summer list

Inspired by my friend Maggie’s Mighty Life List, I'm creating a Summer List. On Fridays, I’ll highlight a few ideas and launch us into the weekend with visions of simple summer lazyness.

This weekend, I hope to walk barefoot through the grass, eat a ripe peach, and read the Sunday papers outside. What are you planning this weekend? Send in your own ideas and we can create the Summer List together. Have a wonderful lazy weekend and see you on Monday.

beautiful image from Tanjica PerovicWalk barefoot • Take a nap outside • Make suntea • Pick berries • Spend time in hammock • Go on picnic • Make herb water • Eat an ice cream cone • Host outdoor brunch • Hang birdfeeder • Make a sunprint • Grow vegetables • Make a skirt • Put lemons in your hair at the beach • Go for a swim • Watch a movie outside • Go to a farmer’s market • Catch summer play • Make popsicles • Read the Sunday papers outside • Take a roadtrip • Learn a summer constellation • Go camping • Go on boat ride • Read a summer book • Take off your watch • Eat a ripe peach • Make a summer mix tape • Make July 4th cupcakes • Pick wildflowers • BBQ outside • Blow a dandelion • Rent a convertible • Play hookey for a day • Watch fireflies • Make lemonade • Make an outdoor  teepee • Watch a small town parade • Listen to a thunderstorm • Take an outdoor shower • Sing around a campfire • Roast marshmallows • Watch a meteor shower • Eat a watermelon • Go bodysurfing • Tube down a river • Take a walk on a dirt road

meet the summer food editor: sarah flotard

Sarah and I met on our very first day of college, when we were randomly paired together as freshman roommates. The first meals we ever made together were on a hot pot in our eensy dorm room. After college, we traveled cross-country together in a wood-paneled station wagon, making dinners on our trusty propane grill, in campgrounds from the Black Hills to Bryce Canyon. After we settled in San Francisco, Sarah went on to develop cocktail recipes for Stirrings, and then work for the James Beard award-winning chef Tom Douglas in Seattle.

Sarah and I share the belief that everything tastes better when eaten outside. And the belief that owning a home with an outdoor shower is the true mark of success.

She makes everything more fun. And makes everything taste better.

summer food: mussels with sopressata

I have a love / hate relationship with camping. Love : pulling into our campsite for the first time and seeing the beautiful, woodsy, home-away-from-home that I spent hours researching on google. Hate: public bathrooms, random shower drain hairs and forgetting to pack my flip flops. Love: sitting around the campfire at night, post-s’mores, thinking about hoping into our tent with the cushy air mattress and down comforter from our bed. Hate: realizing the moisture in the damp air soaked our comforter and my husband let in a billion mosquitoes, turning our tiny tent into a Mississippi-like biosphere.

Oh, the list goes on and on, but the one part about camping that I can’t find an ounce to complain about is the food.  Nothing is better than campsite cooking. And I don’t mean just a box of mac ’n cheese under the stars or instant pancakes at the crack of dawn. I mean making something special, something that you’ve put a little thought into and planned a bit in advance. Making something that the overly aggressive campground squirrels have never seen the likes of before, right out there in the middle of the woods.  

For our inaugural (and most likely only) camping trip of the summer, we headed to Whidbey Island, WA, home of some of the most breathtaking views of the Olympic Mountains and the Penn Cove mussel.  You can find these particularly delicious bivalves on restaurant menus all over the country these days, but since we were camping along the waters where they are raised and harvested, grabbing a few pounds at the local market for a cocktail-hour appetizer was a total must.

This mussel dish is so incredibly flavorful.  And there is little more to it than roughly chopping (a “campsite dice” I like to call it) a few items, tossing all the ingredients in a pot and letting ‘em rip over the hot coals until the mussels have opened.  Scrubbing the mussels and removing their beards takes the most time.  But sitting in a lawn chair by the water spigot overlooking the Strait of Juan deFuca, a glass of chilly vinho verde by my side, somehow makes the hard work, and camping, so very, very delightful. -Sarah

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon butter

4 oz sopressata, chopped to about a 1/2 inch dice

4 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped

1 tablespoon fennel seeds

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

2 pounds Penn Cove mussels, cleaned and beards removed

1 cup dry white wine

1 small lemon, sliced in 1/4 inch rounds

Preparation:

Preheat a stock pot over prepared coals, about 5 minutes.  Add olive oil and butter.  Once the butter’s foam subsides, add sopressata and saute until browned and crispy around the edges, about 7-10 minutes. Add garlic, fennel, and red pepper and saute until very fragrant, about 3-5 minutes. Add mussels, wine and lemon.  Give a good stir, cover and cook until mussels open, about 5 minutes, depending on your fire. Uncover the pot and discard any mussels that don’t open. Divide mussels evenly among 4 bowls and spoon broth over them, or just pop the pot right on the table and have at it. Serve with a crusty baguette for broth mopping and nice, crisp, summery white.

a perfect summer day: heather ross

Every week this summer, someone I love or know or admire (or all of the above) will share their idea of a perfect summer day, real or imagined. Here’s illustrator and fabric designer Heather Ross:

June has not been kind. May was overwhelmingly generous to me, April was lucky beyond belief, but June has roughed me up a bit. I will spare you the details, which are not at all interesting. What’s important to note here is that I have, as a result, not been the most alert or organized lately, which is why I was dreading the 8:30am meeting that I optimistically agreed to this last Tuesday.

The weather in New York City has been strange but lovely this month, heavy and humid one minute and raining the next. It feels sometimes like an attack. Leave the house in rubber boots and not a drop, walk out in a little white sun-dress and get ready for everyone in town to see your nipples. I was dressed Tuesday morning in a defensive system of layers: jeans and sandals and a long, loose fitting shirt that almost reached my knees. It wasn’t the most flattering outfit but it was much too early to try to look interesting and I expected to be spending the bulk of the day with the lower half of my body conveniently tucked under a conference table. And OK, I admit, I hadn’t gotten out of bed quickly enough and then had to dedicate most of my prep time to address the fact that my hair looked like something had been chewing on it all night.

I made it onto the correct subway platform, jumped onto a packed express train, and was (by some miracle) ON TIME. And then the most amazing thing happened: the meeting, which had been billed as a “real hands on task force style work session”, lasted fifteen minutes. Ten of those minutes were used up by me pointing out to everyone that I had arrived on time, and another two had been squandered standing in front of the receptionist waiting in vain to be offered coffee. At exactly 9:02 I found myself back out on the sidewalk on 38th street with absolutely nothing but three empty hours, a confusing outfit, and some extremely unruly hair. Had I been feeling a bit richer or prettier (we are saving at the moment) or had it been winter, I might have celebrated my luck by heading straight down to Balthazar and buried myself in a cheese plate and imported magazines for the morning, if not the whole day, but I wasn’t feeling up to (or looking up to) being indoors yet, even if my jeans were already feeling as weather-appropriate ski pants. I felt exhausted by my options and immediately annoyed that I was in the city at all on such a lovely day. This is what June has been for me. A series of surprise attacks and a generally poor attitude.

Coffee was what eventually forced me to put one foot in front of the other, so I headed aimlessly in the general direction of Bryant Park. If I hadn’t overshot the park by a block and then crossed through it in an effort to short-cut to the coffee I wouldn’t have noticed all the chairs on the lawn. Bryant Park is elevated from the street, so you can’t see how big it is, or how lush and beautiful it is, until you are in the middle of it. Its edges and boundaries are green and thick and conceal century old rose gardens, a tiny carousel, concessions, and an outdoor movie screen of especially ingenious design. Its eastern boundary is the massive limestone backside of our New York Public Library, which is why the park’s grassy multi-acre lawn has been re-branded as this city’s great outdoor summer reading room. There are hundreds of old vintage folding chairs strewn about the park, all of them facing different angles and all of them looking just a bit crooked. There are small tables too, though not that many of them, which made me feel all the more welcome. The chairs themselves are lovely. They are made from iron and wooden slats that have been painted that wonderful waterproof Roosevelt era “park service” green paint. They are used heavily during lunch hour, when the park fills up with the thousands of people who work in the surrounding sky-scrapers, but at 9:10 am on Tuesday I was practically the only one there. I put my hand inside my bag and felt around, hoping to find the spine of the book I am reading - Where The Wings Grow, by Agnes DeMille - and to my happy surprise, it was there.

There is a lovely public bathroom in the Bryant Park that feels like it belongs to a ballroom. It even has an urn filled with fresh flowers and a marble floor and brass fixtures. This is where I went to pull off my jeans and to scrounge around in my bag for a sharp pencil, which I used to corral my hair into a tight and ugly bun on top of my head while the nice young man at the concession stand made me a giant latte. A few minutes later I was standing at the edge of the great lawn, trying to choose a single chair from a whole ready army of them. I took off my shoes and walked through the grass feeling suddenly as though (and I know this sounds a bit nuts) I was part of a highly civilized culture, if not species. Maybe its all the hours I’ve been logging on Huff Post lately, but I had been pretty much convinced otherwise.

I spent two hours there, crying through the last chapters of my book, in which Agnes De Mille describes coming back to the green forests of the northeast after living in California for several years, where she cannot get used to the fact that it doesn’t rain in the summertime. Then, as if on cue, it did start to rain very softly through the last few pages (the book was an old used copy anyway and it seemed most appropriate to let it get wet) and then a bit harder, which is when I gathered up my things and walked out of the park.

So there it was. A perfect surprise of a day in the middle of what has been a cruel month. I have always lived for summers, and have been confused about how to spend them in this city. I have even made a small career of seeking out summer in an urban landscape, through foods and flowers and crafts, but on a this recent and poorly dressed Tuesday I realized that this city figured out summer - even June, even THIS June, - long before I got here.

The first time I ever met Heather Ross, she made me a BLT in her kitchen with bacon she just bought from the green market in New York. As if that wasn’t hospitable enough, she proceeded to make a salad dressing using some of the bacon grease, then uncorked a bottle of rose and we spent a couple hours on her roof. She personifies summer to me, as do her beautiful fabric designs that you can and should check out right here. I’m so happy to call her a friend.



a new series

Summer officially arrives next week. And even through I've spent almost as many years in foggy San Francisco as I did growing up in Virginia, I still feel the internal tug of summer when it rolls around. Afternoon thunderstorms, screen porches, and eating outside as the lightening bugs start flickering. I suppose that sometimes, we spend a lot of our adult lives trying to recreate the things we took for granted as kids.

So this summer, I'm kicking a series called Lazy Summer that will encourage us all to squeeze the goodness out of the season. I will be joined by some mighty fine and inspiring folks along the way. So check back on Monday, and most days after that, for inspiration and ideas to savor my most favorite season of all. 

Long live summer. And long live laziness.