I’m back from Mexico and ready to enjoy the rest of the summer here in NYC. There’s still a lot on my summer bucket list that I want to tackle, and my August list reflects some of these plans.
Start composting
My husband and I have recently decided to start saving our compostable goods to take them to a once weekly drop off at our local farmer's market. I just ordered compostable bags to store the food scraps we'll collect. I plan to save them in the freezer to reduce the mess. I'm really happy to be taking this step to reducing our landfill contributions while we wait for city government coordinate composting to come to our neighborhood. (It's already been implemented in my parents' and his parents' neck of the woods.)
Catch up on reading
I don't go to the beach that often during the summer, but I do subscribe to the idea of beach reads. I love the colorful covers shown on all of those reading lists that magazines put together for the season. On the trip to Mexico one of my friends read Crazy Rich Asians, the novel by Kevin Kwan that is being made into a movie. I borrowed it for the plane ride home and am halfway through it now. It reminds me how much I like to be engrossed in a physical book. It also reminded me that I have plenty of unread New Yorkers sitting around in the apartment.
This month, I'm making an effort to catch up on my New Yorkers (I haven't been too behind so this is very doable) and to read more books.
Savor the summer produce
We love freezing containers of blueberries to pop when we've just come in from the heat, and we share these healthy treats with our dogs to cool them off as well. We recently made sweet corn ice cream and had elote corn at a family barbecue. Our local grocery store has been selling these deliciously ripe mini-watermelons directly out of a shopping cart placed in the aisle and we've kept one on hand near constantly; there's a half of one sitting in my fridge right now. Blueberries, watermelon, tomatoes, corn, and all the stone fruit. We have been enjoying an abundance of in-season produce lately and I'm going to make an effort to incorporate more of these items on our regular grocery list while they are still widely available.
Have cold brewed coffee and tea in the fridge on the regular
Ice coffee season only lasts but so long, and I want to be able to make it for myself. We have a really great ice coffee infuser that we got on Amazon that I've used to great results. In addition, I have loved cold, unsweetened chamomile tea since having it paired with a dish at Aska last year, and all you need to do to make it is pop a bag of chamomile tea into a quart container of filtered water overnight to make one big, satisfying batch of it to drink throughout the day.
Gather
August is both my husband's and my mom's birth month and this gives us easy excuses to plan family get togethers. I look forward to having a few family meals (I'm currently inspired to cook a Mexican feast) and to just hanging out with people I love in these dog days of summer.