Serious Eats: Charred Corn and Cherry Tomato Salad

This is a nice late August farmers' market dish from Kenji over at Serious Eats, one that checks a lot of the boxes as far as what is local and fresh this time of year. However, unless you stock things like Mexican crema and cotija cheese... and live in a place where limes grow, it does involve another trip to a the kind of market that has fluorescent lights (and no farmers) to fill out your ingredient list. To save time the day you make it, you are probably going to want to make the supermarket trip before the farmers' market, as that stuff will sit way better than your fresh veggies. That said, I was able to pick up the corn, tomatoes, zucchini, radishes, and scallions all at the farmer's market at the Harvard Science Center... everything perfectly ripe and lovely.

There is a lot of knife work here, so it might take longer than the prescribed 20 minutes of prep time if you are not especially fast... but you can chop things while the zucchini and corn are on the stove. Plus you want this room temperature, not hot, so there is no particular hurry. I found the flavors to be quite good and for it to be a great way to consume bountiful summer produce.

As you can see above, I preferred it taco style as a main course but it could obviously work very well as a side dish.