Corner the market
Starting with farm-fresh vegetables makes summertime cooking easy and flavorful
It's late July and the farmers' markets are flush. For a month or more, growers have been picking a ripe cherry tomato here and a green bean there, but only for their own tables. Now there's finally enough to pack the bushel baskets and drive them to market. From now on, the produce just gets better and better - until the frost.
Once home with your bulging bags, however, you'll probably head into a hot and stuffy kitchen. So much to cook and so little cool air. Try making do without the oven. Even on a breezy day, it's too warm for roasting. Stick to the stovetop. Pull out a large skillet, a soup pot, and a salad bowl; you don't need much else. These five recipes salad (see Page E5) - sweet corn soup; penne with new potatoes and pesto; tuna with tomatoes and green olives; marinated carrot salad; and radish, fennel, and arugula - are easy to throw together and make a fine meal. Or cook them individually and add them to your usual repertoire. Everything can be served hot or at room temperature. Nothing is fussy.
Simple corn soup gets even better later in the summer, when corn becomes sweeter, cheaper, and more plentiful. The soup has few ingredients, so each step is important, especially melting shallots in butter over very low heat until they're almost jammy but not at all browned. After you remove the kernels from the corn cobs, "milk" the cobs with the back of the knife and then simmer the cobs in the soup, along with basil leaves, and of course the sweet kernels of corn. When the corn is cooked, add more basil to the broth, and then spin the soup in the blender.
Tuna cooked in tomato sauce is a classic fisherman's dish in the Mediterranean, quick and light, but hearty enough for a hot day on the sea. Make a fast and spicy tomato sauce with fresh plum tomatoes, plenty of olive oil and plump green olives, then cook the tuna right in the sauce.
Carrot salad with Moroccan spices is a good way to use the super-sweet young carrots that are in the markets. With their thin skins, bright orange color, and lush greens, they're so pretty. Keep a little of the green ends intact. Blanch the carrots and toss with cumin, paprika, cinnamon, lemon juice, and olive oil.
Around Genoa, in northern Italy, pasta with pesto, new potatoes, and green beans is a traditional dish. There, the dish is made with a hand-rolled cigarillo-shape noodle called trofie. In the summer kitchen, use penne, and though it may seem odd to combine two carbohydrates, the pasta is especially good with the first of the season's tiny, peanut-size, buttery new potatoes. Green beans, still moist inside and picked with dusty green, velvety skins, garnish the salad, along with pesto made from field-grown basil, which is cheap now and impossibly fragrant.
For a salad, radish, fennel, and arugula make a crisp and bright bowl, just right for a summer night. Radishes in different varieties with their green stems attached are sweeter and spicier than at other times of the year; summer fennel is like mild licorice candy, and farm-fresh arugula is pleasingly biting and peppery.
These recipes are just the beginning. Cream the corn, pickle the radishes, grill the fennel, then return to the market for slender eggplant, golden squash, baby beets, leafy greens, and young lettuces. This is a sweet time.
