The Return of Cooking with Bwog — no cooking involved!

The end is of summer is imminent (Monday, officially), which happens to nearly coincide with tomorrow's Morningside Heights Farmers Market.

So, to celebrate the season's end, Bwog recommends a no-cooking-involved summer salad. It also keeps well in your mini-fridge, so you'll have ample opportunity to savor the season after it's past. The preparation is fun: Bwog recommends indulging in the the imagined bucolic nostalgia of shucking corn and the aggressive release of dicing vegetables. Or, alternatively, invite some friends over and make it a cooking party.

How to lose friends and alienate people

Oh Sarah Palin, is there anything to which you are not tangentially relevant?

The first of a two-part series on truck-based dessert foods.

Reading doesn't count unless someone sees you doing it.

Why try to forget about all the fun stuff you missed out on when you could relive the disappointment?

eyePod!

Bwog's suburban diarist Madeline L. is spending the summer away from the city -- and she's enjoying it. Here, our diarist disects the nature of the suburban summer, and why it beats Morningside anyday.

Summer in the suburbs is built on a founding myth; an event within a circle of friends that becomes retold in different heights of enthusiasm, with different details added or subtracted. It becomes so recognizable that the difference of experience between people who lived it and those who heard about it is nonexistent. Collectiveness and camaraderie encapsulate the suburban summer -- that and a lot of weed.

For me, the summer of 2007 was the summer of getting thrown in a pool -- completely clothed, mascara trickling down my face, contacts mangled in the white of my eye, shirt pulled down. The boy who playfully threw me in the chlorine perils argued after the fact that it was my own fault. I made myself fall in, he reasoned. "You just have really shitty balance," he said.

Gather round Columbia, it's time to re-welcome IvyGate into our browsers and into our hearts. Naturally, it has returned dressed to the nines, with a new WordPress redesign and fresh-faced summer editors. Bwogger Justin Vlasits favors the mouse over chalk-underlines in the new masthead (see above), while a Yalie friend of Bwog noticed that clicking on the chalky names re-directs readers to posts about that school.

Now let's meet the man and woman behind the summer incarnation of IvyGate 2.0. Why look, it's hometown favorite Nina Shield (BC '07), and some rising sophomore from Harvard. After introducing herself, Shield puts together a nice little wrap-up of all Vag-related happenings. She is the first Columbian to helm the good ship IvyGate since the legendary days of Chris Beam and Nick Summers. (Oh, and Andrew Nusca, a former summer editor, was a J-Schooler.) Go Lions.