Ok, friends, bear with me. I know there’ve been a lot of salads around here lately. A perfect, basic vinaigrette here. Greens and eggs here. Nostalgia and avocado and citrus here.
But it’s hot. Ridiculously, multiple-showers-a-day hot. So, you see, salads are the thing. The ticket to maintaining sanity at this point in the season.
Here, we are so over summer. I know there are those of you in places where summer is fleeting, blink-and-it’s-gone brief, finished before it really got underway in the first place. But we’ve been experiencing summer weather for five full months, and the murmurs are starting. September is coming and, even though we know the heat won’t go the way of August, we still have hope. We know September is supposed to mean fall, even if the reality isn’t that.
I mentioned the other day to my friend, Dawn, that I wish I could experience chilly weather for just one day. Just one day with an umbrella and a long cardigan and zero reason to put on my sunglasses. Just one day so that I could justify those knee-high, gray-as-winter Frye boots that I’m positively mad for, but that, given current temperatures, what would be the point?
Just one day with a Honeycrisp apple. That’s all I want.
Barring the apple, I do have this French balsamic apple cider vinegar to help me wait for fall and its attendant apples. This vinegar has a sweetness, but there’s body to temper it. I could lick it off a spoon (ok, so I have). So far I’ve only used it to dress salad, but it’s so luscious I imagine I’ll try reducing it with sugar and drizzling it over caramel ice cream. Or berries.
Or maybe I’ll just reach for a spoon.