Cold Play
Written By Catherine Newman
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Slice, toss, dress, purée — dinner, with hardly any actual cooking.
Recipes:
- Caprese Salad
- Orange-Scented Cold Peanut Noodles
- Bread Salad
- Dinner Smoothies
- Perfect Salad
- Cheese Boards
My kids have such healthy appetites.
They just help themselves from our countertop cornucopia of fruits and veggies, buzzing happily around the summer's bounty. Wait — did I say the kids? I meant the fruit flies. The ones that do that thing to tomatoes that keeps them looking like tomatoes but when you go to pick them up they're just tomato-shaped skins filled with moldy juice. The kids, it turns out, have wilted onto the floor beneath the fan and are arguing sweatily for the nutritional merits of Otter Pops — or at least smoothies — for dinner. It's not good. Which is sad, because I had such high hopes at the farmers market, with my hair tied picturesquely back in a print kerchief, my sustainable jute basket smugly filled with crunchy cukes and organic fingerling potatoes, fragrant herbs and salad greens — because that's the kind of mom I am! Alas, I am also the kind of mom who chews the ice and mint sprig out of her mojito and calls it dinner. Who has the energy, after the harrowing heatstroke of shopping for it, to actually make any food. Even if the children's teeth are strangely loose and you catch yourself looking up "scurvy" on Wikipedia? Enter these cool, salady meals that even the weariest parent can prepare easily, and even the most swelteringly unhungry child will nibble gladly. Because life (and summer) is short. What did Groucho Marx once say? "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
