Eat Beautiful Food

It's been summer for approximately three weeks now, off and on, with coldish cloudy mornings and warm afternoons. It's glorious. After all of my caterwauling about the endless rain, it feels luxurious to sit in the sun on our back stoop, wade through 2666 and watch the tomato plants grow. I'm watching our arms grow tan, our cheeks rosy and glowing.

And while we're still waiting for tomato season (hurry up! I want tomato corn pie and toasted tomato breakfast sandwiches smeared with a tiny bit of mayo), we have baby fingerling potatoes and sweet corn and fava beans to play with and distract our stomachs.

Oh, Favas.

Have you eaten them? Vivid green beans that require shelling, then blanching, then skinning, then cooking and which are so worth it for their buttery, almost cheesy taste. Our last foray into favaland was a pasta I made last week with garlicky lemon sauteed favas tossed with pasta and homemade mint-pistachio pesto. This week I might make a fava spread or a salad, something to eat with a cold lemon-garlic-olive oil dressing and the Puy lentils sitting in the fridge, and roasted baby squash. And some time this week we'll eat a fingerling potato and sweet onion tart and I'll smear avocado on sour rye bread and devour my breakfast.

I love eating in the summer. It takes no effort and everything tastes wonderful.

Today at lunch a (very lanky) co-worker of whom I'm fond admitted to being addicted to food. At first this sounds like a scary admission--something a contestant on the The Biggest Loser says to his shame and the viewers' consternation--but I think I know what he meant.

Food is a pleasure. And in the summer it is a fragrant, colorful pleasure of fruits that stain your lips and hands and sweet baby vegetables, and heavy red tomatoes that taste like a voluptuous promise of happiness and beauty. When food represents so much that is good in the world, when cooking it well makes your friends smile and you hum and dance in the kitchen, as long as you eat it with care and eat what is beautiful (because what good food isn't beautiful: the lacy grain of wheat, the jeweled red of beets, the bright green of new peas) an "addiction to food" is less a pathology than an effort to appreciate what grows in each season and how it gets into your belly.

Increasingly, I find myself looking forward to the day when I can teach our future babies to shell fresh peas and water the basil. And stuff fresh raspberries into their mouths and understand that to live life with this sweetness and gluttony and appreciation and attachment to what sustains us is the best way to live. I work on learning these feelings and living this way every day now. It is hard, but it is good.



P.S. This is Princess. T won him for me at Wunderland Nickel Arcades this afternoon and is immensely desirous that Princess appear in this blog post. Sometimes in marriage it is just best to agree.