Summer food cravings

All the cooking mags are coming out with their summer covers and recipes for summer food - corn, tomatoes, peaches, melons. Here in Wisconsin, though, summer's bounty is behind schedule, since we had such a wet June. I'm eating organic watermelon for lunch, but it's from Texas. So far I've had basil and zucchini in my CSA veggie box, but no tomatoes or melons yet; there're tomatoes at the farmers' market, but mostly the hydroponic ones so far - I bet some of the hoop house growers will have cherry tomatoes soon.

All the delicious-reading recipes for tomatoes and other summer goodies have been making me feel wistful, but our local paper kind of irritated me this week - they must've scheduled their annual feature on sweet corn recipes for mid-July as usual, and they even interviewed some farmers for the article. But they didn't listen when all the farmers were saying, "eyup, we're behind this year - no corn till August", and they ran the article July 16th anyways.

I think I'll try to recreate my grandmother's tomato preserves sometime soon, though; they don't require perfect tomatoes. The recipe in Joy of Cooking, written Irma Rombauer, a German woman from St. Louis, is the match of (and probably actually is) my grandmother's, since she was a German woman from Cincinnati.