It's time to say goodbye to corn. It's been seven great days of corn recipes and I know we'll all be sad to see it end. But sweet summer corn will be around for at least another month so the end of this series doesn't have to mean the end of corn for any of us (in this hemisphere!).

For this last of my corn recipes I am going to do a corn brulee. It's a corn-sweetened custard with whole kernels topped with spicy candied bacon and served with a very savory tomato sorbet.

Although the custard is made sweet with the infusion of corn, this is not what I'd consider a dessert. In fact I am serving mine as a first course and my brother Grant is pairing this custard with Vouvray.

But before we get to the wine let's recap this madcap week of corn recipes. It's hard for me to pick a favorite, so here they are in reverse chronological order: Fresh Corn & Sun Dried Tomato Angel Hair Pasta, Old Fashioned Corn Chowder, Corn & Zucchini Fritter Stacks with Bacon and Avocado, Seared Scallops with Succotash, Grilled Chicken with Raw Corn & Grilled Bread Salad.

We started with Grilled Corn with Feta & Lime. It's the only on-the-cob recipe I presented this week and I saved its mention for last because I thought I'd end this week of corn with some valuable tips on removing corn from the cob. Of course they sell devices for just such a chore, but I personally don't like to have tools cluttering up my drawers that only have one job in life. So I rely on a chef's knife to get the job done.

My kabobs keep clicking. This is Day 5 in my weeklong series dedicated to everything skewered and grilled. Today I have Grilled Salmon Skewers with Wild Fennel Pollen.

But this is Day 5 and I have pretty much covered all the details you may ever need to know about the humble kabob. Everything from cooking simple one-ingredient skewers all the way to how to choose and prep ingredients when there are several choices stuck on the stick.

So I have deicided to use the power of the kabob to highlight an ingredient that you may not be familiar with, or perhaps you just don’t use enough. Wild Fennel Pollen.

Now the name is pretty self-evident ‘cuz Wild Fennel Pollen is exactly what it says it is. The pollen from wild fennel! It is a typical Tuscan ingredient, where it is called finnocio. Hand collected from the flowers of wild fennel growing on the coastal and inland fields and open spaces in warm weather climates like Tuscany and California.