SpiceLines

Traveling with garlic: When I opened my suitcase, my clothes were impregnated with the distinctly New Mexican scent of these plump bulbs from Rocio Farm in Espanola.

I came back from Santa Fe with a tear in my eye and a suitcase full of garlic.

Closing the wooden gate one last time, turning my back on the violet mountains and the big sky that sweeps overhead, lurching slowly down the gravel road—these ending gestures always bring a momentary sadness.

The mood lingers until we pass the sign for Cochitl Pueblo and begin the abrupt descent from the high mesa. A long winding road down, then the landscape flattens out. Soon we’re on the outskirts of Albuquerque. Civilization and its discontents are just ahead.

Oh well: back to so-called “real life.” Do you ever feel that way when you leave a place you love?

Ten hours later I unzip my suitcase and the smell of New Mexico pours out.

Frosty paletas from El Paraiso: Day glo cantaloupe is front and center. Bright green pickle is to the left, mango with chile to the right--and that's only the beginning.

101, 102, 103, 107….

Once the temperature passes 100, it doesn’t matter how hot it gets. Whatever the thermometer reads, the heat is simply horrific. So brain-liquefying that nothing could drag me from my Freon-chilled lair, unless….

...as Sylvia says, paradise is within reach. El Paraiso Original, that is.

Oh the sacrifices I make. First, an 18-minute drive across town, clutching the searing steering wheel while hellish flames dance in my fevered brain. Then staggering across the desert, nearly felled by the blinding glare of the sand—oh, I mean the parking lot—and there it is. Behind the cartoonish Garden of Eden mural—jaunty monkeys climbing flouncy palm trees—lies a wonderland of frosty delights.

Some of the paletas I made during yesterday's hurricane: Watermelon; ginger-limeade; cucumber-tarragon; tomato water with red pepper, cucumber and basil; banana-cinammon; and coconut milk.

Here’s the great thing about homemade paletas: You really don’t need a recipe.

Oh, a list of ingredients might be helpful, but you can make seriously delicious frozen pops on a stick by improvising with whatever you’ve got in the fruit bowl, the herb garden, and the spice pantry.

While Hurricane Irene was whipping the trees around our house into a wild green frenzy on Saturday, I was piddling around the kitchen, happy as a six year old with a box of art supplies, inventing sweet and savory concoctions destined for the freezer. As one writer put it, I was making “bliss on a stick”--and a lot of it.

There was watermelon with fresh mint, limeade with (and without) ginger, heirloom tomato water with sweet red pepper and basil, cucumber with tarragon, a splash of white wine and, wait for it….candied Luxardo maraschino cherries.

Yes, yes. I recoiled when B breezily proffered that idea. But trust me: it is fabulous. A little like eating sweet anise-flavored cucumber sorbet with a dark cherry-almond surprise tucked inside. (Don’t try this with bright red supermarket maraschinos, however.)

That’s the other great thing about ice pops: They’re so easy that you can (almost) painlessly test your husband’s crazy ideas.

Fall is on the way: Last week's CSA box held the next to last installment of summer's waning pleasures, but a bounty of autumn vegetables for the larder.

Last week’s CSA box from Elysian Fields Farm perfectly illustrated the slow but inexorable change of seasons.

On the summery side, there were two Sugar Baby watermelons, still sweet and crisp, and so refreshing on end-of-August steamy afternoons. (Now is the time to make those watermelon paletas I’ve been raving about.) And we fell upon the last candy-sweet Sungold cherry tomatoes. A definite farewell to summer: This week’s box will probably have scuppernog grapes instead.

But as the weather cools, there's no reason to be sad. Just look at the other treasures in the box: A trio of Beauregarde sweet potatoes, bags of freshly dug Rose Gold and Corolla potatoes, one Sunshine Kabocha squash, two butternut squash, a yellow Spaghetti squash, and assorted Candy onions. All of these are keepers, so we can comfortably ease into autumn, knowing that the larder is full.

Yesterday I was thinking about our CSA and how great it is to have all these locally grown vegetables. Then I opened The New York Times and found an essay by John Tierney (“Fresh and Direct From the Garden an Ocean Away,” August 30, 2011, p. D2). Tierney’s focus is “the locavore’s dilemma:” namely, that while the food we eat may be local, it probably originated thousands of miles away on other continents.