At Long Last, Signs Of Spring! Are You Excited?
For this daily writing habit, I’ve been mostly writing one day before publishing so that 1) I can schedule the post for the morning before I wake up and 2) have additional time to edit, if needed.
Even though I keep a journal of blog post ideas and an editorial calendar, I had nothing planned to write today for tomorrow and hoped that I’d get the inspiration that I needed.
Because sometimes turn my tweets into blog posts or Medium stories, I thought I’d start there. Nothing recent stood out (what can a person write about a photo of cat shit on an outside roof?) but I did find this tweet from a farm in the Niagara Region:
<Imagine the sound of BOING!!!>
Now THAT is an inspiring photo.
*You have no idea how happy this photo makes me.**
First asparagus of the season!
Asparagus, fiddleheads and ramps get me giddy, and after the long, cold winter, we need it. Twice earlier this week I wore my lighter winter jacket. Not cool, Mother Nature, not cool.
As the old commercial says, good things grow in Ontario*. Soon we’ll have the asparagus, fiddleheads and wild ramps, followed by snap peas, which I eat straight from their shells. Rhubarb is coming, followed by cherries and other berries. Nothing beats a fresh, local tomato.
There are some fruits and vegetables that I only eat if they’re local because imports don’t taste nearly as good. Tomatoes are on that list, but so are any berry. Strawberries and tomatoes especially need to be local. Their origin influences whether they’re soft and sweet or hard and sour. That’s not merely about freshness or the process of picking underripe fruit and then artificially ripening them (they do that with stone fruit and with tomatoes), but the fact that harder (I mean, more robust, not more difficult) fruit travels better.
The book Twinkie, Deconstructed begins with a story of a rock-hard tomato that bounced when thrown against the wall.
[At least, that’s how I remember the beginning of the book. I enjoyed the book immensely, but seem to have purged it from my collection during a bookshelf declutter.]
The tomatoes in the stock photo above are a pretty good representation of what I’m talking about. I can imagine eating those sweet, fresh orbs.
Strawberry Dreams
Several years ago I was in New York in mid-May. Now, it’s possible that I’m conflating two visits — I’ve also been there in June — but I’ll continue with this memory anyway:
My home during my stay was the East Village, which always feels like home to me. There’s something about the East Village that reminds me of Toronto. While there, I visited the Union Square Greenmarket. Their growing season was a couple of weeks ahead of ours, and I got some luscious strawberries grown in the Hudson Valley. It was like I’d time travelled ahead to summer.
[Writing this makes me want to go back so badly.]
Fresh From the Earth
In the fall there will be fresh carrots, but it will also mean that the growing season is coming to an end.
So, we begin again with the asparagus and fiddleheads, etc.
I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Einstein’s Dreams, and the reader’s voice is popping into my head, explaining the passage of time. One season follows the next, but in another timeline, maybe it happens all together, or not at all. I like the seasons, with limited time availability, even though some years I’m upset that I didn’t eat “enough” of this or that.
Grown Man Enthusiasm
I’ve seen my partner — an award-winning pitmaster who has competed in Memphis in May world champion BBQ contest and at several Kansas City Barbeque Society contests — do the happy dance in grocery stores upon seeing fiddleheads. He goes foraging when he can and puts fiddleheads on his restaurant menu, though since last year he’s “got a guy.” Every restaurant owner needs to “have a guy” for everything that they don’t have either the time or the ability to do themselves.
Every spring my partner makes “asparagus fries,” which we first had at a sports bar in Ohio during a road trip down to Memphis six years ago.
And like the bittersweet feeling I get on the longest day of the year in June (more sunlight, but also a subsequent shortening of days), each passing food growth season gets us closer to the next one, which gets us closer to the following winter. But then, it’s spring again.
Tell me: What’s your favourite sign of spring?
*And to those of you from Ontario, let me know if the mention of that jingle got you singing it in your head.
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