HELLO, SUMMERTIME!

how about a picnic?

Did you do something wonderful to welcome the new season? 

We thought it over, here at Thursday Child's, and came up with . . . FOOD!

Summertime Food is an animal of a different color/stripe/shape. We look for these feelings:

• is it cool?
• is it tasty?
• can it be made in practically no time a-tall?
• will the recipe make enough to keep us in this Whatever-It-Is for more than one sampling?
• is there enough to share (in case we can get out in our 100-degree Heat Index)?

We found some things we thought you might like--not all are food, though, so you'll have to adjust.

basket without a handle
simpler to make

 On the Food Scene:

• How about chicken salad? It's quick to fix, if you limit the ingredients to chicken, mayo, and pickle relish. Serve on crisp leaves of Romaine, toast, tortilla chips, or just eat it barefoot. (For those too young to know, that means, "as is," with nothing on it. Or under it. You can still wear shoes and eat chicken salad.)
• And if you don't have a roasted chicken on hand, use canned. Works great!
• Are you a fruit lover? Lots of go-o-o-od fruits in the markets these days. I love the look of a watermelon fruit basket, but don't want to put in the effort to make it. I'll eat what goes in it, though, in a heartbeat. Just grab some grapes (any color, so long as they're seedless), berries (we like blueberries and raspberries), whatever cherries are ripe now, whisk them through the running water, drain on some paper towels, and you have what folks put in a watermelon basket.
• We made some fudgsicles! Not hard at all, and some take only 4 ingredients. One recipe called for some minimal cooking. I won't print the recipe here because we started with a recipe from the Internet, had to make some adjustments to fit our current ingredients, and ended up with a product we both like but would adjust again when making it another time.
• If you want to find a recipe online, type "homemade fudgsicles" in your search engine. You'll probably get a ton of possible goodies.
• We've already decided to make the berry-yogurt frozen dessert--also made into bars or "sicles"--we'll report on those when we get to them. In the meantime, we have 10 more fudgsicles taking up space in the freezer.

Lifestyle Changes:

If your lawn is suffering like ours, and you get out the sprinkler to give it a soak, consider standing close by and letting the artificial rain soak yourself. Looks goofy but feels wonderfully cooling! (If you care about what the neighbors think, do this after the sun goes down.) And while you're cooling off, remember how much fun this was when you were a kid.

Our greatest summertime tip is very simple: Slow Down. Our Heat Index is holding around 100 degrees . . . anything more active than a tortoise is probably too fast. (I wouldn't be surprised to find tortoises just sink back into their shells and wait for the heat to pass.)

Remember the old song? "Summertime, and the livin' is easy." Let's go with that.

Blessings,

Thursday's Child