I still can’t say enough about how delicious these crab cakes are, and how much fun it is to assemble a base for them, usually some kind of salsa. They also require very little heat to prepare, and the puntarelle doesn’t ask for any, which means this entire entrée was particularly welcome on an evening when our breakfast room air conditioner wasn’t working.

The cherries were, well, a bowl of cherries.

• two crab cakes from PE & DD Seafood (the ingredients are crab, egg, flour, red & green peppers, garlic, salt, pepper, breadcrumbs, mayonnaise, milk, celery, and parsley), heated in a heavy copper pan, 3 to 4 minutes to each side, served on a salsa composed of 6 Backyard Farms Maine ‘cocktail tomatoes’ from Whole Foods, which had been chopped and combined with salt, freshly-ground black pepper, a bit of homemade French Basque piment d’Espellate we had purchased in a small town north of Baie-Comeau, Quebec last year from the producer’s daughter, some dried Itria-Sirissi chili, peperoncino di Sardegna intero from Buon Italia, chopped wild mint from Berried Treasures, a section of the stem of a Japanese scallion from Norwich Meadows Farm, chopped, and wild arugula from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm, and, when all was plated, the small amount of juices left at the bottom of the bowl of salsa drizzled on top of the crab cakes
• puntarelle from Paffenroth Gardens, prepared in the Roman manner
• sweet cherries from Kernan Farms
• the wine was a California (Lodi) white, Karen Birmingham Sauvignon Blanc Lodi 2015
• the music was Philip Blackburn’s ‘Ghostly Psalms’