Sun Salad

This salad was part of the July Feast and is a wonderful example of spontaneity and creativity with food. The guests were due at 5:00 and we had a great menu already planned. The first guests were our farmer friends from Red Tail Farm. They came laden with stew chickens for the chest freezer, already thinking of winter, and Sungold tomatoes from their hoop houses.
By the time I came up from putting the stew chicks away, Craig had this gorgeous, glorious creation on the table. If I am honest I will confess that my astonishment had a tinge of irritation. Looking at this platter of golden and purple, my jaw gaped and I felt awe co-mingle with a feeling of "What? Are you kidding me? He just whips that up?" But my joy coursed over and around this irritated awe, and I was simply amazed, again, by beauty.
Absolute, true creativity: a response to the environment, what is around, in reach, catching your eye, making sense to your unspoken, intuitive senses. This level of spontaneous creativity is where, I believe, you can see the amount of sheer time and work, the discipline that comes before the beauty. The work that is in fact what enables the beauty to ever come to be.
Enabling beauty to come to be. That makes work and passion and discipline sound pretty important.
Sungold Salad. And the blueberries are the sun spots!
Frame a plate with zucchini blossoms torn into wide pieces along petals. Edible Marigold petals would also look nice and have a similarly sweet, fleshy presence.
Halve the sungolds and toss with:
olive oil, lemon, tiny bit of white wine (Chardonnay) vinegar, salt, pepper, all to taste. Not too much dressing, just a sheen.
Add blueberries and lightly toss.
Add very thinly sliced basil, just a bit, and toss.
Mound, in a sun like fashion, into the center of plate, within blossoms.