Please tell me that the summer is not getting away. Between all the rain and a few fallen brown leaves I’ve seen the past few days, I’m afraid that fall is closer than I would like. The only thing to do is enjoy the warmth and the summer produce that’s still around, and that means big, juicy, colorful salads!

You have to try this salad while tomatoes are still red and corn is still yellow. There’s nothing like fresh corn in a salad, and the dressing on the top is so good you could drink it.

Summer Fiesta Salad

For the salad (choose measurements according to your taste):

-baby spinach

-yellow corn kernels, gently steamed

-fresh avocado slices

-grape tomatoes

-chopped dry roasted almonds

-feta cheese

Avocado Lime Dressing:

-the juice of 1 fresh lime (about 2 T.)

-2 t. olive oil

-1 T. avocado flesh

-2 t. honey

-dash of salt and pepper

-Puree the ingredients in a blender or food processor until the avocado is smooth. Drizzle over salad and enjoy. Makes dressing for 2 salads.

Avocado makes a wonderful replacement for mayonnaise and other similar ingredients in salad dressing. It makes it so smooth and creamy without adding any heaviness at all.

Speaking of my love for in-season produce, Jason and I are contemplating something very exciting that will allow us to support local farming and eat with the seasons. We’re looking into buying a CSA share.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of CSA, it’s essentially where members of a local community pay to receive a share of a farmer’s produce. When you buy a share, you get produce fresh and directly from the farm, whatever is in season at that time. Awesome, right? We found a CSA organization that actually is a group of several farms and the value for the money is great. We would spend less on the share than I would normally spend buying mediocre produce in our grocery store that’s shipped from thousands of miles away. Stay tuned, I’ll keep you updated as we make the decision!

Now please make this sald before the tomatoes in your store start to look more like wax balls than fruit. I hate the cold.

Thanks for reading!

-Lauren