dissent descent

July 4, 2003

When I decided to make "essence of peach" soup for the 4th of July cook-off - note that it's now a cook-off instead of bake-off on account of the Jell-O controversy in previous years - I didn't realize the hardest ingredient to find would be red raspberries for the garnish. It's July, where the heck are the raspberries? Actually even the strawberries are late this year, so who knows, it may be August before there are raspberries. Spring came late. Oh wait, we didn't have spring. Winter lasted long and summer came late... or something.

Besides the fruitless search for raspberries (I ended up using frozen ones), the most time consuming task was sorting through piles and piles of cantaloupe to find 6 suitably ripe ones. I must have been sniffing and thumping melons for hours. I picked good ones though. And ripe peaches were no problem. Whatever held up the raspberries apparently did not affect peaches.

When I finally checked out of the market, the cashier asked me how I was planning to celebrate the 4th of July. I answered: "I'm going to go out and exercise my first amendment right to dissent." Later when I repeated this to la familia loca at the cook-off, my mother thought I was saying descent and Andrea wanted to know what dissent is. But we all understood the peach soup, and Andrea's truffles were excellent.

Today's Reading
The Natural History of Moray by Charles St. John, In the Land of the Blue Poppies by Frank Kingdon Ward

This Year's Reading
2003 Book List

Today's Starting Pitcher
Derek Lowe