by Anna Nelson – There’s a certain week in late July when you can feel it coming. The mornings are still cool off the water, but by afternoon the heat settles in and everything in the fields starts to move faster. Tomatoes go from green to blushing in a couple of days. Corn stalks shoot up another foot. This is the turn into August around here, and it’s easily the best stretch of the whole growing year.
If you’ve shopped with us for a while, you know we’re not a subscription box. You pick what you want each week, in the amounts you want, and it shows up at your door on Saturday. But August is the month when picking your own order actually feels like an event. The list of what’s available gets long. Farms that were sending us a trickle of greens back in April are now sending truckloads of everything, all at once, all ripe at the same time. It’s a lot, in the best way.
Tomatoes and Corn, the Reason August Exists
Ask most people what they miss about summer once it’s over and tomatoes usually come up first. Not the pale, mealy ones from the grocery store in February. The real thing. Heavy in your hand, warm from the sun, skin so thin it splits if you look at it wrong.
The simplest way to eat a great tomato is still the best one. Slice it thick, add flaky salt, a drizzle of olive oil, and call it lunch. If you want to do a little more, try this for dinner: toss halved cherry tomatoes in a hot pan with garlic and olive oil until they just start to collapse, then spoon them over pasta with torn basil and a handful of parmesan. Takes fifteen minutes. Tastes like August.
Corn is the other half of this equation. Sweet corn has a short window where it’s actually sweet, and this is it. The sugars in a corn kernel start converting to starch the moment it’s picked, which is why corn shipped across the country never tastes as good as corn picked yesterday. Local sweet corn, picked this week, still has that snap and that milky sweetness that make people eat it standing at the sink.
Grilling corn in the husk is hard to beat. Soak the ears in water for ten minutes, throw them on the grill husk and all, and let them steam and char for about fifteen minutes, turning now and then. Peel back the husk, slather with butter, and eat it right off the cob.
Pair either of these with something green and you’ve basically built a whole meal. Valley Flora’s greens and baby arugula are still coming in steady through August, and a simple bed of those greens under grilled corn and sliced tomatoes turns a couple of side items into dinner. Their carrots are worth grabbing too. Shredded raw into that same salad, they add a little sweetness and crunch that plays well against the acid of a ripe tomato.
Peaches, Melons, and the Sweet Stuff
August is also when the fruit side of things gets a little indulgent. This time of year, local farms grow peaches that are soft and fragrant, the kind that drip down your wrist if you eat them standing up. There’s really no need to dress those up. A ripe peach eaten over the sink is one of the best things you can do with your afternoon.
If you want to do something with them, try grilling peach halves cut side down for a few minutes until you get grill marks and the sugars start to caramelize. Serve them warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and you’ve got dessert without turning on the oven. Peaches also freeze well if you find yourself with more than you can eat in a few days. Slice them, toss with a little lemon juice so they don’t brown, and lay them flat on a tray before bagging them up. Come January, that’s a smoothie that tastes like summer.
Melons are coming in too, and this is one of those crops where the smell tells you everything. A ripe melon has a perfume to it, sweet and a little musky, that you can pick up before you even cut into it. If it smells like nothing, give it another day or two on the counter. Cubed melon tossed with a squeeze of lime and a pinch of chili powder is a good way to wake up a plain fruit salad. It’s also worth trying melon alongside something salty. A few slices next to prosciutto or a salty feta cheese is an old combination for a reason. The sweet and salty thing works, and it takes about five minutes to put together, which makes it a good option for a night when it’s too hot to cook much of anything.
Green Beans and Rounding Out the Order
Green beans don’t get the same excitement as tomatoes or peaches, but they’re one of the most useful things in a summer kitchen. They hold up well to almost any cooking method, which makes them a good bridge between the showier items in your order.
Blanch them quickly in salted boiling water, then shock them in ice water to stop the cooking. That’s the base for a quick salad with sliced almonds and a mustard vinaigrette, or you can toss them raw into a stir fry with garlic and a splash of soy sauce for something faster. Roasting works too. High heat, a little olive oil, salt, and pepper, until they blister and go slightly wrinkled. That’s a side dish that goes with almost anything you’re grilling that week, including a steak from Oat Hill Organic Beef if you’re stocking up on both produce and protein in the same order.
Building Your August Kitchen
Here’s the thing about a month like this. It’s not really about one big shopping trip. It’s about the rhythm of it, week after week, watching what’s coming in and letting your kitchen shift with it. One week you’re leaning hard into corn and tomatoes because that’s what’s peaking. A few weeks later the melons hit their stride and you’re building meals around those instead. That’s the whole idea behind picking your own order instead of getting a fixed box. You get to follow the season instead of just receiving it.
A good way to think about August is to grab at least one thing from each category every week. A tomato or two for slicing. Some corn for the grill. A couple of peaches for eating out of hand. A bag of green beans for whatever vegetable side you need. A melon that the smell test passes. That’s a week of eating built entirely around what’s actually good right now, grown by people a short drive from your table instead of shipped in from somewhere you’ll never see.
This is the season that makes all the waiting through winter worth it. Get your order in while it’s here. It won’t last forever, and it shouldn’t. That’s part of what makes it good.
Anna Nelson is a writer and editor based in Smith River, CA. She writes about local food and seasonal shifts and is a proud OtterBee’s shopper and contributing author to the OtterBee’s Market blog.
