WEATHER

This is Justin Day with a weather report for 3:18am on Thursday, 062807.

Recondite... The sweet smell of the night comes in and drives me to the keyboard. I sit in thought. A warm, grainy taste of earth still lingers in my mouth; a by-product of the beet salad that accompanied the spiral pasta and tea at our dinner table this evening. It was a meal I had been planning for a few days now, in the back of my mind. I wanted to serve something that would sum up the warm, ambrosial, static vibration - the lazy' rolling, thunderous friction between night and day - that combine to form your average summer breath.

First the pasta, which was actually served second, but for the purpose of this piece, will be discussed initially. The tomatoes were a key ingredient. After all, tomatoes are nothing more than red, organic sponges carefully designed to collect sunshine and turn it into sugar. When you bite into one, you can taste the magic behind this transition. The bell peppers added a tangy spin to an already explosive combination of basil, garlic, oregano and tarragon. (To me tarragon smells like hot wind blowing dry through a garden and I add it to many of my dishes.) I put this sunshine sauce on a bed of wheat rotini and it made our appetites sing, especially after a hard days work. The pasta represented the sun, you see. It even looked like the sun the way I served it, the noodles stretching out like stray rays, writhing wild around a red, hot center.

The salad, with the main ingrediant being the vibrant deep yellow flesh of the golden beet, looked very much like the moon. I was surprised how good it tasted, having never cooked with golden beets before. I oven-steamed them whole for just under an hour, covered in tin foil at 350 degrees with an inch of water in the pan. As soon as they came out, I cooled them by immersing them in cold water, and then immediately started cutting them, which isn't a good idea, because no matter how cool the outside of a fresh-out-of-the-oven beet feels, the inside retains heat very well, and as you cube it, it will burn you. But it was worth it.

The beet salad was the star attraction and although simple in composition, the beets themselves held such a deep and complex taste that little else was required to make the salad interesting. Olive oil, fresh parsley, the juice from one lemon and a pinch of cinnamon was all I added to the bunch. The resulting flavor was both piquant and muted, the same way that the whispers of the moon quietly bakes under the grass during the hot day, keeping secrets from the afternoon sun.

She's out there now, the moon, swimming in the dark pool of night - eyes wide, waxing to fullness - and I can only admit that, although I answer to her call and will spend a lifetime in her service, I'll still never fully understand her mystery. Did my meal succeed? I think so, and it was a nice homage to the two forces that keep us in check. Whether or not they agree with me, I have no idea. I can't speak sun or moon - I can only translate the subtle vibrations in the quivering limbs of the trees.

70 degrees F. Mostly cloudy. The wind is blowing south at 5 mph. Humidity: 93%.