Strawberries! Peas and broad beans! Asparagus! Sweetcorn! Cherries! First tomatoes! Courgette flowers! New season hispi cabbage! Summer is truly and simply the eating season.
We have a vegetable garden patch at home and even though it’s quite small, in a good summer I get quite frantic: how are we going to manage all this produce? The feeling is a combination of my inherent abhorrence of waste and my general greediness: I want to eat it all!
It’s a different approach than in winter, when all you want to eat is cheese and soup. Summer is about fresh, new season vegetables, local berries and dishes that don’t have to cook for hours, even if they are not all only salads.
So that’s my question for today: what foods and dishes best encapsulate the taste of summer?
I’ll start my selection with dessert because why not, and because berries are up there in the top 5 of summer produce. Once you’ve sliced them into a weekend jug of Pimm’s, continue slicing then mashing them for a strawberry fool: that’s the showcase recipe for ‘strawberries and cream’. An alternative is Athens mess, a riff on Eton mess with sweet filo instead of meringues, and of course strawberry and cream Victoria sponge if we’re leading berries in the cake direction.
Asparagus will now be finishing but there’s still time to make one asparagus tart this season. I can wave it bye-bye if it’s replaced with broad beans. On bruschetta, cooked into Persian rice or lightly crushed when they become more mature, broad beans are possibly my favourite summer thing.
But others are not to be sniffed at, with courgettes giving us the best part of the plant at this time of year: its flowers. If only for that it’s worth planting a courgette in your garden: buttercup-yellow flowers lightly battered and fried are impossibly delicious. Can we make courgette plants produce only plenty of flowers, not fruit?
Hispi aka spring cabbage still comes loose-leafed and sweetly tender this month, at least on market stalls. Turn it into a salad or grill it in wedges, to serve with toasted almonds and plenty of olive oil.
And first tomatoes, served with creamed sweetcorn if the latter has also already arrived, with whipped feta or folded into pappardelle – no need to cook a sauce. Happy summer!