Cooking Seasonally and Predictably

At the public library last week, I stumbled across cookbook by a well-known chef whose promise of “fabulous flavor from simple ingredients” caught my eye. Since we started growing a lot of food, I’m always looking for new ways to prepare our harvest. I took it home. 

Sure enough, there were some wonderful-sounding recipes, especially the maple-roasted butternut squash and curried roasted butternut squash soup that I look forward to trying in the fall. But I was also surprised by a comment in the introduction. The author was writing about her time in France, where, she notes, cooking seasonally is not only the norm, but “the only option.” While extolling the flavor and quality of seasonal ingredients, she went on to say that “coming from the U.S., I found this kind of spontaneous menu planning hard….”

I wasn’t surprised that changing how one thinks about menu planning can be challenging, but the juxtaposition of cooking seasonally and “spontaneously” surprised me. In fact, seasonal cooking is nothing if not predictable. Just as crocuses in March are followed by daffodils in April, tulips in May, and peonies in June, so too are early spring’s salad greens and radishes followed by snap peas, strawberries and chard in late spring, and raspberries, beets, garlic scapes, and carrots in early summer. From that perspective, menu-planning that involves anything you want, any time you want it (what author Barbara Kingsolver has called the U.S.’s “promiscuous food culture”) is what seems spontaneous to me.

But as my new friend, Amarina, reminded me as we were preparing dinner last night, as a nation, we’re so disconnected from where our food comes from. Even when, she added, speaking of herself, you’re only a generation or two removed from people who farmed.  

I have to stop and remember that it wasn’t so long ago that I, too, might have found cooking seasonally to be “spontaneous”; growing food, the sequence and timing of various foods quickly becomes second nature. Certainly, one year there are more snap peas than I know what to do with; the next year, there may be few peas, but lots of something else. And depending on the weather, the first harvest of any given vegetable may vary by a week or so. But each food ripens at its prescribed time, in a regular sequence. And you see it coming. That’s why my 3-ringed notebook of collected recipes is organized by month, not by meal categories. The butternut squash recipes will go in the “November/December” section. 

Here’s a sample of this week’s “predictable” early-summer menu here in central New York State:

Breakfasts

Omelets with garlic scapes, herbs, feta cheese and some baby summer squash

Yogurt smoothies with strawberries or raspberries

 

Lunch

Tabouli with lots of parsley, spearmint, garlic scapes, radish and early carrots (plus chick peas and feta cheese)

Snap peas with mint, in a vinaigrette

Green salad, with chick peas and feta cheese, topped with olive oil and an herbal vinaigrette

Snap peas right off the vine!

 

Dinner

Stir-fried rice with garlic scapes, scallions, spicy mustard greens, chard stems, carrots, and snap peas (plus scrambled eggs and tofu)

Roasted beets

Beet greens with vinegar

Pasta with spearmint pesto

Grape leaves stuffed with rice and chopped beef

Quinoa risotto with arugula and carrots

More snap peas right off the vine!

 

Dessert

Strawberries and/or raspberries – on their own, in yogurt, over vanilla ice cream, or topped with whipped heavy cream

Wild black cherries     

Lemon balm, spearmint and/or peppermint tea

 

And coming soon: bush (string) beans