The Seasons ft. Roasted Corn Salad

I grew up in the suburbs in the Midwest where foods were not seasonal, or at least no one in my orbit was talking about them that way. We had pints of berries in our fridge year-round. Green beans came in canned form, so they were just as waxy and dull to my young tongue in the winter as in the summer. My parents would plant a small garden in the backyard, but the specific recipes for our haul are what I remember more than the ingredients themselves. The tomatoes became fresh salsa that garnished our taco nights, and loaves of zucchini bread churned out of the oven and into the freezer and enjoyed year-round. I can remember strawberry shortcakes feeling like a summer treat, but I thought that was because the packaged little pound cakes only showed up in the produce section once the days warmed and lengthened. I didn’t connect their appearance to the strawberries' ripeness. 

At age 21, I began my career as a chef in the kitchen at Jeni’s Ice Creams, and all she talked about was seasonality. Our ice cream flavors were constantly changing from sweet potato with marshmallows to strawberry buttermilk to peach cobbler to keep up with the produce available from our farm partners. We even got our dairy directly from a farm, made with especially high-fat content just for our ice creams. Scrubbing dirt off of sweet potatoes plucked straight from the ground and pulverizing strawberries into juicy, bubblegum pink puree led to a sensational understanding of the benefits of seasonality. Spoonfuls of sweet potato puree tasted like candy, the caramel flavor something I’d previously only achieved by adding a generous spoonful of brown sugar to the orange pulp. The bold hue of the strawberry puree indicated no flavorless white cores in sight and the texture was smooth as butter. Produce that was fresh and in-season exceeded my expectations.

Despite this new appreciation, I just couldn’t keep the produce schedule straight in mind. When I moved to New York, I told myself I’d be one of those kinds of people who shopped at the Union Square Greenmarket, and that would help me understand growing seasons. I ended up going once and walked up and down the rows of vendors with admiration. Rainbow-colored carrots and overflowing crates of lettuces and greens I had never even heard of. I loved the aromas and the hum of conversation. I spent a whole morning there, and I left with 25 dollars worth of very dirty kale and sweet potatoes. I knew that I couldn’t afford to go back. 

For a long time, I felt guilty about shopping at a supermarket. I was a chef, after all, I should have been building relationships with those farmers at the Greenmarket and getting special access to microgreens. I felt less relevant because I never stalked the farmer’s markets for ramps. But I worked sixteen-hour days, mostly during the times when the markets would be open. I made minimum wage and then a little more than that, an income that was no match for the prices of local produce—which are understandably but no less restrictively high. I loved and appreciated the way a tomato in the middle of August loses its vaguely vegetal flavor profile and becomes complex, impossibly juicy, and sweet like the fruit it truly is. I also needed to find delicious ways to cook when I didn’t regularly have access to those tomatoes. 

Most of our grocery stores are not designed seasonally. Now in Chicago, my local Mariano’s offers me dragonfruit, pineapple, and radishes year-round. I could make you an apple pie that would knock your socks off tomorrow, and apple season isn’t for several months. The chef world sold me the idea that this is a bad thing, that every grocery store should look like a farmer’s market. My time at Jeni’s certainly built up this idea, and then there was the Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman of it all, telling me that I should be eating mostly fresh plants, making the majority of my local grocery store unsafe. 

It’s not lost on me that our attempts to have everything, everywhere, all of the time are contributing to the havoc being wrought on our planet. It’s also bringing fresh foods to many places that might not otherwise have them. I’m not here to speculate solutions because I’m not an expert on that, but I am here to share that I spent many years of my early career embarrassed by my lack of understanding and knowledge about seasonality, and feeling bad for not buying everything from the farmer’s market. Now, I see that sense of moral failure as just another leg of diet culture, a way to pit individuals against one another, a way to demonize certain foods or ways of shopping.

I am pro-seasonal food and recipes. I am also pro-frozen foods and apples in May and eating in ways that fill our bodies as much as our souls. I’m sharing a recipe today as a reminder—maybe mostly to myself—as farmer’s markets open and seasonal recipes flood my feed, that cooking and eating are so many things…restrictive should not be one of them. There are so many foods! We should eat and try them all (if you want!). If you have a farmer’s market or access to locally grown produce and the money to spend on it, I love that. But to this day, after nearly fifteen years in the food world and with the privilege of more money and time, I still have to double-check when to expect cherries or corn at the farmer’s market. And sometimes, I still have cravings that don’t follow the rules of seasonality.

This leads me to today’s recipe. No, it’s not peak corn season. I didn’t get my ears from the farmer’s market, and once I committed to making the recipe anyway, I hardly expected to find fresh corn at my local Mariano’s. But there they were, early but no less plump, as if to say, Make the corn salad. There are tomatoes in this recipe, too, which are undoubtedly not at peak season, so this whole thing is seasonal blaspheme, really. Jeni would be ashamed…or would she? I planned to buy frozen bags of corn, which is simply corn that was once fresh, put in a freezer. I wanted something bright but hearty, sweet and salty, something to accompany the recipe for carnitas that I make every few months (and you should, too, it’s an excellent recipe). Corn fits the bill.

So, I made a really delicious corn salad. You could wait a couple of months and buy nearly every single one of these ingredients from your local farmer’s market, and then you would have a seasonal corn salad. I can’t wait to do this myself. Thinking of how exceptional it will be with some heirloom tomatoes makes my mouth pucker. You could also make it next week. Maybe your local grocery store has fresh corn a little earlier than expected, too. 

In any case, let me know if you do make it, I’d love to hear what you think. Love and sometimes seasonal produce to you <3

ROASTED CORN SALAD

Serves 6-8 as a side dish

6 ears-worth of corn kernels or roughly 3 cups

1 pint cherry tomatoes

1 bunch of scallions or roughly ⅓ cup  

1.3 oz package of basil or roughly ⅓ cup 

½ cup corn nuts

4 oz crumbled feta cheese

DRESSING: 

3 tablespoons lime juice

1 tablespoon honey 

½ teaspoon red pepper flakes

⅓ cup extra virgin olive oil

Preheat your oven to broil. 

If you have whole ears of corn, shuck those while your oven warms up. You might have a trick to do this very quickly. If you don’t, I’m sure the internet does. I simply pull away the leaves and silks (you may not get them all, that’s okay), and then use my sharpest knife to release the kernels from the cob into a large bowl. 

Once you have a bowl full of loose corn (thawed, frozen corn works just fine here too), toss with 2 tablespoons olive oil, 1 teaspoon salt, and a few cracks of black pepper (maybe ¼ teaspoon). 

Spread the corn out evenly on a large sheet pan and broil. Your oven will likely be different from mine (different meaning better) so I would check it and toss it after 5 minutes, then every 3 minutes. You want a deeply golden char on most of the kernels, and some of them may even get burnt—that’s fine! This tastes good, I promise! Mine took roughly 12 minutes total, but your broiler might be more powerful. 

In the bowl that just held the raw corn, make the dressing. Whisk together lime juice, honey, red pepper flakes, and about ¼ teaspoon salt. Whisking constantly, add the olive oil until emulsified. Once your corn is fully charred, toss it in the bowl with this dressing while warm. Set aside and let it cool slightly while you chop everything else. 

Now, while your corn cools slightly, prep the rest of your salad ingredients as follows. Grab a separate small mixing bowl to hold everything:

• Slice the cherry tomatoes in half, maybe quarters if they’re particularly big guys. 

• Slice the scallions into thin slices (⅛” or ¼”). 

• I like to preserve some whole basil leaves, and if there are really big guys, half them. 

• Roughly chop the corn nuts.

By now, the corn will have cooled to just a hair above room temperature. Perfect! Add the small mixing bowl of stuff to the corn and toss gently. Add the crumbled feta and toss very gently.

This salad changes personality as it sits. I love it when freshly tossed—the corn nuts are so crunchy! I also love it out of the fridge because the flavors have mellowed and the corn nuts have more of an al dente bite, not a sharp one. It’ll last three days in the fridge, I’d say.