All the cooking mags are coming out with their summer covers and recipes for summer food - corn, tomatoes, peaches, melons. Here in Wisconsin, though, summer's bounty is behind schedule, since we had such a wet June. I'm eating organic watermelon for lunch, but it's from Texas. So far I've had basil and zucchini in my Tipi Produce CSA veggie box, but no tomatoes or melons yet; there're tomatoes at the farmers' market, but mostly the hydroponic ones so far - I bet some of the hoop house growers will have cherry tomatoes soon.

All the delicious-reading recipes for tomatoes and other summer goodies have been making me feel wistful, but our local paper kind of irritated me this week - they must've scheduled their annual feature on sweet corn recipes for mid-July as usual, and they even interviewed some farmers for the article. But they didn't listen when all the farmers were saying, "eyup, we're behind this year - no corn till August", and they ran the article July 16th anyways.

I think I'll try to recreate my grandmother's tomato preserves sometime soon, though; they don't require perfect tomatoes. The recipe in Joy of Cooking, written Irma Rombauer, a German woman from St. Louis, is the match of (and probably actually is) my grandmother's, since she was a German woman from Cincinnati.