OK, I'm over it. A more reasonable response is to make this inspired and inspiring cookbook work for you. One way is to consider all the substitutions, as in regular mint for Persian mint, regular lemons for Meyer lemons, flat-leaf parsley and oregano for nepitella, scallions for green garlic. Or start with the simplest, least ingredient-specific recipes. These I found to be good ideas, worth tweaking in the future.
Cold zucchini soup is an obsession of mine, and it's tricky to get right. This one, summery zucchini-lemon soup, was almost perfect -- cool, jade-green, tangy from lemon. To my taste, it could have been a bit sweeter, easy enough to fix with more caramelized onion. Melon, cucumber, and mint salad turned into a pleasant surprise. The briny feta countered the sweet cantaloupe, and the cucumber offered extra crunch. (Don't keep it more than a day, though, since the salt will leach out all the water.)
Also on the easy end of the spectrum were tangy white beans, in which garlic and parsley brought out the nutty sweetness of the cannellini, and cider vinegar relieved their monotony. Nothing (except for maybe the beans) could have been easier than farfalle with five herbs and cherry tomatoes, a lush cascade of basil, parsley, mint, dill, and chives jolting the pasta awake and flattering the sweet tomatoes.
Oddly, the book offers a scant choice of summer entrees; a handful of grilled fish and some roasts. Roasts in the midsummer heat? In California? I made salmon with creamy watercress using regular watercress in place of pepper or curly cress. The cream had a striking variety of ingredients -- capers, dill pickle, hard-cooked eggs -- whose acidity and pungency stood up well to the robust taste of the pink fish.
