Baby, It's Summer

This weekend we have Canal Fest, The Italian Festival, the Polish Festival, and Burgerfest in Hamburg, New York, all complete with carnival rides, games of chance and capital F Food. Come to Buffalo, and I guarantee you put on fifteen pounds...sure we have a few pricey restaurants, but the mainstay around here is home cooking. Best pizza in the world, char broiled hots, fish fries, beef on weck, and wings (they are so easy, I have no idea how people mess them up but they do). We lack only in seafood and I would like a good, small Greek taverna to find a home here. We do have good Greek restaurants, but if you want exceptional Greek you drive up to Toronto where geometric honey-soused pastries are born in tiny flowers and gathered by bee maidens. As I was saying, you will add more weight during summer than winter in these climes, winter burns the pounds trying to stay warm and finding the car. Not only American cuisine will call you, but this region is near enough to Canada (I can see you, Canada, if I stand on my bathtub and look out the window) so you can learn to put gravy on french fries and to prefer tea with your tourtiere. Having lived here and there, I still say this city has it hands down on any part of the country east of the Mississippi. I know, those may be considered fightin' words; just tell me your side of the menu, I am always ready for debate. But I lived in Florida where the citrus will knock you in the head as you walk down the sidewalk, big, ugly misshapen lemons that make the loveliest lemon meringue pies of which I am Queen 47. We were near penniless, but I found inexpensive lemons and eggs at Webb's. We had pie all the time. You could purchase what was called bait shrimp for cents from the Gulf, but is renamed as "$13.99 a pound" up north. Coconuts, oranges, bananas, and cheap fish held us together. I drank Donald Duck orange juice by the quart, which at the time was thirty three cents a frozen concentrate can. Directly from Florida we moved to opportunity in Chicago to work a Cafe. I made the soup of the day in immense restaurant-sized pots in an illegal kitchen in the basement. I learned to crack eggs single handed by fours for the nine-dozen salad dressing recipe, and was also in charge of the pastry case. The company ordered the pastry from Lutz's, a renowned German confectionery just to the north of Chicago. My heavens, the Bienerstich, the Schwartzwelder kirschtoffen, the Japonaise, the Punschtorte. Oh la. We were able to live in Greek Town, which also had Jewish delis where I had the best chicken livers lightly dusted with flour and sauteed in butter on toast. I have forgotten the name of the Greek restaurant, but the souvlaki and gyro sandwiches have never met their match, liberally drizzled in tzatziki and wrapped in waxed paper. The best food item in Chicago are easily the sausages sent in from Wisconsin, bratwursts, knackwursts, and frankfurters on toasted rolls, sometimes wrapped in bacon, bursting juices through their skins. Now I am going to get to the kitchen to put up the eight quarts of sour cherries purchased this morning. They are beautiful, and reflect waves of light from the individual prisms in their exteriors into a translucence of summer coral. See you later, perhaps, full of cherry nectars.