Corn feast sweetens a summer
If parents linger on the internet long enough, they can’t avoid the pressuring trope that — with all of their energy, will and time — they should be “making memories.”
In my more sentimental moments I’m convinced, but it mostly just feels like a responsibility. One more thing, and one more thing to give me failure-anxiety, at that.
Still, I try. I book the family photos, I pack-mule all of the gear down to the shore, I usually say yes to glitter. Am I doing this right? I’m joking, here, mostly, and I know that my kids’ lives are filled with joy. But what will they remember?
Is it my job, truly, to choreograph their every waking moment as an insurancepolicy, a guarantee of wistful memories decades from now? Or is it good enough to just give them the tools and leave them to their own devices?
I’m not sure what the answer is. But as a family, we look for it every summer at local farms.
I loved you- pick and
pick-your-own situations as a kid. While I couldn’t have put it to words back then, I recognized that food was my love language. My memories of picking peaches and apples, of weighing buckets of cherries and berries, of tasting the difference between produce from the farm and from the grocery store are so precious to me, and they’ve shaped my life.
I can’t be sure of the impression it will leave on them, but I will never forget these sweaty days of watching my kids sneak a few (dozen) strawberries into their mouths in a sunny field, their dad lifting them to reach that perfect apple and them deliberating so carefully over the patch of pumpkins before they make their choice.
My favorite way to mark the summers of their lives is not with a growth chart, but with the corn that we get from farm markets; teaching them to husk it; helping them with their cob-gnawing form; and being forced to hand over freshly stripped ears, raw, for them to enjoy on the deck.
I might be making their memories, and I might not. But our treks out of the city are sparking a lifelong love affair with good food, and surely this is good for something.
We’re lucky in southwestern Pennsylvania to have a wealth of farms that offer PYO from spring through fall, and corn is our handsdown favorite seasonal offering. (As East Enders, our favorite place is Triple B Farms in Forward.)
Corn comes into season in June and can be harvested through late August (early September, if we’re lucky). We try to eat it as much as we can, while we can, as those 10 long weeks can seem so short once the corn is gone. And I’m not much of a “preserver” — I don’t can and rarely freeze — so we do our best to eat ourselves tired of it. We have yet to succeed.
Our favorite way to indulge is to get a few dozen ears and have a cob feast, with little else on the menu but salt and good butter. For my daughter’s summer birthday, she usually requests a corn-on-the-cob bar, and we have to place an order for a whole gross of ears.
We arrange a table with all sorts of condiments — flavored butters, salts and sugars, shakers of spices, bowls of minced herbs and crumbly crunchy things. The kids seem to best enjoy a simple honey butter; the grown-up faves are gochujang and crumbled Doritos. And here is one of the best #protips I’ve ever received: cooler corn.
How else to prep all of that party corn without spending all day at the stove or grill? You just shuck and rinse all the ears and place them in a large insulated cooler. Add a gallon or two of boiling water and close the lid for an hour. When you open it, even the corn that’s not submerged is perfectly cooked and yet nothing is too hot for little fingers. It’s pure genius, and fantastic for crowds.
When we have a little more time to prepare dinner, or want to spare ourselves an evening of dirty cheeks and toothpicks, I like to make one of these two recipes. The first is simple, and while the second one takes a little more time, they’re both great with either fresh or leftover grilled corn.
When selecting your ears, look for ones that have tight green husks — no dry leaves — and that feel heavy in your hand. When you give them a little squeeze, a good ear will feel firm, not spongy. Once you’ve selected the best, use them right away. Corn converts up to 50% of its sugar to starch within 24 hours of being picked when held at room temperature — and up to 90% when sitting in the hot sun of a farmers market.
For the sweetest possible summer corn, eat it fresh and buy it directly from a local farm. If you’re lucky, you might even make a memory along the way.