For people all around the world, food is a critical aspect of their culture, inviting an opportunity to spend time with family and friends. Summer is an especially good time to share these experiences and recipes through a variety of lighter foods with vibrant in taste, color and smell.

Sophomore Vivian Eggleston’s favorite summer dishes consist of classic Southern foods. For example, watermelon pickles happen to be both tasty and economical. To prepare them, place the rind of a watermelon (after having eaten the rest) into a jar of vinegar and cinnamon. The result is a sweet and tangy treat.

Eggleston also mentioned a certain seafood dish: a mix of fresh crawdads and cornmeal-fried catfish that is popular at Fourth of July celebrations.

Sun tea is another sentimental favorite.

“You take mint from the garden, and you cut the mint and put it in a jug of water, add whatever other herbs you want and slices of lemon, and then you just put in on the back porch for a couple of hours– it’s so hot that the sun steeps the tea,” Eggleston said. “We always added a little bit of lemonade, and then you let it cool down and drink it iced.”

Another favorite Southern summer food is pie, according to Eggleston. Key lime pie, lemon meringue pie and chocolate banana cream pie are especially delicious, as well as peach pie and peach cobbler.

Pie is also a favorite summer food for sophomore Priscilla Chung, who bakes her own blueberry hand pies. Chung found the recipe on a popular food blog called Pastry Affair. She said hand pies happen to be especially good for picnics, but she will bake them whenever there is time.

“All of the berries are really good in the summer. When you make a hand pie versus a regular pie, you shove the berries into the dough and then add cornstarch and sugar and stuff before you fold it up,” Chung said. “Then when you open it all the juices ooze out and it’s really yummy.”

Chemistry teacher Courtland Ferreria-Douglas’s favorite summer recipe is unique to his family background. Ferreria-Douglas is half Black and half Filipino. An annual event important to his family is the Pista sa Nayon festival.

“My favorite dish [there] out of all of them is called halo-halo, and in Tagalog, the official language of the Philippines, it means ‘mix, mix,’” Ferreria-Douglas said. “It’s basically a milkshake, except you throw in rice, beans, gummy bears– anything you can imagine. Then you flavor the water, like strawberry or kiwi, and they give you a long spoon to eat the stuff in the bottom.”

According to Ferreria-Douglas, tradition states that it is supposed to tell your fortune, so if there are a bunch of good things at the bottom, like gummy bears, it shows good karma, but if there are a bunch of less desirable things, like beans, it means something bad. Ferreria-Douglas explained the myth that this originated from.

“There was a guy in the Phillipines who was a world renowned chef with all of this food, but the king came, and unfortunately he ran out of things to give the king. You don’t do that to the king, because he would kill you,” Ferreria-Douglas said. “So the cook went back and tried to figure out what to make. When he returned, he had this milky substance and all of the leftovers from the past days’ foods. He blended it all together and gave it to the king.”

The king allegedly decided it was the best dessert he had ever had, and he also liked it because the cook gave him a long wooden spoon with which kept digging up good things, which stated he had positive karma, Ferreria-Douglas said. And so, every single year the king would come back to get his fortune and eat the dessert.

In a similar way, Ferreria-Douglas and many other Pista sa Nayon festivalgoers return every summer for their beloved halo-halo.

“All the Filipino families on the West Coast come together for the festival in Seattle and it’s really cool,” Ferreria-Douglas said.

Whether at a festival like Pista sa Nayon or with just one’s own family, people can look forward to enjoying special summer meals.