Summer meals and memories

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
July 27, 2013

A caprese salad and grilled pizza. This has been our go-to dinner as of late.

I love that the main ingredients came right from our garden, and that we assembled and cooked it all together as a family. In fact, this meal was so delicious that I took a bite out of the pizza before a photo could be snapped. Oops.

This has been our best batch of tomatoes in six years. I know the timeframe, because the last time we had a healthy crop of tomatoes was when my father was dying. When we visited him in the hospital, we would bring him a big bag of tomatoes from our garden. He was weak, but he always smiled when he saw the sack filled with plump, red tomatoes. He would bite into them as if they were apples and tell us how delicious they were. I think he loved that we grew it for him as much as the taste itself.

After he passed away, our tomatoes died, too. Each year, they suffered from blight or some other affliction. Yes, I’m sure it was a coincidence. But there’s also a part of me that thinks that it wasn’t. Does that make any sense?

So, this summer, when our beautiful tomatoes came back after a long hiatus, we celebrated by including them in as many dishes as possible.

Tonight, I whipped up a balsamic vinegarette dressing to drizzle over the caprese salad. My son and I made pizza dough in our bread machine. And my husband topped the pizza with prosciutto, tomatoes, basil and a combination of goat and blue cheese. He cooked it on our pizza stone on the grill and it was perfection. It was the ideal meal for this gorgeous and crisp summer night.

This beautiful, delicious and easy-to-make dinner brought back memories that were bittersweet, but ones that I hope to always remember.

사랑합니다 아버지.

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