Sometimes, particularly on a warm summer evening, you just don't feel like having anything complicated or heavy to eat, so it's just as well that all kinds of salads invite themselves to the dinner table for a light, satisfying meal. I tend not to cook fish in the summer months, other than in fairly light fish chowders, preferring instead to make use of tinned fish like salmon and tuna. For tuna, I turn to Irving because he makes the absolute best tuna salad.  

 

Yesterday though, we  had Sockeye salmon featured atop a potato salad. Nothing done to the salmon, it's good on its own. The potato salad along with the salmon provide all the necessary protein, carbohydrate and fats a meal should be comprised of. Yukon gold are the absolute best all-'round potatoes for any use and they shine in a potato salad, along with onion and snap peas for crunch, well seasoned with salt (lightly) and pepper (heavily) and mayonnaise.

 

Tonight is Irving's turn; I've prepared chicken drumsticks and baking potatoes (Yukon gold) and put together a fresh broccoli salad (chopped fresh broccoli, sliced green onion, dried cranberries, salt, pepper, cider vinegar, mayonnaise: yum!), for dinner. Yesterday we bought strawberries grown in Quebec and that'll constitute our dessert. Irving will nurse the drumsticks on the barbecue to a fine, crisp finish and that will represent quite the contrast to yesterday's dinner. 

 

We were out fairly early in the afternoon on this beautiful first of September. A cool temperature of 24C, full sun glimmering in an ocean of blue accompanied by the usual cooling breeze, and if that isn't summer perfection, correct me! As cool as it is out at street level, it's cooler still in the ravine toddling through the forest trails. There are more butterflies around now; mostly cabbage butterflies, but the occasional Monarch as well.

 

We came across a few other  hikers and dogs. Jackie and Jillie, the little monster bullies, terrified a large dog with their hostile, frenetic barking. Jillie instigates the harassment, and Jackie joins in with great enthusiasm. They both ignore us when we tell them to stop until my voice gets really angry and strident, and then they return to us, abashed, while I try to reassure the large dog hanging back, fearful of passing them. A few minutes later, they're all tail-wagging friendly with another large dog they're familiar with.

They are incorrigible little bullies. 

 

We come across an amusing little tableau; a ripe, red apple that has been well nibbled, left on top of a flat-topped tree trunk. Someone's dinner table. Close by the forest floor under a patch of wild apple trees, is littered with fallen apples, bright red ornaments, every one of which has had at least one bite taken out of it.

 

When we eventually reach the meadow, which we've bypassed while the landscape was drenched from heavy rains, it just doesn't look quite as it did a month, even a few weeks earlier. Many of the black-eyed Susans are in deep decline. The purple loosestrife flowers are now a bedraggled grey, many of the compass plant flowers have gone to seed, very little is left of the once-prolifically-budded evening primrose. There are a few clumps of fleabane looking pretty fresh among the long grasses. Along with some late-blooming B-E Susans.

 

But on the other  hand, the well colonized area taken over by the Himalayan balsam remains a crowded tenement of happy little pink orchid faces, row after row until the hillside they've expanded within gives way to the forest beyond.

 

After Jackie and Jillie have scarfed down their afternoon vegetable salad, out I go to the garden. It's a perfect day for anything out-of-doors, including awarding our hard-working garden pots with a fresh infusion of fertilizer and that's just what I planned on doing.