| 7 may 2001 a brand-spanking-new review! the whole city, you say? yes! smithsonian missiles | summertime, and the eating is chilll-leeee Let's face it: sometimes, I eat like a twelve-year-old. Macaroni and cheese? The squishy food group. Pringles? The crunchy one. Yoo-Hoo? The vitamin-fortified liquid one. Then warm weather arrives, and I begin to nibble from the Summer with Kim group. And to stay on the safe side, I try not to forget my vitamin supplements. I don't know about you, but when it's hot, I don't want to eat much of anything that's not cold, sweet, and delicious. When I lived in Chicago, I found it kind of ironic that it was so difficult to get good, cheap produce in season. After all, I did live smack in the middle of farm country, right? Nonetheless, I was hard-pressed to find fat Georgia peaches in July and August. For the unitiated, peaches are only good for about six weeks out of the year. You never buy a peach that you can't smell from at least one foot away. And you don't buy hard ones, either. You'll be yanking the pulp off the pit for days, puckering all the while. Big-city peach shopping was a bust. Yick. That's one of the best parts of being back in Carolina--summer peaches. Portable snacks of the fresh-grown kind. No fuss, minimal muss. In the summertime, I don't guess I eat a big variety of foods. This would explain why I have no problem with the fact that the people at Baskin Robbins...and the yogurt shoppe...and the freezer-stocking guy at the supermarket...uh, they sort of recognize me. In fact, just yesterday morning the coffeehouse guy was all psychic as I walked through the door. "Hey, Red!" he smiles. "Another espresso milkshake?" Um, yeah! With that chocolate stuff in it! It was a good week for ice cream. Baskin Robbins was giving away free cones on Tuesday. Friend X and I were SO there...sandwiched in line between one vanful of preschoolers and some ten-year-olds. And the new girl there has my raspberry sherbert shake down pat--two scoops of malt, and kind of lumpy. Glomph! Of course, you can't eat ice cream every day (every other day, maybe). Sometimes, you have to eat popsicles. Or, if you're me, you skedaddle to Wal-Mart and get the case of Fla-Vor-Ite icee pops. You know what I'm talking about--the skinny plastic-wrapped ones that you squish upwards and slurp! At about 4 bucks for 100 pops, they last at least a month around here. Except maybe the orange ones--I don't like those so much. Hands down, though, my favorite thing about summer is definitely a holdover from summers past: Kool-Aid! Who needs lipstick when you've got strawberry Kool-Aid? From May through August, it's in my fridge, my lunchbag, and my belly. Nothing but food coloring and sugar. At less than twenty cents a packet, you can add water or...heh...not water. Really, I add water. Always. |
