Good Sunday evening. How are you doing? I have been really feeling the late-February gloomzz. Ohio is near the top of the list for “most overcast days in a year,” and the clouds this past week have been relentlessly gray and drippy.

The other morning I felt like I could barely tell the difference before and after sunrise. I was robotically making my breakfast toast when I opened a jar of my favorite spread, We Love Jam’s Blenheim apricot jam. And you know, it was like a cheesy commercial: I opened that jam, and a cloud literally passed from the sun, lighting up the jar like June sunshine through the trees, glowing with a honeyed tangerine light as if lit from within. It was ridiculous. I laughed, slapped that jam on my toast, and then tasted summer in every bite.

Cheeseball romanticism aside, though, isn’t this what the very best preserves do? They literally bottle up the very best of summertime and hold it for the grayest days of the year, when we need to remember the warmth. (And believe me, the jam We Love Jam’s tiny team has been making for years is truly the best of the best.)

What do you do in the kitchen, in these grayest and coldest days, to get that summer vibe? Here are a few things I do to combat the winter blues:

Wash the kitchen windows: I keep the insides of my windows clean, but for the first time ever I hired a company to come and wash all my outer windows just as winter set in. WOW the difference — so much brighter!
Make corn risotto with frozen corn: As an Ohio girl, nothing tastes like summer like sweet corn, and even frozen corn will do in a pinch.
Break out the grill: Pretty much every Midwesterner I know will tell you that grilling is year-round and the key is just not to let your grill freeze shut. This grilled cabbage is both seasonally friendly AND delicious; that spicy char tastes like summer to me.
Jeni’s wildberry lavender ice cream: This is my 4-year-old’s absolute favorite right now (what can I say — she has expensive taste!). She calls it the “purple ice cream” and it’s like a taste of June in the freezer.

I asked the Kitchn team what kind of summer food they eat in wintertime. Adriana Velez, our executive editor, said that “Just about any kind of agua fresca tastes like summer to me. I can't bring myself to make my favorite, watermelon (out-of-season melons, nooooo), but horchata works any time of the year.” Cory Fernandez, associate food editor, said: “I marinate a lot of meats and poultry with sour orange juice (naranja agria). It's an ingredient that both reminds me of my culture as well as warm summer months in Florida.” Nina Elder, Kitchn’s executive food director, told us how much joy these extra-sweet tomatoes are bringing right now. And Mara Weinraub, our lifestyle editor for groceries, said that “I made this sausage and peppers hero (or hoagie, depending on where you're from), drank it with a hard cider, and pretended I was at a baseball stadium.”

After that our convo turned quickly to all things cider and seltzer, as Ni’Kesia Pannell, our news editor, owns Peach State Drinks and makes her amazing Brown Sugar Lemon-Aid all year round. (If you’re in Atlanta, look for this!) Mara, our resident grocery expert, also shouted out Abita Strawberry Lager (“very summer in a bottle”) and Nectar, a new hard seltzer brand with flavors like yuzu and lychee (“perfect for summer vibes”).

Summer food in wintertime doesn’t change the cold, or the worries of this particular February and its dramatic, tragic world events. A taste of summer is a small joy, but small joys are necessary. What’s your small joy of summertime in February? Always love to hear back from you if you’ve found a fresh way to bottle sunshine for these gloomy days.