Late summer meals for us when I was a kid would be chilled shrimp. Big and fat and lots of 'em.

Yum.

Being Jamaican, we don't have those. Never really thought about food that way.

I am completely unfamiliar with this concept.

Furriners.

Fresh corn, for sure. Lobster rolls (not for me). Whatever meat/fish/chicken grilled on the back porch.

Dough boys, clam cakes, and chowder. And if I was lucky my grandfather would take me out for lobsters and make a pasta sauce with the leftovers.

Clam cakes! I have a wicked craving for clam cakes. I have to make them take me next time I go home.

Very happy to hear Grace's good news.

I did watch a bit of Ted Kennedy's funeral - the bit where the "youngests" in the family came up and read bits from his speeches (Prayers of the something?) - I liked that. Plus, it was interesting to see the young ones.

My mom told me that her synagogue held some sort of reception for Ted Kennedy shortly after he was first elected senator, and the youth group waited tables there, and she was president of the youth group so she got to serve the head table. She was totally mortified to serve Senator Kennedy the dish that the synagogue Men's Club was immensely proud of and served at every function -- individual meatloafs, with a peeled hard-boiled egg baked into the center of each one, which they thought was really clever because it made the meatloafs look bigger but only used cheap eggs, instead of more expensive meat.

Now I have made myself hungry for things that I doubt I can find in Worcester.

Late summer was usually when we'd go on vacation, so meals would be salami and cheese and crackers at rest stops or reconstituted dehydrated food at a campsite (Loch Ness soup is a stand out memory - it got scorched so my mom and I were the only ones who thought it tasted good - mmm, burnedness, yum), barbecued salmon or oysters on occasion, whatever restaurant Road Food turned up along our route. If we were home, I remember churning a lot of ice cream, but I have no memory of hot weather food. Whatever my dad wanted to put on the hibachi, probably.

I don't have any sense of "traditional family meals late in summer" either.

I know what we ate down the shore.

Yeah. We had seasonal fresh tomatoes and corn in late summer, but all our meals that involved any sort of tradition ran from Thanksgiving through Easter. Even Fourth of July just had random picnic food rather than anything set.

Ah, age-inappropriate crushes. Is there anything better?