Celebrate the sun: Watermelon, feta, and mint salad

If you are one of my editors in Boston, please click here.

For the rest of you, I confess, I've been playing hooky today. After the past days of chill and rain, today's been the kind of day - a randy breeze and gentle sun -- that makes you want to run naked through the fields with flowers dripping from your hair, or sit on a patio somewhere in a chic dress and drink ice cold vodka, or anything, really, except sit in front of a computer and transcribe interview notes. Which is what I was supposed to be doing.

And since my flower child days are over and I haven't quite arrived at the morning vodka stage of things, I opted for a day of rambling around with my son. One of the advantaged of having children is that on occasion they turn out to be a bit like you. (This is also one of the disadvantages, but we'll save those musings for a rainy day.)

In my son's case, this means we both like to sleep in, eat a slow breakfast preferably with lots of raspberry-oatmeal pancakes, and then get really dirty digging holes in the garden. And somewhere in the middle of all the digging and tearing out of weeds and grumbling about invasive plants, I set my son to attack the mint.

Yes, I know better than to plant mint straight into the middle of an herb garden, but some how it ended up there, I don't know how. And now every spring as the rest of the plants are poking their baby heads above ground, the mint bursts forth in full adolescent rebellion. Yes, if the mint lived in the house it would have black walls with KoRn posters all over them.

This is war, I told my son, attack. (Note to parents, seven-year-old boys seem to like gardening more if you can make it as violent as possible.)

So while my son was dealing deathblows to the mint, he piped up with the idea that we really shouldn't waste all this wonderful smelling stuff.

Let's make something with it, he said.

OK, but what?

We were on the end of the week's groceries. But there was a wedge of watermelon sitting in the fridge. (Price Chopper has watermelons on sale this week, I'd bought a big seedless one for $5, and it actually had flavor.) There was also half a cube of feta leftover from an earlier Greek salad.

Three ingredients and a sunny day. Sometimes that's all you need.