Mid-July is the height of Virginia’s growing season. If you love cooking foods from around the world, this is when our farms make almost anything possible.

It’s where my Appalachian roots meet Ottoman traditions—building meals from overflowing gardens with vegetables, grains, and legumes transformed into purées, dips, salads, breads, and pastas, leaving the stove for only what truly needs cooking.

In Charlottesville, Integral Yoga Natural Foods partners with more than 30 local farms to bring healthy, organic, locally grown produce to its shelves, making it easy to cook with the season while supporting the people who grow our food.

My son loves yellow watermelons, and luckily we found a beautiful one waiting near the front of the store. Yesterday evening, we sliced it up and enjoyed it poolside.

If local food is the canvas, then the world’s cuisines are the paints. Summer is the season that makes putting together a meal feel effortless. Tomatoes become salads, cucumbers become cacık—a cooling yogurt dish with grated cucumber, garlic, and mint—fresh herbs find their way into everything, and a ripe watermelon needs nothing more than a knife, a little cheese, some good bread, and good company.