I’m back. Did you miss me? I, you.
It is officially fresh notebook and journaling season. I’ve long been enthralled by Sylvia Plath’s Food Diary, an account on X that chronicles what the poet ate and drank, according to her journals, letters and other published writings. The intimate entries range from the gastronomic aside (“made a big picnic,” Aug. 24, 1952; “I ate as much as I could of the baked beans,” 1963) to more evocative, lyrical accounts of the charmingly mundane: “Woke, dazed, to pare potatoes into cool white ovoids, carrots into long conical spheres, onions slippery glossed & bulbous popped & cracked from their rattle-paper skins,” March 8, 1958.
These diaries have been top of mind after several weekends of sumptuous summer meals away from home in various cabins upstate. I snap my little photos to remember them, but I know writing down the subtler details better helps me commit them to memory. I’ve pledged to make a habit of jotting down the big and the small.
That’s how I can tell you that on Aug. 24 I ate Mark Bittman’s five-star corn salad with tomatoes, feta and mint, prepared by two friends, at dusk on a towel-draped picnic table. That’s perfect end-of-summer eating — salty, sweet and fresh. Get it while you still can.
Corn Salad With Tomatoes, Feta and Mint
And on Aug. 29 I cubed a two-day-old loaf of sourdough to riff on Melissa Clark’s panzanella, dicing up yellow, orange and cherry-red heirloom tomatoes and tossing them with plenty of garlic, herbs and more vinegar than called for. I left out the cucumbers, mozzarella and capers, but the dish still packed plenty of punch. I also made oven-roasted corn on the cob, something my dining companion didn’t even know you could do. Reader, you can!
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