We live in the country and share food. Food I have received in the past includes, but is not limited to ducks and squirrel (“they’re clean, Ma’am, but watch out for the buckshot, I may not have gotten it all”), and has extended more recently to honey from bee-loud glades. Now somebody with cows has brought sirloin steaks.
I rubbed them in Creole seasoning and left them for two days. Then I coated them with olive oil and basalmic vinegar, and left them another day. Then I grilled them rare, and ground sea salt and black and green pepper onto them, and put a pungent bit of parsley from my parsley fields next to them, and mais yeah cher, talk about good.
The salad was made of lettuce from the new co-op. The dressing was lime juice made thick with very finely chopped garlic and hot peppers, and it was very rich. The olive oil from the steak had dripped down into the grill pan and we fried day-old sourdough bread in it, and we ate a honeydew melon.
We have lemon grass for tea, too, and we have made enormous pitchers of this, naturally sweet and so cold to drink, it is delicious. We are looking at some old material where people, more old fashioned than even ourselves, talk about living in the country and in town. Notice Mississippi John Hurt’s speaking voice.
And it’s late summer and very Southern and we will not be here too much longer now, but the oranges are growing in the yard and we are enjoying everything while we can.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Great stuff. We give and get a lot of local food. Last week a friend came by with enough ahi (yellow fin tuna) for two meals. I cooked it right away, because it starts to spoil immediately. We had it with greens as a salad and the next day in a stir fry.
It looks as if we will have a good citrus year. But the fruit flies are such a problem.
Ahi! Ah, how wonderful. I am hoping to catch shrimp in the spring. The best and most folkloric, though, is when they sell it door to door. “I jus’ come up from Intracoastal City, Ma’am.”
When I lived in Pacifica, fishmongers still came by from time to time. One of them told my mother she was an “old soul.”
Oh, Pacifica! I could use some fog and a sea breeze about now … although *in fact* for some reason the fog always lifts when I get to Pacifica …