A short window of inspiration before perspiration.....

I've been thinking about spring lately. New season, new menu. Time to take the rugs out back and beat out the winter's dirt and grime. It's been an amazingly seasonal season for lack of better words here in north Florida. The cold nights and mornings were actually pretty cold. It made for lots of hearty food and drink. It inspired lots of slow braises with rib sticking starches and reduced and reduced then fortified jus'. It brought a whole host of fantastic soups and a truly inspired challenge to create new and satisfying composed plates for vegetarians week after week. It brought pork belly, great maple syrup and thus, maple cured bacon and pancetta.

It was a good winter.

Funny enough, spring still has not shown up. It has poked out it's head a few times but quickly ran back to rejoin the masses of now anxious hibernators. But it's coming. The grasses are showing small signs of green and life and the inevitable purgatory that is mowing a jungle in 100F. The produce isles are looking slightly less scary. The arsenal of hard as a rock, gassed, and glazed, are being replaced, and a once sterile room starts to actually smell like tangible earth.

I wanted some real inspiration for spring. I like words. So I dug around and found this. Henry David Thoreau' s Walden...here's a little excerpt...

This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry... It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit- not a fossil earth, but a living earth....

When I think of spring, I think of my childhood. Opening the windows when it hits the high 40s. Putting the top down on convertibles. Everything wet and slushy. No bright colors, not yet. But beating arteries of greens, and pristine whites, and shimmeringly clear blues. Asparagus, arugula, mustards, peas, beans, lots and lots of onions of varying shapes, sizes, and colors. I think of all this and some far off corner of my mind says scallops. I like gnocchi but I love spaetzle. They are more delicate. Hold a flavor with more dignity. They will harmonize with whatever you want to match them with. Big piped scallion spaetzle crisped in brown butter, tossed with baby arugula and snow peas right at the end. Seared scallops, blood orange and fennel. Bright, clean, crisp flavors. Not too exotic or challenging. A time to let the new birth of spring be tasted in relative simplicity.

One of the great contrasts that caught my eye today while picking through chilies was the rhubarb. Something I have not tasted since my childhood. Definitely going to make it into my cart in the near future.

Once more from Thoreau's Walden......

......compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.

Reverence and respect for the earth. There has been a curtain of sterile detachment pulled over the food in all it's forms for too long. Thankfully, we as a nation are being rescued by or better yet rescuing ourselves from this peril. Food tastes better when you know where it came from. I live a stone's throw from Georgia. Someone please show me a Georgia peach in a grocery store already before I submit to my theory that it is all a big scam. Eat a Peach...for shame Allman Brothers.

Enjoy your spring and a tip to the willing. On the next nice afternoon. Open all the windows, download "Eyes of the World" from the Grateful Dead's "Without a Net." Crack a beer, pick up a little around the house, then find a nice cozy spot, contemplate your next meal, and be mellow. 16 minutes of springtime heaven!

Till next time....