I can’t believe that yesterday was the Summer Solstice! That means that starting today, the daylight will be getting shorter every day. I know that “officially,” this is the start of summer, but instead it feels like a wake-up call to how much of my summer has already passed. Still, I try to celebrate the day as one of the landmark days on this year’s journey around the sun.

However, my day got all discombobulated. I was supposed to do an early morning outdoors yoga class to start off the day, and was supposed to hang out with friends at a beach at a local lake. But the weather was NOT cooperating! It was cool and rainy and cloudy, so my outdoor plans all got cancelled. So I went to my fallback tradition for most holidays–I made a special meal.

While I haven’t had a standard Summer Solstice dinner, I have often served salmon because it is a dish that many pagans have for Litha, which is the pagan Summer Solstice holiday. But since I’m following my son’s example of having a more plant-based diet, I decided to have a vegetarian meal this year.

I kind of made up my own recipe, which I’m calling Summer Solstice Salad. I started by cooking farro, a very nutritional grain, to represent the idea of Summer being a time to harvest all the things planted in the Spring. I combined it with room temperature corn kernels, which is very much a summer plant, at least in our part of North Carolina (the local corn hasn’t really come in yet). I coated those with an herb-based vinaigrette.

The next step was to add the fresh local vegetables I had gotten at the Cary Downtown Farmers Market the previous Saturday. Those were green onions, regular onions, garlic scapes, green and purple peppers (the first of the season! The red, orange, and yellow peppers will come later), and halved cherry tomatoes. The final touches were crumbled feta cheese from our local CDFM cheese maker, Boxcarr Handmade Cheese, and sliced fresh basil. I served it /some fresh rosemary focaccia from one of our local downtown Cary bakeries.

It was summery and nourishing and a BIG hit with my son, so that may become our new Summer Solstice tradition.

Then for dessert, I made a first-time frozen treat with the two varieties of local fruits I had gotten from the Farmers Market–blueberries (unfortunately that season is finishing up) and peaches (these were the first local peaches for us). I coated them in yogurt, dropped them into small piles on a silicon baking mat, and froze them.

Then I made a coating with 72% cocoa dark chocolate chips and some coconut oil, dipped the frozen piles into the mixture, and froze them again.

Biting into them, they looked like this:

The blueberries were neater because the peaches released their juices so it was harder to get the pieces to stick together with the yogurt. However, my son like the peach clusters better because he liked the juicy yogurt pits. Either one made a refreshing dessert that wasn’t too sweet or too decadent and allowed the delicious flavor of fresh local fruit to shine through.

So while I may not have gotten to go to the beach or to the lake, it allowed me to have more time to be inventive in the kitchen. And I figured out another holiday meal without meat and could have been made vegan if desired. You know what they says…when life gives you lemons, make chocolate-and-yogurt-covered lemon clusters! (Although I’m glad life had given me blueberries and peaches.)