SpiceLines

Summer in a bowl: Zucchini and yellow squash simmered with fresh corn kernels and lots of chopped basil from the garden. Zingy lime basil adds a bright, unexpected accent to the dish.

This is my go-to-recipe when summer’s at its peak.

Right now there’s an abundance of zucchini and yellow crookneck squash. It’s that perfect moment when the squash haven’t yet turned into brickbats, and you can still find small, young ones with a sweet, delicate flavor.

Corn is also taking a star turn. A few days ago I bought a dozen ears of just-picked Silver Queen, so fresh that I could smell the vegetal green aroma of the shucks. The pale kernels were plump and full of milk.

And the garden is so full of basil that I can’t use it up fast enough.

Call it Summer in a Bowl.

What we're eating for dessert: A clafouti of fresh cherries macerated in bourbon and basil, and baked in a cake-like batter. The word clafoutis comes from the verb clafir which, in Occitan, a dialect spoken in the south of France, means "to fill."

It's pouring rain at the moment. The fireworks may sputter... but who cares when bourbon, cinnamon basil and sweet Bing cherries are dancing in your mouth?

Happy Fourth of July!

Chicken Bridge Bakery's rustic French Crown gets its wonderful sourdough tang from levain, a wild yeast starter. The rooster is stenciled onto the dough with flour before the bread is slipped into a wood-fired oven.

It was the rooster that grabbed me.

Stenciled, with flour, onto the crust of a hefty French Crown loaf that took center stage in the glass case at Chicken Bridge Bakery’s stand at the Wednesday market.

Baker Rob Segovia-Welsh calls it “a pretty simple bread.” Hmmm….I’ll let you decide. Here’s what he told me about it:

“This is a traditional French Crown made with organic bread flour (white wheat flour), whole wheat flour (grown and milled by Brinkley Farms near Butner, NC), levain (wild yeast sourdough culture), water and sea salt….The dough is wet and goes through a six hour fermentation, not including the 8 hr. levain fermentation which happens before mixing…..

“I do all my baking in the wood fired oven that my wife, Monica [pastry chef at The Lantern] and I built last year. I usually start the bakeoff around 8 am with these 1.2 kilo crowns because after firing the oven for 5 hours the hearth floor is so hot, I need a large mass of dough to suck up some of the initial heat…so the bread is functional as well as tasty! Before sliding the loaves into the oven, I sift flour over a stencil that I’ve made to create the image that will be burned into the crust.”

What I love, of course, is the end result: A speckled crust, ever so slightly blistered and burnt outside, chewy and coarsely textured inside, with a mellow, wheaty sourdough tang.

It’s a great bread for eating right off the loaf, toasted with butter and honey, or drizzled with olive oil and sea salt. Oh, you want to be fancy? OK, then add grated bittersweet chocolate, just as Ferran Adria does….

Entrance to the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple in Kerala where $22 billion in gold coins, statues and jewels have been discovered in subterranean vaults. Photo: P.K. Niyogi, Wikimedia Commons.

Do you think there are no more adventures to be had? Think again.

Here’s a story tailor-made for Indiana Jones: In “A $22 Billion Question for India: What to Do With a Treasure?” (The New York Times, July 9, 2011 ), Vikas Bajaj writes of the uproar over the stunning discovery of six vaults crammed with gold coins, statues and jewels beneath the 8th century Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple in Kerala’s capital city of Thiruvanathapuram.

The debate, it seems, is between those who believe the treasure should stay at the Hindu temple, which is administered by a trust run by the former royal family of the old kingdom of Travancore, and others who insist it be turned over to the government for public works such as a subway system.

The Indian Supreme Court will ultimately decide the treasure’s fate, but in the meantime it’s the backstory that’s really fascinating. For one thing, a temple archaeologist says that the extravagant trove—which includes a three-and-a-half foot tall gold statue of the god Mahavishnu studded with rubies and emeralds—came from the rich trade in “pepper that the Travancore kingdom used to sell to Europeans and others.”

A butcher in the Mendoza market displays a hefty side of pork. He also sells smaller cuts of meat such as sausages and costillas, or ribs, as well as chivito, or baby goat.

I’m a market junkie.

Here are the signs:

☛Giddiness at the prospect of a morning's ramble through stalls of wild mushrooms, soil still clinging to their stems;

☛Slight elevation of heart rate and flushed cheeks when inhaling the smokey fragrance of New Mexico chiles roasting in a hand-cranked propane-fired wire drum;

☛Senses go on high alert when drinking a durian milkshake, the stinky fruit just this side of ripeness--and discovering that I liked it;

☛Willingness to lug heavy bags and juggle camera with open wallet for hours on end;

☛Loss of any concept of time during all of the above;

☛And the worst: Compulsive buying of food I will not be able to eat or or carry back on the plane. The "need" to purchase, for example, in Oaxaca's Mercado de Abastos, a half-kilo plastic bag of freshly ground Mexican chocolate, mixed exactly to my taste with Ceylon cinnamon, sugar and ground almonds, warm from the mill and oozing through every pinprick-sized hole.

This never happens in a grocery store, for heaven’s sake.

Real markets are about abundance, about noise and funky smells, about tasting red pepper paste so sun-warmed and full of sweet fruity flavor that you can't imagine cooking without it. They're raw and elemental. Also messy. I feel right at home.

At a market you have your fingers on the pulse of a city’s appetites. And nowhere have I seen more meat than in the city market in Mendoza, Argentina. Right there in the heart of wine country, meat is what’s for dinner.

Are you ready? Put on your rubber soled shoes and grab your wallet. Let's go shopping!

Francis Mallmann, Argentina's top chef. Photo: Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way

The mild-mannered man, wearing knee-high brown leather boots and a soft brown jacket, his thinning gray hair covered by a brown wool cap, lifts gargantuan hunks of beef from a simmering caldero or cast iron pot set over smoldering logs. Behind him we glimpse a sprawling adobe hacienda, perhaps the remains of a derelict estancia, set amongst dry scrubby brush. A dusty Land Rover is parked nearby and underneath, a black and white dog lolls in the dirt.

Cooking show or love story?

The man has made a puchero, a South American take on the rustic meat and vegetable stew known in Spain as a cocido. With a tender smile, he scoops an array of vegetables, including a huge collapsing pumpkin squash, onto a wooden platter.

And then it happens: The scene goes all soft focus and slow motion. A misty haze surrounds the meat and vegetables, nestling together like lovers, as the man ladles broth slowly and sensuously over the food.

It’s as romantic a scene as you’ll find on late night Argentine TV.

The man is Francis Mallmann, Argentina’s most popular chef, star of numerous cooking shows, owner of restaurants in Buenos Aires, Mendoza and Uruguay, and author of Siete Fuegos, or Seven Fires, a 2009 cookbook written with his good friend Peter Kaminsky. As a young chef he trained in France with nouvelle cuisine luminaries Alain Senderens and Roger Verge, but in middle age he’s become an exemplar of South American-style, fast, high-heat cooking, mostly done outside over a blazing fire.

The counter at the Grove Cafe, where you can order breakfast burritos made with eggs and green chile, or buttercream-frosted cupcakes in flavors like red velvet and coconut almond.

There’s nothing like the otherworldly feeling you get landing in Albuquerque. Coming from the east, there’s the sense of having traveled vast distances that have nothing to do with the time spent in the air.

Maybe it’s the cracked brown desert, or the parched heat that feels like a balm, even as it sucks all the moisture from your skin. Or all those faux turquoise necklaces and boxes of pinon incense lying in wait for sun-dazed visitors.

It might be the ex-Santa Fe Railroad-hospital-turned-asylum—now a stylish boutique hotel, thank you very much—where we fell into a weirdly deep and dreamless sleep. At the rooftop Apothecary Lounge B and I watched jagged bolts of lightning crackle into the mountains while sipping pomegranate mojitos.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s ambling down the street the next morning to the Grove Cafe & Market.