Easy Summer Corn Salad

A few days ago, I mentioned a pea and mint salad that I've been eating a lot this summer.

Here's another salad that's easy to throw together. There's not much to it, which makes using the freshest ingredients possible even more important.

In yesterday's CSA box, we got several ears of "Vision" sweet corn. I've written about my love of corn before. But I have to say that this is the best corn I have ever tasted.

I don't know what it was — the variety, the fact that it's organic (does that affect the taste of corn much? Most sweet corn I've had has been local, but not organic), the exact seven-minute cooking time … I'm not sure, but I think the variety has a lot to do with it. It's super-sweet and was perfectly tender-crisp after cooking.

The flavor and texture make it the perfect main ingredient for this salad. You do need to cook the corn first and then let it get cold (though I think it would be very tasty warm, too). After the corn is cooked (seven minutes!), cut the kernels off the cobs and store in the refrigerator. (Ours was refrigerated overnight.)

Then, in a bowl, toss the corn kernels with some halved grape or cherry tomatoes. We got a container of sugarplum tomatoes in our CSA box yesterday, too. They are seriously amazing — totally sweet and a beautiful orange hue, and I just love the name.

Next, add some feta (I've been eating a lot of this lately), followed by finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley and basil. Drizzle a little bit of good olive oil over the top just to help everything come together, and finish with a sprinkling of kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Toss everything together. Eat. Love.

Before you wrinkle up your nose at the part about cutting the kernels off of ears of corn, let me say this: It takes less time to do this than it does to microwave a bag of frozen corn, drain it and pour it into a bowl, and it tastes SO much better. You will be very disappointed in yourself for not having done this before. You will want to cook hundreds of ears of corn this summer, cut off the kernels and then freeze them so that you can have delicious sweet corn in the middle of February, which I think is an excellent idea. You will eat this corn in the middle of February, sweater-clad and shivering, and you will instantly feel warm and sunny on the inside. And then you will ask yourself, "Seasonal Affective Disorder? What Seasonal Affective Disorder?"

Or, you will just eat this salad for lunch and call it a day.

Swiss Chard with Parmesan

Isn't everything better with olive oil and Parmesan? I say yes.

I'd neglected the bunch of red Swiss chard from our CSA offering long enough, so in a moment of crazy ("I can TOTALLY cook this while Benjamin is squirming and fussing in his highchair!"), I made this.

I started out with a big pot of salted boiling water. I've sauteed chard before, but that seemed too labor-intensive, for some reason. From there, I wasn't sure what I'd do next. I removed the leaves from the stems, and then chopped them roughly. After consulting Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" — the most stained, most dog-eared, most used cookbook in my kitchen, by far — I went ahead and chopped the stems, too. They reminded me of beets, with their earthy smell and ruby hue.

I threw the stems into the water first, for 5 minutes, followed by the leaves for another 5 minutes. Bittman said for the simplest preparation, you could throw in some butter or olive oil or vinegar. So naturally, I put in all three — about a tablespoon of butter, a generous swirl of extra-virgin olive oil and a few glugs of balsamic vinegar, plus salt and pepper. I didn't measure; it can all be done to taste.

And since there was a wedge of Parmesan on the counter already from the pasta I'd made Benjamin for lunch, I thought, heck, why not? I grated some over the top, and it melted in, adding a nice salty creaminess.

The best part? My kid liked it, too.

Anatomy of a Pea

If you perform an autopsy of a sugar snap pea, this is what you'll find inside. Yes, more peas! I photographed one this afternoon outside in the rain. This incarnation of peas is certainly more pleasing than a plastic bag of loose frozen ones. Yaaawn.

We got a bunch of snap peas in our CSA box yesterday, along with more lettuce and greens, red Swiss chard, strawberries, zucchini, cilantro and two heirloom Cherokee purple tomatoes. I'll take some photographs of those, too. They're amazing-looking: stripey, purple-red and misshapen.

It's all almost too beautiful to eat. Almost.