It’s that point during the summer when you have two options: make this summer the best one of your life, or let it just quietly fade into fall. You decide what you want to do. (I vote for the first option.)

I can trust in red clay, and family, in cold beer and greasy food that I don’t have to cook.

Buy cheesecloth, dance new dances, cook new recipes, be blindly ambitious.

Alyssa, meet Beet. Nice to meet you, Beet.

In a rare moment of culinary serendipity, the stars aligned, butter and wine emulsified, and the result was everything I needed—a creamy sauce, satisfaction, and the promise that things would get better.

I could buy peas in a can, yes. I could buy them frozen in a creamy butter sauce that would melt after three minutes in the microwave. I can get them year round. But they wouldn’t be May peas from a farm in my region.

When one knows they will eat a food they hate, they take comfort in the small things they do like. I really like garlic.

In my selective culinary world, I had my own brand of logic, one where starches and carbs substituted for vegetables, because if Piccadilly said it, it must be so.

Dana gives you some ideas on what to cook with your Five Points Community Supported Agriculture basket. This week she focuses on the beets.

Farm wife and food writer Kathleen Fogarty reviews FOOD, INC., which debuted at The Naro with a panel of local farmers and foodies, including her husband, Farmer John Wilson.

This recipe, from the market’s Operations Manager Kathy Reese, was featured in the Five Points Community Farm Market’s first cookbook in 2002. Virginia pecans are available at the market’s new location at 2500 Church Street.