Phyllis’ Blog

Spring hits, and I begin my almost daily prowl of roadside farmstands and twice-a-week visits to our downtown farmers market.

I make a meal of asparagus, sugar peas, strawberries, and rhubarb. And then another one and another one and another one. We liven things up with brown butter spooned over the veggies, and shortcake as a platform for the berries. (In this part of the world, you put a square of cake into a soup bowl, cover it with a heap of sliced berries, and then pour cold milk over top just before eating.) This year we’ve eaten rhubarb in pie, muffins, a crunch, a cake, and sauce.

On the next market day, I bring home the same ingredients. The only thing I vary is the thickness of the asparagus spears-skinny one time; fat the next.

I used to buy only one pint of sugar peas on each visit. That was almost worse than not having any, because after one scoop of the spoon around the serving dish for each of us, the gloriously sweet, annoyingly laborious flat little peas and their pods were all gone. But I was already spending more time than I had, nipping both ends and then stringing each side of every single pod. More boxes per meal seemed out of the question. Furthermore, these guys aren’t cheap.

When Merle protested the meager amounts I was serving, I confessed my stinginess and whined about how little time I have. He wondered why I hadn’t asked his help with stringing. Now we set up to watch the evening news, each of us with a pile of peas, a knife, a container for the stems and strings, and a bowl for the prepared peas. I’m buying double amounts of sugar peas these days.

Already we’re sad about the end of the season for these first-of-the-summer garden gifts. We’re squirreling boxes of fresh sugar peas, bags of just-cut asparagus, and long stems of rhubarb in the back of the fridge, hoping to extend this opening stage of the garden until raspberries and blueberries and tomatoes and corn start showing up.

Last evening, Merle and I served a cold springtime supper to two of his brothers and their spouses. Three of our four guests had birthdays within the last two weeks (Carl and Lois even share the same birth date)-and we wanted to celebrate that, along with the fruits of the season. We didn’t pull out the grill; in fact, I barely cooked.

We started with ice-cold strawberry soup, with slightly warm strawberry bread alongside. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a strawberry overload. The berries announced themselves shamelessly in the soup but behaved subtly in the bread.

We segued into Chicken and Noodle Green Salad. This surprisingly sturdy, surprisingly light main dish is built upon three primary ingredients–cooked chicken, noodles with some body (I like kluskis), and fresh spinach. You can zip it up with fresh parsley and sliced scallions, and then bring it all together with an oil/lemon juice/mustard/herb dressing.

A big bowl of salad in the middle of the table looked tempting enough, but also a little meager on its own. So I blanched some eight-inch-long asparagus spears, shocked them in ice water, and then served them full-length on a platter. I sent a brown sugar-mustard dipping sauce around on the heels of the spears.

When the hot sun dropped lower in the sky, we sat on the patio, letting our food digest while telling old stories, completing each other’s memories–or correcting them–which seems to be every sibling’s impulse.

Then we were back inside to finish off with warm rhubarb cake and ice cream. Our sister-in-law made the cake with rhubarb pulled from the patch that Merle’s parents cultivated next to the barn on the home farm. Elaine and Leon have lived there for a generation, growing crops and gardens, replenishing the soil, and innovatively keeping run-off out of the stream that winds through the meadows.

Dessert came with a price for the birthday honorees. They each had to answer two questions: 1.) Which past birthday stands out and why? 2.) If they could choose, which year in their lives would they each like to return to?

We laughed. We got close to tears. What I hadn’t anticipated was how feasting on spring-time food had put us all closer to new life, despite our ages. Remarkable how fresh food in season renews us in multiple ways.