Summer

Our local market recently had raspberries on sale -- 77 cents per half pint. I bought 8.

Since tangy fresh raspberries are highly irresistible (and perishable), Jeff and I have eaten a lot of berries over the last few days in cantaloupe boats, smoothies, berry parfaits, salads, scones, and today's raspberry sour cream cake.

This may just be the perfect summertime cake. It's delightfully quick and easy to make, and it's versatile. I know. I loved the raspberry sour cream cake so much that I made a blueberry buttermilk one too. Most of all, it's delicious.

Underneath the crunchy sugar-dusted top is a pillowy soft interior punctuated by bursts of juicy, tart raspberries. This cake needs no adornment, but a dollop of creme fraiche doesn't hurt.

While looking for recipes for this week I kept getting drawn back to old cookbook from the 50s and 60s that I have in my collection. It seemed that baked and broiled tomatoes were all the rage but thinking of putting a beautiful heirloom into the oven and baking it until soft and mushy seemed to border on blasphemy. Oh no!

At the same time I cannot count the number of tomatoes I've eaten raw since June. I needed something different, something that was hearty enough to be a side or main dish.

This recipe, a tomato and zucchini gratin, seems to be the most basic thing ever. In fact, I made it from a conversation with Adam who actually created the same dish a few weeks ago during a packaging shoot. And it's right up my alley — a few ingredients, cheese, substantial enough to be an easy supper, and cheese. Did I say that already?

Three years ago I discovered something at the farmers' market that changed my life: it's called elote (Mexican grilled corn).

Despite the fact that it was only 10:30 in the morning, the aroma of smoky grilled corn lured Jeff and me to a stand where open grills were covered with plump ears of roasting corn. As soon as each ear was cooked it was quickly jammed onto a stick then drowned in a lime-spiked mayonnaise sauce, rolled in crumbly cotija anejo cheese and sprinkled with lime juice and cayenne pepper. Each customer's eyes widened in anticipation when handed this unusual treat.

Since that day, I have learned that the Spanish word "elote" can refer to corn or to grilled corn and that it's a common street food in many parts of Mexico. Like the famed fish taco, grilled corn is classic street food: unpretentious yet remarkable in its unique flavor. It's hot and creamy and salty and spicy, and utterly, wholeheartedly addictive.

What do potato salad, corn-on-the-cob, watermelon, and bean salad all have in common? They're requisite summer cookout foods.

When I was a kid growing up in Rhode Island, it was usually Italian-style pickled bean salad made with green and yellow wax beans and dark red kidney bean. I always ate so much that I inevitably ended up with pickled gray vinegar lips.

Then sometime in the '90's my mom replaced the Italian bean salad with a rich, sweet baked bean dish made with crispy bacon. It was so sugary good, that one year I ate nearly half of it while I was making it for the cookout. Not a good idea.

When we lived in North Carolina, it was either a mushy green bean salad with diced ham (yech) or a crisp black-eyed pea salad similar to succotash (yum).