The Thursday Three

It's baaaaaaaackkkkk....


As I opened my refrigerator earlier this week, I was struck by what I call "Summer Fridge". The contents just look different than, say Thanksgiving Fridge or Dead of Winter Fridge. And this led to
the question of


Summer Fridge Staples


What's in your fridge when the weather heats up and all the fabulous stuff starts getting ripe?



Here are my big three.



#1. Lemonade and Iced Tea. One for the kids and one for me. We also do limeade and pink lemonade and even strawberries mashed up in a pitcher of lemonade. (See #3). I'm a big iced tea drinker and usually have a pitcher of it at the ready. My southern family was continually disgraced by my loathing of sweet tea, but I do love to toss a slug of lemonade on top of a nice cool glass of tea. I'd like to say that I make sun tea, but I don't. I do it the down and dirty way in the coffee brewer. Make it at night, let it cool, and voila! This is especially important now as I'm trying (for the three millionth time) to give up diet sodas. This is gonna be fun. Snarl.





#2. Salad. Two weeks ago it was a big bowl of tabbouli with garbanzo beans and sun-dried tomatoes instead of fresh, thanks to the whole tomato/salmonella thing. Last week it was a corn and black bean salad with a cilantro and cumin vinaigrette. At the moment it's an asian coleslaw with ramen noodles and sunflower seeds. I'm blessed with kids who are salad maniacs, so I try to always have something available that gets better if it sits a few days. I'm still looking for that one magic salad (other than Caesar which doesn't keep) that all three of them adore, but I have a whole repertoire of salads that two out of the three happily eat. I figure if I keep rotating them it all works out.








#3. Berries. Mostly strawberries, but blueberries as well. At the beginning of the week my bottom shelf was completely loaded with strawberries, but the supply is dwindling low by now. My kids are all junkies. A few years ago (the last time there was a crop in this area), we went blueberry picking and came home with about fifty pounds of them for the freezer. For months, every time I turned around I had a kid with blue teeth. We have a friend with a crazy productive raspberry patch. They can't give them away fast enough once they start. One of my projects this week is to try to get together all the orphan blender pieces I have laying around and put together one whole working blender. It's smoothie time at Casa RC.


Better than a diet soda any day. Right??