Mom’s Summer Salad

The combination of emotion, flavor, feelings and taste add up to something hard to describe, but you know you feel deeply fed.

Why do we like the food we like?

I love thinking about the concept of ‘kitchen culture’ and what goes into how we put together the food and herbs we eat. Our kitchen culinary culture is more than the recipes we make, it is steeped in a complex mixture of emotions, family, traditions, where we live and what we have access to.

I always ask my students to journal about the food and herb traditions they grew up with. Often, forgotten herbal knowledge shows up in these remembering exercises.

Over the years, I have ben amazed at how much emotion comes up around these food memories.

What we create from the Earth’s harvest (which is what every single meal is about), helps shape who we are and what we love.

What food do you love because it is steeped with feelings that you can feel in your entire being?

Here is one of my stories.

Growing up, near Yolo County, California, the largest exporter of tomatoes in the United States, we rarely ate tomatoes from the store.

Yolo is the Native American word for ‘Where the tule grows’. Thousands of acres of native tule habitat was mowed under for the tomato farms so now we eat tomatoes.

Anyway… When I was little, my mom worked in the tomato fields during the harvest. One of my earliest plant memories is playing in the tomato fields with my little brother, with the plants towering over us. We ate SO many tomatoes.

To this day, when I smell a tomato plant I am instantly transported to the memory of playing in those fields while my mom picked tomatoes.

Once the tomatoes were ripe, my mom made this salad almost every day. Fresh tomatoes, cucumber and red onion were a staple on our table all summer long.

I don’t really like tomatoes all that much, but I enjoy this dish.

This is my mom’s recipe. I added the basil and calendula.

It’s nothing earth shattering, it is a very simple recipe using ingredients that were made for each other. It is just the right combination of locale and momma love and steeped in a story that brings everything together and feeds my soul.

There is something that happens with the feelings around your family table, the love of mother, the smell in the air at that time of year when you eat the same food during the same season year after year.

The combination of emotion, flavor and feelings add up to something hard to describe, but you know you feel deeply fed.

What we create from the Earth’s harvest (which is what every single meal is), helps shape who we are and what we love.

What seasonal food has a memory that transports you to another time?

What are the food and feelings that shape your kitchen culture?

What influences your culinary culture today? I would love to hear.

Print Recipe

4.50 from 2 votes

Mom’s Summer Salad

Author: Kami McBride

Ingredients

• 1 thinly sliced cucumber
• 2 sliced tomatoes
• 1/2 thinly sliced red onion
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/2 cup chopped basil
• 3 tbsp minced parsley
• 1 tbsp fresh thyme or 1 tsp dried thyme
• salt and pepper to taste
• handful fresh calendula petals

Instructions

• Arrange the sliced vegetables
  on a plate and drizzle the olive oil and red wine vinegar over them. Sprinkle
  with the fresh herbs and salt and pepper and garnish with the fresh calendula petals.