For the birds? Spring peas and asparagus with millet

Mother Nature, why do you keep messing with us?

If you can’t make up your mind what season it is, how are we supposed to know what to eat?

Regular readers here may believe that I have officially crossed over to the yet unclassified condition known as weather-dependence.  Boring? Yes.  Incurable? Not sure. But I ask you, how does anyone know what they feel like eating, and by extension, cooking, without seasonal signposts? No matter if the climate comes from the outside or the inside. Who hasn’t downed a pint of haagen dazs—make mine vanilla—in the midst of a personal global warming meltdown? We need parameters.

So, I am making up your mind for you, Mother Nature. Tease us. Blow hot or blow cold. I’m going with spring today, because I found a bag of shelled English peas in the market. (Trader Joe’s if anyone wants to know.) Now I’m all for meditating over a basket of peas, shucking them on the back steps and all that. But it is a summer occupation, a ritual I rely on when I need a vacation even though I am really just at home, wishing I were on a screen porch somewhere. For now, I’ll take the bag, and thank you very much Trader Joe’s.

Spring bounces back with watercress soup

There’s something unnerving about a summer day in March. The show outside is like a time-lapse movie: buds on fruit trees don’t sweetly emerge in a slow and lady-like fashion, but pop screaming into existence from their branches in contrast to the surrounding dark and barren limbs that didn’t get the memo.

I want nature to behave, to be consistent. I want some outside sign to tell me all is right with the world, because inside I’m at sixes and sevens. (It’s those odd numbers that get you.) I just wrote to a friend telling her I was at a conference with a thousand other people and it felt like a visit to Maggie’s Farm. I’ve come home with a head full of ideas, going from cheerful to discouraged and back again at whiplash pace. In other words, business as usual.