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It’s a milestone — blog post #200! If you’ve been following along here for a while, you may recall that every year around the holidays I make one or more recipes with pears. My late father used to send us Harry & David pears every year, and it is a happy memory when I receive a box from the machetunim (a Yiddish word for the in-laws of one’s child, i.e., my son’s wife’s parents).

This year I made so many pear recipes, and I can still hear how my father might sing the line. “I love a parade,” a fitting title here!

Whenever my students ask me about it, I tell them I’m a Valentine’s Day Scrooge, and that it seems like going out to dinner on Valentine’s Day costs twice as much and is half as good! It’s not a holiday we put a lot of thought into – although the most memorable was when my husband and I had bought the exact same card for each other!

Today was my annual blueberry-picking date with one of my former students at what I like to think of as my secret blueberry orchard.

I love shellfish, but Hank is allergic. It’s not so severe that he can’t be near it – whenever we’re in Maine, after he quickly finishes his fish ’n chips, he waits patiently as I work my way through every bit of my lobster – however it does mean that I rarely cook shellfish at home.

But when we have a guest who likes shellfish, I sometimes like to treat myself, and not too long ago I was able to do so, and I served soft shell crab sandwiches for lunch and grilled octopus for dinner!

It is officially summer!

Around midday today, I signed out of my last Google Meet class for the year.

And then, I shut my laptop and made myself a special lunch to celebrate the official start of summer vacation!

My friend, Carrie, recently emailed me a link to a recipe she had made for sweet potatoes with tahini butter. Also recently, I had ordered two jars of Soom tahini, which has been praised as a superior tahini by Michael Solomonov and many others. So I decided to give it a try.

The original recipe steamed or boiled chunks of sweet potatoes, not really sure which, as it seemed like more work than just baking a large sweet potato which Hank and I had planned to share. So I just drizzled the tahini butter over the sweet potato halves and I was hooked on the flavor. It was an amazing dinner with steak and the last ramps of the season, grilled, and it was the first evening warm enough to eat on the porch!

I’ve been working my way through seasonal treats I froze last summer, and one of the things I found tucked in the back of our freezer in the garage was another bag of frozen corn. Every time Hank get corn during the summer, whether from Kinderhook Creek Farm in Stephentown, New York or Noble’s in Pittsfield, Massachusetts or any number of other local farms, we always get half a dozen ears even though we know we won’t eat it all. I cut whatever is left off of the cobs, measure the amount, and freeze it in labeled zipper bags.

Over the course of the winter, I might cook a bag of corn as a side dish or make corn chowder, and sometimes I make this incredibly easy soup.

I went out to forage for ramps again, then wondered what to do with then. As I was falling asleep the other night, I began to dream up recipes, and somehow stumbled upon the idea of using ramps to flavor a sauce to serve with dinner.

It is a serious problem for me, keeping me from falling asleep at night, when I start to think through which perishables we have in the house, which will go bad sooner and which later, and trying to plan accordingly.

We had a near disaster the other day. We have a tall pantry cabinet in our kitchen with fairly deep pull-out shelves. With my hand on one of the shelves, pushing it back in, I heard a crack, and as the plastic bracket holding the side rail broke, I managed to prevent the shelf from crashing to the floor, along with all of its content.

Thankfully I averted what would have been a mess of broken bottles of oil and vinegar, jars of mustards and jams, and various containers of breadcrumbs all over the floor.