While summer nights can be occasionally too hot to sleep, long tall stalks of corn are relishing that heat and turning it into one of the sweetest and savoriest tastes of August.

Golden yellow, lightly grilled in their husks on open flames in your backyard grill with their natural sugars and a little added salt -- all it takes to have a star dinner guest on your plate that you wish came to visit more often than just in the summer.

The perfect marriage of sweet and savory -- and with some effortless improvising, add in some spicy rubs to make it an even more tempting threesome.

The tallest vegetable in the garden knows what it's doing by getting closer to the sun so it can ripen in a way none of its smaller cousins in the patch can -- and grow to become one of the most enjoyable foods of summer.

Sugary, Salty and Simple

Canned corn is the quick convenient solution we're often happy to find in the back of your cupboard when you need it -- like the spare tire in the trunk of your car when you get a flat. But with winter emergencies aside, nothing can compare to the smooth rolling of a fresh cob of corn working its way down the butter stick highway of late summer.

Some of my most vivid visual memories of childhood are summer picnics, on red and white checkered table cloths with grilled burgers, fried chicken, mom's secret recipe potato salad (insert a jar of mayonnaise here) and blinking fireflies dancing in the air for fleeting milliseconds in every direction. But the taste that comes most to mind, isn't the bbq meats or rich salad (sorry mom!), it's the simply sweet and salty pleasure of fresh ears of crunchy yellow corn on the cob. (#summer #corn #mais)