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I'm just finishing up my book and looking forward to a week or two of summer before having to check back into regular life and — boom — I check the editorial calendar and it's "Back to School (and Work) Week"? Bummer.

So I flat-out refuse. After a month of ridiculous heat waves and then a bunch of chilly rainy days, I'm still summer's biggest fan. So I'm sitting squarely on my summer tuffet, choosing not to jump on the bandwagon of folks (folks like the talented writers of The Kitchn) who are planning ahead.

My mom is spending part of our vacation with us. Aside from the company and the babysitting, she's spoiling us with her cooking. It's a pretty good deal.

Yesterday she made this after-lunch treat with some local full-fat yogurt, leftover macerated peaches, and a touch of cream and lemon juice. She garnished it with pink raspberries from my garden. After a little cat-nap in the freezer (half hour, tops), it was almost like having ice cream, but without any of the usual fuss, and no added sugar to boot. Seconds, please!

I'm about to kick off for a vacation and unplug my computer, which means when I'm not swimming or cooking, I will be reading books. I like a trashy beach novel as much as anyone, but I most often reach for books about food and cooking when I travel.

Packed in my bag right now are The Lost Art of Real Cooking by Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafzinger and Reading Between the Wines by Terry Theise.

To help you pack your bags, Faith and I (two of the seven grown women on the planet who have not read Eat, Pray, Love) put together a list of some great food books for vacation reading.

There's nothing terribly original about pouring beer over ice cream; if nothing else, root beer keeps us reminded of that tradition. I've been lazy with my beer and ice cream pairings — who isn't? — and so it wasn't until recently when a guest brought over a bottle of super-sweet Framboise Lambic, a raspberry beer of sorts, that I gave some serious thought to pouring boozy brews over ice cream.

So while the dinner guests were mixing their crimson red beer with Prosecco, I fell into a lambic float daydream.

After fourteen years in a Manhattan kitchen untouched by renovation, Sara Moulton recently took an axe to it all and started from scratch. It might shock you to learn she still cooks on an electric stove (no gas in the building) and didn't enlarge the footprint one inch. Better yet, she cooks five nights a week for her family of four and develops all of her recipes there.

I spent a recent afternoon in her apartment chatting about what makes an ideal kitchen and helping her make Chicken Saltimbocca from her new book, Sara Moulton's Everyday Family Dinners.

I started this website to help people get cooking and to put them closer in touch with their food. While do we want to make your cooking easier, most of us here at The Kitchn get excited if a reader says they hung out in the kitchen and cooked all day.

But this week I had to draw the line. For four straight days, the temperature climbed to 100 degrees in New York City and throughout much of the country. Like most people, I didn't feel like cooking.

So I did something you might think was nuts: I got out the slow cooker and cooked an eight-pound pork butt.

Salads at 4th of July cookouts and summer picnics tend to fall into a few worn-out categories. Mayo-laden potato salad. Greasy pasta salad. Maybe a tomato salad if you're lucky. Salads and side dishes get short shrift next to the blazing grill and charcoal taste of those cheeseburgers, or the splendor of the blueberry flag cake. Well, that shouldn't be so. Here are 15 summer salads that offer delicious summer taste, and something fresh, something new for your summer picnic table.

I was moaning to a friend the other day about the heat and she told me her latest afternoon addiction was a shake made from matcha, the Japanese powdered green tea. "Blend matcha powder with milk, sugar, and ice. Green frothy jolt at 2pm!"

Easy enough. I immediately put down my work and went to the blender.

I'm both laughing at myself and patting myself on the back for even trying to make vegan and gluten-free cupcakes this week. While we have ample vegan and gluten-free coverage on TheKitchn.com, let's just say it usually doesn't come from my corner of the test kitchen.

Two weekends ago, however, I became enamored of a cupcake brought to our summer-kick-off party by a local farmer. She showed up with a giant sheet pan full of these gooey black and white confections and didn't tell me until later that they were not only vegan, but gluten-free to boot.

More and more people are growing their food. For some it's a life in farming, and for some, it's tearing out a strip of lawn and putting in some corn, or placing a pot of basil in their kitchen window. I'm all for it if it means a deepening connection between people and the source of their food. See, somewhere along the line, the majority of our society lost that connection. We all need a little tickle to get back in the dirt.

One person I know who inspires folks to get dirty is Scott Chaskey, the man holding the beautiful salad in the above photo. He grows food like he grows his beard: with commitment and a touch of whimsy. Scott has farmed on Long Island for over twenty years and taught me a few things about growing food over the years.

This is the time of year when college lets out, and new graduates gear up for "real life."

Thirteen years ago, that was me: armed with a lot of student-loan debt and a curious spirit but very little sophistication in the kitchen, I packed my bags for a new life in New York City. I thought cheap Spanish Cava was "good champagne" and overcooked my pasta because I didn't know better. My first home was a tiny illegal sublet on 61st Street, whose one-drawer kitchen was seen by everyone passing on the Roosevelt Island tram. That one drawer was full of a lot of dull knives.

You probably know at least one graduate who will fend for his or herself in the kitchen for the first time this summer. (And just maybe that graduate is you!) No more campus cafeterias or midnight pizza runs; it's time to cook for real.

Here's a crash course in kitchen basics — from finding a good cheap knife, to cleaning the worst sorts of stains off your pots, to roasting a chicken.

At some point before I became a real adult, someone older and wiser told me I should always have a good knife in the car. Not for safety, but for picnics. So with summer knocking at our doors, it's time to make sure we're all prepared for eating out in the wild.

Last weekend, I gathered eight hungry picnickers together to test eight knives. We took our work seriously, slicing hard salami, a baguette, hard and soft cheeses, tomatoes (had to spring for some green-house grown in order to bring you this detailed report) and other assorted vegetables. We also opened a lot of wine.

I'm one of those people who fires up my grill in a snow storm; as long as I have a large glass of wine in one hand, I can grill with the other. I also drink rosé year-round and give people gifts when I feel like it, sometimes missing their birthdays. In other words, I follow my heart more than my calendar.

With Memorial Day weekend upon us and bags of charcoal appearing in great towering pyramids at the grocery store, maybe it's time we make it official. Let's launch the 2010 season with a hip-hip-hooray, a smash of the champagne bottle against our grills (new or old), and a nice roundup of some of our best grilling coverage, plus a few words from Adam Perry Lang, grill-boy extraordinaire.

My adventure with this big fish peaked Sunday morning as I tried shoving it — lovingly stuffed and carefully sewn up with pink thread — into my twenty-inch apartment-sized oven. There was swearing and a little dance of frustration. Maybe even a lump in the throat. Then I hacked it in half and moved on.