Lazy Summer Salads: Stone Fruit + Mozzarella! Honeydew + Kiwi + Avocado Spiked with Jalapeños!

You'll make these all summer. Unless you just don't feel like moving.

This is my Pale Green Salad, Fruit Edition, before it gets dressed.

EVEN THOUGH I AM IN my twilight years (an expression I love despite its darkness), I still associate summer with the long-ago childhood bliss of doing almost nothing for months. So every summer I feel slightly ripped off by the season’s broken promise.

I have had this irrational, gently nagging resentment at least since college, when I had to face the truth about the world and started working not just in summer but year-round, mostly in restaurants.

Pepé LePew: Not a nice skunk.

In my little college town (back in the year 1899), I worked at the sole French restaurant, where the oversexed owner (he reminded me of Pepé Le Pew—who would probably be in jail today if he were real) “flirted” aggressively with all the young women he’d hired while his wife simmered at the bar. (So I had my first exposure to whatever we’re calling that these days—but also to wonderful soufflés and Sole Bonne Femme and garlicky escargot.)

I had my first snails and my first soufflé during my college work life.

I worked at an alleged Mexican restaurant, owned by a former frat boy, where it seemed like everyone in charge was perpetually drunk on margaritas. I worked at a good burger joint right across from campus, which served delicious coffee that we all drank until 1 a.m. without worrying about sleep and where the manager politely asked me to brush my hair before punching in and then fired me when I cried and told him this was just how my hair looked. (It still looks that way.)

And I worked at a wonderful vegetarian cafe, where the ceiling was painted to look like the sky and I consumed plate after plate of tofu and vegetables sprinkled with nutritional yeast and learned to make the good egg salad I continue to make to this day, which you can find in this issue. (I’ve also appended the downloadable recipe, below, in case you are feeling too lethargic to look for it in the newsletter, which I understand. It’s summer.) I still see the cafe’s chef now and then, when I go back to visit, and I included one of her recipes in my book.

An Ideal Egg Salad

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My old friend Archie Andrews.

So! It has been a very long time since I have been allowed to lead the life promised to me by my own childish delusions—years and years since I have played kick-the-can until well after dark, or gotten to recline by a pool all day long, or played tennis for six hours in one day, or ridden my bike for miles, just to ride my bike.

I bring all of this up not to complain (although do we really ever get over the loss of our innocent, lazy childhoods?) but because I recently realized—really realized—how lucky I am to love what I do for a living, even though it doesn’t include lounging in a hammock all day reading Archie comic books. Even when my work life has not been perfect, or when work has been scarce, I have always been acutely aware that I was not one of the people out in the hot sun building the Great Pyramid of Giza or installing America’s Transcontinental Railroad. And I try to remind myself of this fact as often as possible.

NOTE TO SELF: Not your job. (A view of the great pyramids, Giza, Egypt; Getty)

None of this is to say that I don’t display openly shiftless behavior during summer, especially in this heat, which bears down upon us mercilessly here in Atlanta, even when chunks of ice are falling from the sky, as happened a few days ago for about 10 minutes, knocking out my electricity and terrifying my dog, Cookie, but somehow not bringing down the temperature. It seems like it should have cooled things off, but I’m not a scientist.

Nor is it to imply that I am not constantly trying to think of ways to make my life more leisurely. Like many people who love their work, I contain the battling impulses of industry and indolence, which is why I am able to say aloud to my empty kitchen, as if I were a character in a Tennessee Williams play, that I am “suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside me” and also that “I’m going to make the easiest summer salads possible.”