End of Summer

 

I know summer is ending because the calendar has flipped to September, but also because I can now go outside without sizzling over-easy on the sidewalk. This past July set a record for heat. Bring on Thanksgiving, I say. But if there was a silver lining to summer, it was that I ate more ice cream than I did in my previous 23 summers put together.

Why? It was hot. The AC is taboo in my apartment. But not in the hallways, where it feels like January. Exit the building and you leave the cool halls for a choking breeze and a desert sun. Not to worry–there’s an ice cream store right across the street. There, they scoop graham cracker ice cream and a chocolate peanut butter that must be two-parts peanut to one-part chocolate. And finally, I ate so much ice cream because my freezer is full of it. My office’s test kitchen had leftovers and I couldn’t let them go to waste.

After days at the beach, there was ice cream (dark chocolate gelato, coffee with chocolate chips). At the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, there were “regular flavors” (ginger and black sesame) and “exotic flavors” (vanilla and strawberry). And from The Bent Spoon in Princeton, there were truly exotic flavors: Sriracha-peach and quail egg, pictured above. The flavors aren’t nearly as eccentric at the shop across the street, but there the flavors change with the seasons, which means that maybe my ice cream habit won’t.

 

Sicilian Orange Salad

When the sun showed last week, and when I was trying to use ten sad skinless lemons leftover from limoncello, I made a summer staple of mine: Sicilian orange salad. Lemons, oranges, and blood oranges–the colors are too ecstatic for winter, the flavors too florid. But let us defer the matter of seasonality to logic.

Consider Sicily. The island is a heartbeat away from kissing Africa. Surely, given this closeness, and given the climate of Sicily in the summer, so hot that many farmers wait until nightfall and tend their fields wearing headlamps, we should be little surprised if lemons and February are good friends in this distant land. Consider citrus. Even in the summer we northerners bring in oranges from afar, so why not eat the fruits in February?

This salad will wake you up like a coffee. I recommend experimenting with the recipe. For a less-sour salad, use one lemon. Try grating a patch of its rind and adding the zest before the final toss. If you’ve made limoncello and have only naked lemons, zest the blood orange instead. Here we are throwing things together and not calculating. Sliver all of the mint, or for more varied bites keep some of the leaves away from your knife.

Freeze the salad for five minutes before serving. Serve with foods of personality: barbecued ribs, garlicky pasta, whatever nimble beer you have on hand, or all of the above. But often I eat the salad alone, standing in the kitchen, in the afternoon, in the winter or the summer, straight out of the chilled bowl, lemon spirits and the sun mere excuses.

Serves 2 as a snack, 4 as a side

2             oranges

2             small lemons

1             blood orange

1/5         medium red onion (one ounce), cut into slivers

3             springs mint leaves (some 25 leaves), half slivered, half left whole

1 tbsp      olive oil

freshly ground pepper

pinch of salt

1) With a paring knife, cut the rind and white pith from the first orange. Discard the rind and pith. With your knife perpendicular to the lines between the orange segments (the orange’s poles at east and west), slice the sphere into thin rounds, removing seeds from rounds that have them. Put rounds into a large bowl. With a paper towel, wipe juice that has pooled on the cutting board.

2) Repeat for other orange. Repeat for lemons and blood orange.

3) Add red onions, mint, and olive oil. Toss delicately.

4) Add 5-8 grindings of pepper and next-to-no salt. Toss delicately.

5) Cover and put in freezer for 4 or 5 minutes. Take out. Eat.