Dear friends,
Remember when I made those mewling and puking noises about how I had missed my last window of opportunity for making strawberry jam for the season? Erm, never mind. It turns out that my favorite farmers in the world, or at least the Hudson Valley corner of the world, brought their last berries of the season to market. And they cut me a break on the price. And they threw in a little bag of zucchini blossoms so that Lloyd and I can have zucchini fritters sometime this weekend. If I haven't mentioned in the last seven minutes or so, I love the Greenmarket in the summertime. Of course, we're still a few weeks away from the headiest days of all, the mid-August-to-late-September days, when you can smell basil before you even push through the turnstile in the subway station, when you buy more tomatoes than you can possibly eat because you know that at least half of them will split into juice by the time you get home, when the Elephant Heart plums are at their peak of purple sweetness and the first local grapes of the season force you to jockey with the bees clustering around them, and when eggplants of varying hues are so swollen with flesh and purpose that they almost demand that you pick them up and regard them as thoroughly as you can without making your fellow shoppers cast speculative glances at you and your tawdry character. We're not there yet, but I can wait. There is plenty here to keep me going, as you can ascertain from this morning's crop of piccies.
Not willing to risk missing out by waiting another week hoping for one of those boxes of culls oozing apricoty goodness and seeping through the cardboard, I gave up and bought two batches of jam worth at full price this morning.
As I just mentioned over at Scrine, I knew I’d done a Very Good Thing when I scraped off the froth and remembered the last piece of leftover cheesecake hiding in the fridge.
Now I love my wife and kids dearly, but they were out at the library and there is that old rule about the chef getting the spoils… .
Whatcha doing with your strawberry froth?