The Coolest Breakfast

When it's already too hot in the morning, the rest of the day stretches before you like a vast, uncrossable desert. Somehow I know I'll make it to the point when I can lie in bed naked with a fan pointed at me, but I just don't know how I'm going to get from here to there.

Once I have that realization, I can't bring myself to do any activity that would result in even the slightest increase in temperature. Turning on a burner to boil water for tea or oats is out. I'd just as soon turn on the toaster as stick my head in a vat of molten glass Even the warmth generated by the underside of laptop seems too much.

In such weather I often go rabbit. I eat raw fruit and vegetables, often unadorned. (And for some reason I find myself dodging the shadows of hawks). Meat loses much of its appeal.

Additionally, I seek out those foods that promise some cooling effect, by which I mean foods that have an uplifting flavor, such as a lemon, a cold temperature, such as anything out of the refrigerator, or foods whose essences are considered cooling in nature in traditions such as Ayurveda and Chinese medicine. Like corn silk tea.

And this morning, I think I created the ultimate cool food: yogurt, melon, and mint.

Though I don't usually eat dairy, I do make an exception for yogurt during the summer. Why? Because at some point I convinced myself that it was a good idea. The yogurt I used today is, I think, the most flavorful plain yogurt I've ever had: Sidehill Farm, a raw milk yogurt that seems to be a local favorite around my summer residence in the Northampton area (by which I mean I'm living close to Northampton but somewhere cheaper). The melon was a Santa Claus melon. The mint was, I think, spearmint, from the garden.

After a few bites (slurps?) it suddenly felt ten degrees colder. The stuff is as cooling as toothpaste, and just as minty-fresh. It gave me the courage to face the warmth of the laptop.