“Summer provides the food for winter,” - will say many Ukrainians while pickling cucumbers, tomatoes, squashes, beetroots, salting cabbage and mushrooms; preserving salads made of summer vegetables or even making a wide variety of fruit jams and juices or bottling compotes.
Yesterday's rain brought back to me images of dancing fireflies and I felt a strong longing for going home...
When I was a kid, my mother's family liked to get together whenever possible and prepare "un p'tit gueuleton." Depending on the time of the year, those festive meals would entail lots of local vegetables and a great diversity of seafood - or "fruits de la mer" as we called them. Fall gatherings, however, often included land snails and I was usually tasked with collecting them in advance.
