I’m a huge fan of almost every summer fruit, and have been enjoying a great many of them this summer. A few weeks back Lynn posted about her experiences with blackberries. I don’t usually eat blackberries plain, but have mixed them with strawberries and raspberries this summer and found them to be delightful. However, the star of my summer fruit eating this year has been watermelon.
I don’t mean those humongous, rather mealy and tasteless long watermelons I usually find in the grocery stores. I mean the small, almost round watermelons that when cut open, reveal firm, red, and extremely tasteful fruit.
I haven’t been doing anything particularly creative with watermelon. I just cut it into cubes, and eat it straight. No embelishments. No sauces. Just pure watermelon.
Midsummer may be an unusual time for praising herbal tea, but when I felt a bit under the weather yesterday, I prepared and drank my cup of chamomile tea with such profound pleasure that I want to share this with you.
The minute the weather turns hot and humid, my food cravings change. I no longer want homemade soups and stews, and the comforting carb-filled foods of winter. I want salads!
We’ve had a flurry of unseasonably warm weather up north the past week. In addition to breaking out my flip flops about a month early, I’ve started thinking about the foods I like to eat in warmer weather. Now I’m not foolish enough to believe that the warm weather will last. In fact, I fully expect to see at least a few snow flurries once more.
At the moment I must work a lot, using a great deal of energy and urgently requiring comfort at intervals, so it’s no wonder I turn to the pantry and the fridge on a regular basis. Now much as I love chocolate, I can’t eat it all the time, or my stomach rebels. So I’ve had to come up with some alternatives for comfort food. 
For the most part, I eat healthy foods but I am a complete chocoholic. I love dark chocolate in and in the winter, I get the most intensive hot chocolate cravings ever. When the wind comes whipping in from the mountains and I feel wet and cold all the way through to my bones, nothing will warm me up except a steaming mug of chocolate. The $0.99 boxes of watery chocolate from the supermarket will only go so far, though.
When my grandmother died, seven years ago, one object I took from her home to mine was her book of baking recipes. Grandma was a good cook, but a passionate baker. She loved trying out new recipes, and the book I inherited is full of traces of sugar and flour. Whenever there was a family party, she would proudly carry in several huge, delicious confections and spoil us all with the results of her latest experiments. What I remember most fondly, however, are her simpler cakes: poppy tart, Baumkuchen (layered cake?) and cheesecake. She encouraged my sister and me to start baking ourselves, and we began doing so when we were no more than 9 and 7 (and yes, that included dealing with the hot oven).
