Saturday: Summertime Lunch Break

Our beach weather has been so wonderful the last few weeks that we’ve been lulled into thinking summertime thoughts without regard to the realities of the calendar. Everyone who has lived at the beach for any length of time knows that June is iffy, season-wise.

If it’s hot inland, we get that ‘moist marine air’ hanging overhead like a big, gray, drippy blanket. It’s the very weather that drew the first tourists here in the 1870s and 1880s – those intrepid survivors of the Oregon Trail who had settled the inland valleys of Oregon. Once established, those who could ‘removed to the beach’ for summer relief from the heat.  It is still happening.

Sunday: Misty Moisty All Day Long

But this year, June has been hot (for us) and dry with continuous blue skies and lazy summer days. We’ve been doing ‘outside things’ in our shirtsleeves and even taking breaks for cooling drinks of lemonade or good old Oysterville water. It has been so summery that I’ve been hankering for hot weather foods – especially for Nyel’s pasta salad. He makes great ones.

Anyway: Pasta Salad

Part of his ‘secret’ he says is that the salad needs to be made at least twenty-four hours ahead so the flavors will blend. (Ditto potato salads, also a summer favorite around here.) Saturday morning was the making day; Sunday evening Maggie was coming for dinner and to see episode two of “Poldark.” Saturday, of course was a hot summer day. Anticipation was high. And then came yesterday – gray, drippy, cold. June!

The pasta salad still tasted delicious. I had three helpings! (But I didn’t have any dessert. Well, just a cookie or two. No ice cream.) But I still felt in my heart that the meal was all wrong. Or, actually, it was the weather that was all wrong. Pasta salad is a summertime treat and here we were, still in June. Oh well.