The Boys of Summer

There is something about late summer that I really love. The nights begin to cool down. The locusts call to one another in the overgrown grasses. Airplanes fly overhead and the sound is somehow deeper and more distant. By now gardens are in the throws of giving us sweet corn, green beans, carrots, new potatoes with tissue thin skins, sweet watermelon, and juice laden orange cantaloupe. The very things I ate most as a child. But nothing more so, than sun-warmed tomatoes.

As I've cooked over...