Wicked Wednesday: Five Favorite Foods

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Edith/Maddie here, writing from north of Boston and loving me some sweet corn, ripe blueberries, and sun-warmed tomatoes.

It’s full July in New England, and you know what that means – local summer produce! This week let’s delve into summer foods, the ones grown or produced locally that you can taste only in season. (Ice cream counts if it contains a local fruit or flavoring.)

Wickeds, what are your five favorite local foods to eat in July?

Liz: I am all about the summer fruit – blackberries, strawberries, peaches, nectarines, and I like to have some local corn on the cob once a year.

Edith/Maddie: Blueberries from my own bushes are a favorite this month, after a salad of my own lettuce, cukes, and sun-warmed heirloom and gold cherry tomatoes. Sweet corn from one of our local farms is a treat. And I like to grill the slender Asian eggplants I grow. If there are leftovers, I whirl them with olive oil and roasted garlic into a baba ganoush dip/spread. Oops, that’s six.

Jessie: Cherries! They are not currently local to me, but I love very few foods as much as those! When I was a child they were a local food, and I have never lost my love of them, warm from the tree and darkly sweet. I also love my home grown rosemary, cider doughnuts from the local farm store, a local goat cheese, and baguette from the Standard Baking Company.

Sherry: Oh, Jessie, we’ve been eating lots of Rainier cherries the past few weeks. They come and go so quickly. My favorties: grapes crushed into wine — a nice, crisp white is perfect on a summer day. The ribs my neighbor cooked for us on July fourth, ice cream, tomatoes from the farmer’s market, and pesto that we make.

Julie: Sherry, LOL. Bless those grape crushers. I adore summer fruits and veggies. Blueberries, strawberries, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes. Runners up are squashes, nectarines, and cherries. And rhubarb!

Barb: Since it’s summer, my favorites are corn on the cob, tomatoes, melon, peaches, and ice cream. I’m very much a seasonal eater by preference and tradition.

Readers: Are you hungry yet? I am! What are your favorite July foods from your area? Make sure to add generally where you live.

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Published by Edith Maxwell

Agatha Award -winning author Edith Maxwell writes the historical Quaker Midwife Mysteries (Beyond the Page) and short crime fiction. As Maddie Day she writes the Dot and Amelia Mysteries, the Country Store Mysteries series, the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries, and the Cece Barton Mysteries (all from Kensington Publishing). She lives north of Boston in an antique house with her beau and cat Martin, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook.

26 Thoughts

  1. Oh my goodness. Blueberries are first on the list. Blueberries with milk are my favorite way to start the day. Then white peaches and Rainier cherries both of which are around very briefly.

    I’m particularly fond of what my mother called “summer squash” but the rest of the know universe calls scallop squash. Cooked up and mashed with salt and pepper and enough butter to clog your arteries just looking at it.

    Watermelon. These days, it’s around all year long, but I only seem to crave it in the summer. Right now I would commit any sin that could be named for some ice cold watermelon – so cold it makes my fillings hurt.

    I should add that I’m in the Central Valley of Northern California where the temperature outside today was 108 degrees. And because my A/C is currently non-functional it’s 90 inside at 1:15 AM. We’ve had more 100+ degree days this year than we’ve ever had in history in July, and naturally it’s when I have no A/C.

    When I was a teenager, I thought cold showers were a torture device. These days, they’re the blessing of heaven.

    I wish you all pleasantly cold showers on unpleasantly hot days.

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    1. I love white peaches, Lee – such a delicate flavor. We had a tree of white and of yellow in my So Cal backyard growing up (plus apricot and lemon and plum and fig and guava and boysenberries…). I hope your AC gets fixed and the temps moderate!

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  2. I live in Ottawa ON. I bought the first local sweet corn yesterday. I am eating peaches from Niagara ON (stone fruit capital of Ontario). Juicy sweet peaches are the best. I’m still waiting for my cherry tomatoes and Asian white eggplant to develop/ripen. Both are several weeks behind schedule this year, thanks to record rainy/cool weather in June/early July. The weather this week is nicely seasonal: sunny and highs of 27C/81F.

    On the plus side, this unseasonably cool weather means I am still harvesting leaf lettuce, arugula & herbs (especially Genovese & Thai basil) from my balcony garden. This is the first year they have not bolted in the summer heat.

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    1. Lucky you to get good peaches! I can’t eat them raw anymore, but I think it’s time to bake a peach pie. My gold cherry tomatoes are ripening nicely but the bigger ones are staying stubbornly green.

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  3. Right out of the garden tomatoes, corn on the cob and watermelon and freshly picked blueberries and peaches are my top 5.
    2clowns at arkansas dot net

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  4. I wish I could think of an exotic Swiss fruit or vegetable to amaze you with, but Swiss summer fruits and veggies aren’t very different from the ones in most of the US. Our cherry season is short, so I’m eating as many of those as I can, and the blueberry season is only a little longer, so I’ve been working my way through bowlfuls of them, plus baking blueberry crisps and pies for all occasions. Add to that fresh basil to eat with tomatoes and as pesto, delicious cucumbers for Greek salads and tzaziki, and, finally, fresh apricots. Lots of the apricots are picked too green to ripen into perfect fruit, but now and then you get a truly good one–both in flavor and texture–and it is scrumptious.

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  5. Oh, yum! Local blueberries and raspberries from my bushes, fresh squash, and tomatoes, and because this is Maine – new potatoes. Nothing like them fresh from the ground.

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  6. Lancaster, PA is known for its great soil for growing. It’s hard to choose only 5 favorites. Strawberries, donut peaches, cherries, asparagus, and corn are all musts. I gain weight in the summer from eating fruits and veggies. I just can’t seem to eat enough of the fresh goodies.

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  7. Here in Central Indiana, it’s prime season for fresh blueberries, strawberries, and corn. The peppers in my wife Nancy’s garden are almost ready. We’ve got lots of fresh basil and mint, too.

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  8. Hoping that nostalgia for local counts, and I just have two: basil ice cream … the ice maker grows his own basil! and tomatoes…beef steak from the farmers market. Nostalgia because I no longer live in that area.

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  9. Here in the Phoenix desert where we have only seen our low temps in the upper 80s 3-4 times in the last month, fresh from the garden produce is scarce in July; think January for all of you in the northern climes! That said, basil and rosemary thrive in the heat and just an hour or two both north and south of here, grapes being crushed abound. Tomatoes are ripening, lettuces, eggplant and zucchini are showing up at the Farmer’s Markets. While not local, cherries are my all time favorite summer fruit and in the spring we had treed loaded with wonderful apricots, peaches, mulberries and figs.

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  10. Here in Southwestern PA, we are awash in blueberries, which is a favorite. Cold watermelon on a hot day is amazing. I had my first corn on the cob the other day (surprising I left it so late). And peaches! Here at the Cottage we have two peach trees and after our recent hot spell we are drowning in small, but sweet, peaches. Barb, I’d ship you some if I could.

    Also, brewed iced tea with a splash of lemon. We have a brewer, but I’ve also done sun-brewed, which my grandmother did every week during the summer in Western New York.

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      1. Wow, I forgot about sun tea. Our brewer broke and I never replaced it. I’ll have to try sun tea again.

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  11. Moved to Arizona from Nebraska in 1996 and I still miss home grown Nebraska tomatoes, just not the same flavor here. My favorite is green beans any way you can fix them, especially creamed. Also cantaloupe, raspberries, peaches, nectarines, cherries, grapes, corn, summer squash etc. Anything in season we enjoy.

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  13. How wonderful to read about your selection of fruits. Over here in the mountains of San Diego we are having an enormous harvest of rhubarb…and we are giving it away, because by now I have had my fill of it. We will be on overload with figs shortly.Mangoes, and Brazilian and Strawberry Guavas are going to be ready in about 3 weeks, and Persimmons will be ready at the end of August. Y’all are welcomed to come get some!!! Luis at ole dot travel

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