Peppery Vegetable Soup and Eggplant Salad

August is for late-summer produce

Late summer is when America feels the most like Thailand to me in terms of the weather and the flora it produces. At no other point in each calendar year—in my Midwestern neck of the woods, anyway—do I have more fresh ingredients to make Thai food.

So, between early August and early September, I carpe every last bit of the summer diem because I know the…