Plum Salad on Whipped Feta; Fresh Corn Salad with Basil and Tomatoes 🍅

Also: Is "too much produce" the problem? Or are you?

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN: Late July, when we begin to talk unkindly about fresh produce as if it took over the guest room at the lake house in the early spring and has since refused to leave. Even though the truth is that it just got here.

I’m talking about the insane idea of “too much produce.”

Since I tend to leave a trail of fruits and vegetables behind wherever I go, like Hansel and Gretel, it’s also the time of year when more than a few of my friends tell me not to bring along any produce from my kitchen when I visit them. We already have too much, they say.

Stunning! As if having a surplus of any one fruit or vegetable is a problem to be solved rather than a beautiful mystery to be lived.

To prepare plums for the plum salad, remove the “cheeks” on each side and slice. You can trim the extra bits left on each side of the pit, too.

It hurts my feelings a little bit. But it also surprises me, because we are clearly living at the end of a golden age of not worrying constantly about fire or floods or tornadoes or hurricanes or drought or other climate disasters that are also disasters for farmers and anyone who eats food—unless we make enormous changes at global, corporate levels.

It seems to me that people should beg me to bring them as much produce as possible while we still have reasonably easy access to it, but I try to be understanding. What I can’t understand is why we don’t see people walking down the street or driving their cars or sitting on park benches while gorging on cucumbers and zucchini and what’s left of those tragically disappearing peaches. What is everyone waiting for? Someday, we’ll be eating nothing but food cubes, and we need to think about that. (Just so you know: I’m going to try to get the food cubes from Star Trek in at least one issue a month.)

Food cubes, your time has almost come.

I’d understand this bizarre refusal of my fruit and vegetable deposits if it were the year 2080, when half of our friends (and our bosses, government officials, and the President of the United States) will probably be robots and AI chatbots that want us to engage in love affairs with them, who don’t eat corn or tomatoes or plums (which are the featured ingredients in the two salads I have for you today).

But it’s 2023, and at the moment people seem to be worried less about enjoying all of nature’s gifts and more about such trifles as “too many zucchini”—or whatever vegetable or fruit is overcrowding their local market or getting dropped off at their house right now. The typical response to overabundance is to freak out and go straight to making such culinary battleaxes as zucchini bread, which doesn’t even use that much zucchini and has no discernible zucchini characteristics whatsoever.

Turn your Parm into hidden nuggets of flavor for the corn salad.

But as I have said here before, many times, when it comes to “using up” extra produce in summer, the key can often be just “eating” it. You know, as a last resort. This is part of the reason I love salad: It tends to be a celebration of produce rather than a disguise.

I’m not a saint, though. When I realized I had a hell of a lot of plums and tomatoes in my house this week, my solution was to create a complicated (and quite awful) salad which I began to imagine would eventually—if I ever got finished throwing more and more ingredients at it—win some kind of international salad award. I was out of control.

You have got to get off this crazy ride, I finally said to myself, as I realized I was reaching for the nutmeg.

Miss Kitty, a cowboy.

I placed the overwrought salad in the fridge, went for a long walk, and came back to my kitchen with a clear mind, reminding myself that everyone loves tomatoes and plums; I didn’t need to put them in an overblown costume meant to attract cowboys, like Miss Kitty, on Gunsmoke.