ColumnThe official Foodie Underground summer bucket list guide to your favorite season.

So you checked off last year’s list of food-related summer bucket list? Good. Now here are 100 more things (plus an extra one, because 101 is just more fun) to keep you busy all summer long.

1. Learn about natural wines. It helps with the headache the morning after, trust me.

2. Make a cake with kale in it.

3. Find 10 different ways to use rhubarb. To start: rhubarb and mint.

4. Make your own yogurt.

5. Roast your own coffee.

6. Infuse something with geranium.

7. Write a story about a food experience.

8. Ride your bike to the market or grocery store.

9. Plan a dinner party with food sourced from within a 50-mile radius.

10. Try to buy all local for one week. And I mean all.

11. Eat lunch on a sailboat.

12. Grow your own lentil sprouts.

13. Stuff your face with ice cream cake. The vegan kind of course.

14. Make your own sorbet.

15. Two words: kombucha smoothies.

16. Make your own chips out of anything other than potatoes and sweet potatoes.

17. Start a vintage cookbook collection.

18. Go through your grandmother’s or mother’s recipe cards.

19. Plan a picnic on a bridge.

20. Serve wine in actual wine glasses and not mason jars.

21. Make your own picnic basket.

22. Learn how to homebrew.

23. Volunteer on a farm.

24. Don’t look on the internet for a recipe for an entire week and see what happens. Constraints breed creativity.

25. Put seeds (sunflower, poppy, sesame, hemp, etc.) in your salad.

26. Go geoduck hunting.

27. Sew your own reusable produce bags.

28. Make a beer cocktail.

29. Pick berries.

30. Host a “homemade BBQ,” ie: homemade ketchup, homemade chips, homemade sausage, homemade buns.

31. Skewer berries on a toothpick, freeze them and place them in glasses of bubbly for a more festive drink.

32. Beer slushies.

33. Serve a chocolate cake topped with salt and vinegar chips.

34. Make a dish with lavender.

35. Design your own coasters.

36. Date a farmer.

37. If that doesn’t work, date a vegetarian.

38. Find a video projector, hang up a white sheet and watch a food documentary outdoors.

39. Pretend you’re a wine connaisseur. Better yet: just drink the wine you like.

40. Plan a road trip in search of good street food.

41. Keep a coffee journal.

42. Go through all of your kitchen supplies and reduce them by half. You really don’t need it all.

43. Beach picnic.

44. Park picnic.

45. Mountain picnic.

46. Backyard picnic. You don’t have to go far after all.

47. You need to stay hydrated, add fruit and herbs to a pitcher of water to add a little flavor: cucumber, thyme, lemon, apple, etc.

48. Bake something for your neighbors, just because.

49. Read a food book that isn’t a cookbook.

50. Grab a glass jar with a screw on top, pour in some sugar, add in a vanilla bean. Voila: vanilla sugar. Good for sprinkling on summer pies.

51. Master campfire bread.

52. Cut watermelon into cubes, freeze. Eat.

53. Visit a vineyard.

54. Visit a brewery.

55. Visit an urban garden.

56. Improve your table manners.

57. Start juicing.

58. Spend at least five minutes on this website.

59. Serve ice cream or sorbet in something other than bowls, like lemon shells for example.

60. Grill s’mores with your own homemade marshmallows.

61. Go vegetarian for a week. Just to see how you feel.

62. Never serve store-bought guacamole ever again.

63. Build a beer bottle holder for your bike.

64. Make a berry pie, but make a crust with ground hazelnuts instead of a regular one.

65. Produce batches and batches of your own Nutella.

66. Keep an ongoing collection of food quotes.

67. Write a poem about food.

68. Teach someone how to cook.

69. Buy an ingredient at a farmers market you have never tried before.

70. Eat salad for breakfast.

71. Grill zucchini.

72. Make goat cheese ice cream.

73. Put a dash of salt in your cold brew coffee.

74. Find a tree. Build a treehouse. Host a dinner party in it.

75. Put something other than water in your ice cube trays.

76. Guerilla garden.

77. Plan your summer vacation around food destinations and not tourist sites.

78. Cheese tasting night.

79. Pick blackberries and infuse some vodka.

80. Eat a meal blindfolded.

81. Go crabbing.

82. Use zucchini instead of pasta.

83. When you can’t take a vacation, host a round the world dinner party.

84. Cook with saltwater.

85. Start seaweed foraging.

86. Experiment with chilled fruit soups.

87. Roast your own red peppers and serve them on everything.

88. Go to a food festival.

89. Master a sangria recipe.

90. Make a classic dish from all 50 states.

91. Put fruit in your sparkling water.

92. Build your own fire pit and cook something over it.

93. Expand your spice collection.

94. Bottle cold brew in a mason jar and give to your friends.

95. Learn how to make your own fish tacos.

96. Go a week without referencing a cookbook.

97. Make mead.

98. Put basil into a sweet dish instead of a savory one.

99. Consider learning how to pit cook.

100. Eat outside at least once a day.

101. Keep your own sun tea on hand… at all times.

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Ginny

The post Foodie Underground: 101 Summer Bucket List Items for Foodies appeared first on EcoSalon.

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

When I was 19, living in Italy and then backpacking Europe, I re-entered my life back here in the States with a whole new perspective on what I would want from the future. Oh, I could envision this virgin bucket list and sitting here writing this – at this very moment – I can tell you I remember what I FELT like when I saw the future and it had very little to do with being responsible.

(Bucket List 1990): To remain forever single, forever childless, to explore jungles clad in dirty tank tops and a camera around my neck shooting images of wild eyed women who have no idea why the hell I would want to be there, write a novel alone in a cabin on a mountain, learn how to fly a Cessna, have many affairs, romances, always take coffee with lots of cream, explore existential freedom, sexual freedom, get published in the New York Times, get published in National Geographic.

(Bucket List 2000): To love my husband forever, to take my two children to all the places that inspired me, to inspire at least 10 women to succeed, to buy a cottage on a lake, buy a 1963 Ford Falcon to look cool in, drive in New York City without having an anxiety attack, go on a roller coaster again, get published in the New York Times, get published in National Geographic.

(Bucket List 2010): Breathe more, take yoga weekly, take my two children to all the places that inspired me, inspire another 10 women to succeed, get that damn cottage on a lake, get published in the New York Times, get published in National Geographic (because for shit’s sake I know enough people who work there now).

(Bucket List 2012):

I had this column all mapped out for you. I was going to be clever but truthful and write a few things here about what is REALLY on my current bucket list. But as with life, and all the twists and turns it offers us, I stumbled upon an article in the daily newspaper early this morning.

A former philosophy professor who is forever my mentor and friend had written his own column with the title “A New Kind of Clock Tells the Truth.”

“Here are three things that we all know to be true,” he writes.

“1. The past does not exist.

2. The future does not exist.

3. All that does exist is the present.”

I often tell my 92 year old neighbor when she laughs and tells me I’ll “probably outlive her,” that in this life, we cannot always be so certain. I told her just last night on her back porch that at that very moment a satellite from space could suddenly plunge from on high and crush me right in front of her. She didn’t think that was so funny and went inside.

Bucket lists? To what purpose do they serve? To add to longings and make us feel inadequate with what we do have? I have everything I need at this very moment: a comfortable chair, a cold glass of lemon water, a light breeze on my shoulders and an audience who will read this article.

My family is safe and healthy and we have traveled. I have taken flying lessons, listened to countless women’s dreams, driven in New York City, rode roller coasters, taken yoga classes and sat quietly taking deep breaths.

I disagree a bit with my professor. I say the past does exist and that it has a big part of the present. That in the grand scheme of things, these experiences are all things that have made us who we are sitting here together. We have not only checked things off the list but we are the total of them. Regardless of whether they’ve been right or wrong, we are them.

How full we should be now and ready for the falling satellites.

Image: Naomi Lbuki

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

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