Decorating the summer kitchen can be an exercise in having a little wild fun. Summer colours and shapes make us feel as vibrant and bountiful as this glorious season and can be used to encourage the growth and fulfillment of wishes, plans, or projects in many ways.
If you would like to feel more prosperous or fertile, you can align yourself with summer’s energies by choosing to decorate your kitchen with green–leaf green, moss green, grass green–the colour of growing things. Renew a tired kitchen chair with a coat of green paint, or find some old green tiles to make a backsplash for your sink. Paper leaves are fun to strew around the room in various ways, or you could paint leaves on any available surface, if you’re artistically inclined. And green potted plants add their encouraging presence to your countertops or table.
For more confidence, warmth, or success, choose fiery red, sunny yellow, rich, buttery amber or goldenrod, mouth-watering tangerine. Sun-colours have been associated for centuries with the oomph it takes to make things happen. Paint a big golden sun above your stove, or experiment with vivid rag rugs or hot-coloured dinnerware.
And it’s easy to make a connection with nature’s abundant energy by picking a little wild beauty to honour in your kitchen–the earth is blooming in a thousand ways just outside your door. From the simple (a handful of dandelions or long grass plopped in a jar) to the more complex (fragrant blooms from the garden or a roadside patch of weeds, tendrils of berry-covered brambles, a bowl of ripe, dewy fruit), summer decorations are an evocation of bounty, richness, delight, and nourishment. By honouring the loveliness growing all around us, we invite summer’s positive energies into our home.
As the summer begins to wane after August 1, you may want to include the colours of wheat and golden corn in your decorations. Braided wheat figures or a wreath made of cork husks, or even a bunch of wheat-coloured dried grasses for your table, all are beautiful ways to honour the Earth Mother’s generosity to her children. See yourself as her representative. Every time you make a meal, you are echoing that Goddesslike power to nourish both body and spirit.
Summer offers so many delights for the eye, the tastebuds, and the soul! But most of us would rather dance and play outside than stir and chop and bake indoors for hours in the heat–and so the summer goddesses give us recipes that are simple and easy to prepare. Dishes are meant to be cooked and eaten outdoors, surrounded by the chirping of insects and the trees’ cooling green. Summer teaches us to relax and bask in the security of earth’s bounty: what we need will be given to us. And summer’s gifts are abundantly rich with flavour and colour–every bite bursts in our mouths like fireworks that fill our bodies with vitality.
from Cait Johnson, Cooking Like a Goddess
