Make a salad with summer’s veggie bounty
At the end of the summer, we all are awash in corn, zucchini and tomatoes. This is, by and large, a good thing. But it begs for a bit of creativity in the kitchen so the endof-summer vegetables don’t mount up and threaten to overtake us.
If you are growing any of these items in a garden, you really need an arsenal of recipes to keep the influx at bay. I have a neighbor who once told me that when he was growing up, August was the only time the people in his town locked their cars. They did it because otherwise they might come back to find someone had left a bag of zucchini on the seat.
Lucky for me, this neighbor has a serious green thumb, and I never lock my car.
Even if you don’t have a garden, these items are plentiful at the farmers markets and supermarkets, and as summer starts to ebb we all want as much of this produce as we can get. Soon we’ll be reminiscing about ripe, red tomatoes; plump, sweet corn; and firm zucchini with their emerald skins. But for now, they are ours for the eating.
This Cobb salad has chickpeas and eggs as the main proteins, and the traditional bacon as well, which could be left out if it’s not your thing. You could of course add a row of cooked cubed or shredded chicken or cooked shrimp, or substitute it for the chickpeas. Most of us think of zucchini as a vegetable to be cooked, but if you get small, very firm zucchini, they are lovely shredded, diced or peeled into ribbons and eaten raw.