As long as I'm eating watermelon, it's still summer

Events are conspiring to make it feel like the end of summer, with the kids back in school and everyone getting all serious again, but here in Colorado we've just started to get summer produce. We picked our first tomatoes from the Generous Servings hell strip a few weeks ago, so we're featuring these "ultra-local" tomatoes in our salads and several dishes in Après.

Gardener friends of ours have repeatedly snuck in to "give" us squash that we didn't ask for, so we decided to embrace this generosity and we're collecting squash for the next three weeks that we will cook and freeze for this winter's Cook for a Cause (so if you've got extra summer squash--zucchini, yellow squash, etc.--bring it by!).

I just developed a new dish for Après, called Watermelon Carpaccio with Basil Ice Cream. Want to see it?

I got the idea for this dish when I taught a Farmers' Market Cooking class a couple of weeks ago, and I bought a yellow watermelon for a salad. Several of the students had never seen a yellow watermelon before and had difficultly believing that it was real, which made me look at it with new eyes and realize that it is very striking. I don't know if it's annoying to call these watermelon slices "carpaccio"--it was a fad on the coasts about 10 years ago to call all kinds of thinly-sliced non-meat items "carpaccio", which by my calculations indicates that the trend should just be reaching Denver about now. The other components on this plate are the basil ice cream, black pepper, and balsamic vinegar reduction. It's all very light and cool. Basil ice cream, by the way, is very good. It's not too basil-y but not too sweet either.

I finally remembered that one of my friends asked to see a picture of our "idea board", where we hang pictures and recipes that we think might provide inspiration for our desserts. Here's what the board looks like:

Who put this chocolate in my croissant?

A guy came into the café on Sunday and bought a pain au chocolat and a cappuccino. He left, then came back in to tell us that our pains au chocolat aren't authentic because in France they would never put that much chocolate in a croissant. What I don't understand is, was that a complaint? Because it is a goal of my life to put as much chocolate into our pains au chocolat as physically possible, and I think we may hold the international record (see http://thecookingdoctor.blogspot.com/2007/12/good-weekuntil-flood.html for an early example). So maybe this guy was just confused by how good it tasted? Or maybe he was more deeply troubled, because he ordered his cappuccino extra-wet, and they would never make it that way in Italy, but we thought it would be rude to tell him that.

It's Culinary Camp time again, and dealing with some of our adult customers reminds me that one of the reasons I like working with kids is because they are so rarely supercilious. Or maybe they try to be but it's so ineffective that I don't notice. Instead, they are charmingly clueless. For example, two of the kids from my last camp decided to buy a drink from the café at the end of the camp, and they noticed the penny cup next to the cash register. They asked what it was for but the barista didn't do a good job of explaining it, so they concluded that it was related to the adjacent tip jar. They were very pleased with themselves when each of them took a penny from the cup and grandly put it in the tip jar.

Today while we were walking on our field trip, a couple of girls starting telling scary stories (this was not one of the subversive conversation topics I planted, although I enjoy doing that sometimes, like when we discuss yeast and I ask them what foods other than bread are made with yeast, and eventually someone says wine, at which the other kids get a shocked expression like, "Are we even allowed to talk about that before we're 21?" Why yes, you are. This is my own personal form of First Amendment activism). Here I transcribe in its entirety one of their scary stories:

Girl #1: Oh, I know one. There was this doll and this girl bought it. The doll had three black fingers. The girl didn't notice that before she bought it. She brought it home and the next day the doll killed her mom. Then it had two black fingers. The next day it killed her dad, and it had one black finger. Then it killed her brother, and it had 10 black fingers.

Girl #2: Wait, it had three black fingers when she bought it?

Girl #1: Yeah, so it had killed seven people before that.

Girl #2: Oh, that's creepy.

Is that creepy?

Today's field trip was to an Asian grocery store, where we had a competition to see who could find the weirdest food product (I usually win because I know where they keep the frogs). Then we went next door to the boba (bubble tea) shop and I bought durian boba for the kids (durian is a really stinky fruit that doesn't taste like much, but smells like a dead rat). I've tried it before, and between you and me, it's gross (we got some other flavors, too). The woman who works in the boba shop always tries to sell me more stuff, using her special sales method of yelling at me, at full volume, while I'm trying to order: "You mix peach and passionfruit! Is very good! You try sticky rice! You have too many people, need more tea! Mix strawberry and banana! Mango! Mix durian and jackfruit! Get sandwich!" I tell you, it's always an adventure. Tomorrow we're off to a butcher shop, which is a new field trip destination that I'm very excited about, so stay tuned.