This is heretical to admit but I don’t like August. Not as a cook, not as a mom, not even as someone with a birthday in August. It’s too hot to cook. It’s too hot to go to parks. It’s too hot to go to the beach. And everyone is away so I’m miserable and without friends. Everyone else hates August too and takes vacations then.
So this time of year, surrounded by heaps of sun-warmed produce straight from the CSA box or even from my own garden, I start cheating on summer.
It starts as a fantasy, as all affairs do.
My sage is going gonzo in the garden and I was staring at it the other day, thinking that even I won’t use all that dried over the winter. Maybe I could put it up? I’ve got a recipe for herb jelly somewhere…. Oh, look, it uses wine or apple juice. Why not hard cider? I’ve got a couple bottles of West County’s Pippin Cider tucked away.
What the heck would I use sage-apple jelly with?
Pork. A pork roast. One that I salted and let rest for 24 hours in the fridge and then roasted really slow in the oven until it was fall-apart tender, like pulled pork only without the smoke. And I could make a sauce from apples and and brandy. Then I could make my fabulous cream biscuits and put the jelly on the biscuits.
That sounds… good.
I could roast some potatoes with fresh-picked rosemary and thyme — my garden’s best features are the Scarborough Fair quartet. And I’d need to make new butter to go with the potatoes. Then I could cut some of the collards (my biggest non-herbal garden success) and cook those. Collards, it must be understood, are always cooked with bacon and onions and a little cider vinegar.
Might as well carry the apple theme all the way to dessert with baked apples. Cored and filled with butter and cinnamon and sugar and just a pinch of nutmeg, baked until they are slumping soft and served with ice-cold cream laced with just a hint of vanilla.
Lost in a haze of food lust, I stand in my baking-hot oven and bees hum around my head and I can almost taste… I slap my face a little. That would involve having the oven on all day. That’s not just stupid, that’s potentially dangerous in 90+ degree heat.
My autumnal feast will have to wait until…. autumn.
But then I find myself with most of a ham in my fridge. And I think, split pea soup is really autumnal, so I really shouldn’t make it. But… why not? It’s does well in a slow cooker. That won’t heat up my kitchen. It doesn’t count at fall cooking in summer if it’s in a slow cooker.
Plus it’s for Christopher. I don’t like it, so it doesn’t count as cheating, right?
But this is how it starts. A little taste here. A craving for home-baked bread then — in the early morning cool, when you can feel how summer’s grip is fading, despite the promise of heat later in the day. Next thing you know, I’m in a torrid kitchen, sweat running down my heaving chest, as I make venison stew with slow roasted potatoes.
When it comes to autumnal food, summer just doesn’t hold a candle.
Seriously? Hot now? Oh right… you weren’t at Pennsic. I love August, and August food. I don’t have a choice about when I take my vacation. But given that my vacation involves cooking over an open fire in the blazing sun, I’ve been enjoying the ability to comfortably bake again. I made bread yesterday, and one of the two loaves was gone by this afternoon, so I suspect I’ll be baking again real soon now. I’d decided not to take pics of the beef salad we had for lunch… but maybe I’ll have to post about that anyway. Not that I have the slightest clue about seasons and beef, but it was a ‘cook at night, chop at lunch time’ sort of meal, which I love in the summer.
You brought us rainy autumn weather! Hooray!