Summer

With summer drawing to a close, I'm still not ready to say goodbye. My garden, though less productive, has a lot of vegetables that are still ripening. But, alas, the cooler weather and shorter days will bring an end to summer's bounty. But with all the beautiful late summer produce that's currently available at farmers' markets, like squash, peppers, tomatoes, and more, there's a lot of summery cooking that can still be done.

Take the opportunity to make a tomato sauce, a soup, saute or stir-fry. I love stir-frying because it's such a fun and easy method for cooking up a meal quickly. Plus you can pack it with vegetables. For this summer stir-fry, I use zucchini, bell peppers, and oyster mushrooms. And one of my favorite herbs, Thai basil, makes an aromatic and flavorful addition. What could be a better dish for using up summer vegetables than this?

With Thai flavors, much like Pad Thai, I use sweet tamarind paste and savory fish sauce to flavor the dish. Soy sauce, garlic, and ginger round out the flavor profile. It's all served over rice noodles. But there's one thing to keep in mind. The secret to a well-made stir-fry is cooking the dish in smaller portions so that everything stays crisp instead of steaming under the weight of a full wok of vegetables. Take a few minutes to toss together this healthy and colorful dish. You won't be let down by these summer flavors.

Walk through any farmers market and the bounty of summer will be on display in mounds of freshly picked carrots, beets, lettuce, broccoli, cucumbers, peppers, onions, parsley, zucchini, corn, celery, green beans, tomatoes and spinach.

Nearby there will be baskets of fat figs ready to burst, bright pink peaches, sharply colored pluots and plums, nectarines the size of soft balls and clusters of black, green and red grapes, seedless and seeded.

How great is all that wonderful food! Now, what to do with it? That's the challenge.

It's hot outside, so who wants to cook? My suggestion is simple, make gnocchi. If you've never made gnocchi, you're probably saying it's too difficult to make. Only Italian chefs can do that.  The truth is, gnocchi are easy to prepare.  And it doesn't take much time in the kitchen.

My house wine is sweat tea, but there are a couple concoctions I simply relish as much as tea. One is Mrs. Wilson’s Rosemary Lemonade and the other, a “James Farmer” – this Farmer’s version of an Arnold Palmer.

Dear friends of mine in Montgomery host me and “put me up” (or more so put up with me) when I’m staying in town for the night, and Mrs. Wilson, a fabulous cook and hostess in her own right, often makes a batch of this delicious drink. I cannot be more thrilled to partake.

I, as she has, have served this sweet, tangy, and savory blend to guests, family, and party attendees alike and it is always received with smiles and requests for more.

Mrs. Wilson serves hers from beautiful antique crockery pitchers, thus making it taste that much better, in my humble opinion. A farm girl originally from Opp, Alabama, Mrs. Wilson knows the importance of serving the best to friends and family.

Often times the best is just simple yet elegant creations direct from the garden and the land. Rosemary lemonade epitomizes this – fresh herbs from the garden, juice right from lemons, and simple syrup to bring it all together.

Mix this lemonade with my sweet tea, and you have one heck of an Arnold Palmer. Delicious and divine my friends, delicious and divine. Yea, though, as I mention an Arnold Palmer, this Farmer does have a version of the famed beverage… selfishly dubbed a “James Farmer.”

Sweet, tender, mild, succulent, moist, and juicy. These are some words that describe one of my favorite seafoods, the scallop. I love the shape and design of their shells, which I collect, but I love the mild flavor of their meat even more. Part of the bivalve family of mollusks, these shelled creatures are prized for their tender, white meat. Harvested at sea usually by dredging the ocean floor or by diving, a more ecological method, scallops have their meat removed before arriving in markets. That is why you almost never see them in their shells.

Luckily, I have had the opportunity to see scallops in their natural yet man-made habitat. When I was a teen I worked on a scallop farm out on Long Island Sound as part of a summer aquaculture program. The scallops were housed in lantern nets, suspended directly in the sea between buoys. On reaching the farm, boatmen would lift the nets out of the sea for the students to work on. We moved the baby scallops from their crowded lantern nets into new ones that afforded them the space to grow to full marketable size. While handling them, the scallops, like toy water pistols, would squirt us with briny water. Besides not being allowed to eat the scallops, it was a fun and memorable experience.