playing guitar with my Dad out on the front porch, singing all those old
Joan Baez and Pete Seeger ballads. Fresh corn on the cob that I had to
cut off for five years because I wore braces. It is this experience that
I cannot reproduce here on the foggy central coast. There are loads of
other fabulous reasons that I love it here and I will never move. Ah,
but those warm summer nights are a lovely lingering memory.

Fog in the morning is wonderful. It makes coffee taste very good. Coffee
is already delicious, but that warm cup on a cool, foggy, summer morning
has a quality unique to itself. There is a deliberate slowness to the
morning. The blue ocean color breaking through the steely gray blanket
of fog is magical. I love to walk along West Cliff in the early foggy
mornings and watch this alchemy.

Where are those summer evenings? We have to travel to find them in the
summer to warmer climes and turn the outdoor heaters on when we are
here. We find them at Silver Lake in the Sierras every August and over
at Mark's sister's house in Santa Clara. We have found them in
Charlevoix Michigan at our friends "cottage" and in Portland Oregon at
my mom's in late June. We have purchased outdoor heaters and surrounded
the patio couches with them. We blast the heat and watch movies outside
on a big sheet hanging from the roof's edge. We cannot rely on the
nightly parade of summer evening warmth as I did in my youth.

Memorial Day weekend and it's undependable weather is not an indicator
of the summer ahead. It doesn't mean we will have a month of fog in
July, it is a weekend in May, not yet even summer officially. But, if we
do have a month of fog in July we will enjoy our morning coffee in the
fog, walk West Cliff and then head somewhere to the sun, just over the
hill or further, maybe we will check out Lake San Antonio.

Foggy Day Corn Salad

5 fresh ears of corn. Corn must be very fresh. Buy them at a farmer's
market when you know they have been recently picked. Corn begins to
starch immediately and looses its sweetness.

* 1 basket of cherry tomatoes 
* 1 red bell pepper chopped
* 1 yellow bell pepper chopped 
* 1 serrano chile chopped (optional) 
* 1 cup basil leaves 
* 1/2 cup cilantro leaves 
* 1 avocado cut into cubes
* 1/2 cup olive oil 
* 1TB red wine vinegar 
* 1 teas lemon juice 
* Salt and pepper
* 1 shallot minced

Cut the corn off the husks into a bowl

Put the halved cherry tomatoes, and the chopped bell peppers in the bowl
with the corn

Add the serrano at this time if you want a spicy salad

Add the avocado and the cilantro leaves. do not mix the salad at this
point you son't want to bruise the cilantro or the avocado

Make the vinaigrette

Put the olive oil, vinegar and lemon juice in a bowl , whisk with the
salt and pepper. (Remember corn likes salt so taste to make sure you are
adding enough)

Add the minced shallot

Cut the basil leaves into long chiffonade strips. Do not cut the basil
until you are just ready to plate the salads, basil tends to oxidize on
the cut edges and look unsightly.

Toss the salad with the vinaigrette and put onto serving plates

Sprinkle the basil on top and finish with a few grindings of black pepper