Hot weather hit us this year even before the official inauguration of summer on June 20. My house was designed to maximize sunlight in our New England winters. Consequently, it gets very warm in the summer months.

When the warm temperatures arrive, I go into summer mode. I don’t turn on the oven except for early morning projects. (I’m not generally an early riser so there aren’t a lot of those.) I barely turn on the stove.

When I am forced to cook something, I haul out my tiny grill. Most of the time, however, I take advantage of our lovely local produce and make salad after salad.

The salad about which I’m writing today is one of my favorites: the Greek salad, also known as the Horiatiki (village) salad. With our crazy, early produce season this year, we already have local cucumbers and tomatoes, the stars of this salad.

When I made it last week, I couldn’t find a local bell pepper so I used one from the grocery store. I have a feeling the peppers will be peeking out at us from the shelves of farm stands soon, however.

I recently learned that the Greek salad as we know it is a relatively recent invention. Greeks started to combine cucumbers and tomatoes once tomatoes began to make inroads in Greek cuisine in the 19th century.

As readers may know, tomatoes were first grown and eaten in Latin America and only came to Europe after Spanish explorers and conquistadors arrived in this section of the world. They started bringing delicacies home in what the scholar Alfred Crosby called “the Columbian exchange.”

It took Europeans a long time to take to the tomato, which resembled the poisonous deadly nightshade plant.

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When the Greeks finally cottoned on to tomatoes’ fabulous, non-poisonous flavor and their suitability to the sandy soil in much of Greece, they embraced these red globes in a big way. They also began to pair them with cucumbers for a tasty luncheon.

According to food legend, the additional ingredients we associate with the classic Greek Salad only made their appearance in the 1960s.

At that time, in an effort to control costs for consumers, the Greek government set a price cap on what restaurants could charge for their popular tomato-and-cucumber salad.

An Athens restaurant came up with an ingenious solution. By adding feta cheese to the salad, its chef could claim to be making a completely different salad … and could charge a premium price.

Adding Kalamata olives further differentiated the salad and added to the saltiness of the feta, which in turn set off all the flavors in the salad beautifully. The new salad was soon adopted throughout Greece and much of the world.

I love my fresh tomatoes and cucumbers — the latter are particularly succulent this year — but I must admit that I always add feta and olives to them. The heat of summer increases my body’s natural craving for salt.

Below is the recipe I made last week. Please note that a true Horiatiki should have chunks, rather than crumbles, of feta. I am a firm believer in working with what I have, however, and what I had on hand that day was crumbled feta.

I also used an orange bell pepper rather than the classic green, again because that’s what was in my fridge.

Happy salad season!

Ingredients:

1 standard cucumber (or 2 pickling cukes), peeled (or semi-peeled) and either sliced or chunked

1/2 bell pepper, cut into small strips

1/4 red onion, thinly sliced

Kalamata olives to taste (at least 10!)

1 large tomato or 2 small ones, cut into chunks

5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons red-wine vinegar

1 handful fresh oregano leaves (or 1 teaspoon dried oregano)

1 pinch salt

1/2 cup feta cheese in chunks (or in my case crumbles)

Instructions:

Combine the cucumbers, the peppers, the onions, and the olives in a bowl.

Place the tomato chunks on top. (Feel free to pour in their juices.)

In a small bowl or glass, combine the oil, the vinegar, the oregano, and the salt. Drizzle about half of this mixture on top of the vegetables. Add the feta; then drizzle the rest of the dressing on top.

Serves four to six.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.