Appetizer Salad —rsquo; The Cool-Hours Remedy for a Hot Vermont Week

August arrived hot. The week ran in the high eighties most days and into the low nineties Friday, which is genuinely hot for Vermont and which the house and I are not particularly built for. The morning cooking discipline became more important — I had the bread baked and the supper-prep done by ten most days — and the afternoons were spent on the porch with a book and a glass of iced tea and the dog at my feet, the porch being shaded enough that the temperature there was bearable even when the kitchen had become uninhabitable. The discipline of summer in a wood-frame farmhouse without air conditioning is the discipline of using the cool hours and surrendering the hot ones, and I have learned over many years that the surrender is not a defeat. It is a different kind of work.

Made a cold cucumber soup Wednesday — cucumbers from the row, peeled and seeded, blended with yogurt and a clove of garlic and a handful of fresh dill from the herb bed, salt and pepper, chilled for two hours in the refrigerator before serving. The soup is the kind of dish that is the antidote to the hot kitchen — no heat involved in its preparation, served cold, refreshing in the particular way that a cucumber-and-yogurt combination is refreshing in a hot week. I ate it on the porch with a piece of bread and butter and was, for the duration of the soup, completely reconciled to the heat.

The blog post on the soup was practical — the recipe, the technique, the rationale for cold soups in the hot weeks of summer — and the comments included a number of recipe variations from readers who keep cold soups in their summer rotation. A man in California sent me a recipe for a chilled avocado soup that I have written down and intend to try. A woman in Georgia sent me a recipe for a Thai-influenced cucumber soup with coconut milk and lime that I am less likely to try, my Thai-cuisine instincts being underdeveloped, but I appreciated the contribution. The blog continues to be a kind of one-room schoolhouse where the students and the teacher trade roles by paragraph.

Anna texted Friday. She had been reading some Frost in the evenings and had come across "After Apple-Picking" for the first time in years and had been struck by it in the way I had been struck by it when I first read it as a young man — the late-summer fatigue of the poem, the dream-imagery, the apples-of-too-much-having-picked. She wanted to know if I had a particular reading of it that I had taught my students. I told her: the poem is about the satisfaction and the exhaustion of having done the work, and about how the exhaustion contains a kind of dread of the larger sleep that is coming, and about how a man who has worked hard for a long time understands all three of these things at once, and about how Frost gets all three of them into a poem of forty-two lines without straining for any of them, which is the trick. She wrote back: thank you. She said: I think I understand it now in a way I didn't when I read it in college. I told her: that happens with Frost. Read him again every five years. He keeps deepening. She said she would. I have no doubt she will.

The cucumber soup on Wednesday reminded me that the best summer cooking is the kind that asks nothing of the stove — and this appetizer salad follows the same honest logic. I put it together in the cool of the morning, the way I baked the bread, and had it waiting in the refrigerator by the time the kitchen grew too warm for serious work; it is exactly the sort of dish Anna would have approved of, practical and unstraining, the kind of thing Frost might have eaten on a porch after a long day in the apple orchard and considered sufficient.

Appetizer Salad

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 15 minutes (plus 1 hour chilling) | Servings: 6

Ingredients

• 1 large cucumber, peeled, seeded, and thinly sliced
• 2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup pitted Kalamata olives, halved
• 1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese
• 2 tablespoons fresh flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

1. Make the dressing. In a small bowl, whisk together the olive oil, red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, oregano, salt, and pepper until emulsified. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed.
2. Combine the vegetables. In a large mixing bowl, combine the sliced cucumber, cherry tomatoes, red onion, and olives. Toss gently to distribute evenly.
3. Dress the salad. Pour the dressing over the vegetables and toss to coat. Add the crumbled feta and chopped parsley and fold in gently so the feta does not break down completely.
4. Chill before serving. Transfer to a serving bowl or platter, cover, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour to allow the flavors to come together. Serve cold, straight from the refrigerator.
5. Serve. Bring to the table — or better, to the porch — with good crusty bread and butter alongside.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 145 | Protein: 4g | Fat: 11g | Carbs: 8g | Fiber: 2g | Sodium: 390mg