Spring! It’s out there. It’s tantalizingly close. Spring! And with it, in come rushing all the cloying clichés: the spring in your step, and hope springing eternal, neatly spring to mind! Now that we have dispensed with that, it is a relief to open the windows, even if just for an hour, and have the breezes billow the wafting draperies over and through the agitated dust bunnies.
This is my house, not Martha’s, after all, and I have yet to eagerly embrace the notion of spring-cleaning. I wait until all the dog and cat fur clump together, and it gets back-combed into black, big-haired, tumbling tumble weeds before I bother to get out the Hoover. There are too many flowers about to burst onto the scene to worry about the mundane and the nonsensical cleaning up after the perpetually shedding animals! Although, perhaps, I should speak with my staff…
It is time for us to start going sockless. It is almost flip flop season, although Easter is awfully late this year – April 20. Not that I am dying to pull out the linen, just yet. I have gotten tired of being bundled up every minute of the day. It would be nice to sit in the yard, with a book, and feel the sun on my face. I was out back earlier this week observing the signs of life in the garden (see the photo of the lettuce) and the birds were swooping with grace and abandon. I watched a twittering band of goldfinches the other day streaking around the back yard. (I just looked up the collective noun for finches, and it is “charm”; a charm of finches scissoring merrily through the neighborhood.) It looked like such fun.
Yellow is truly a springtime color – not a pastel watery yellow – but something with vigor and brass – like a daffodil trumpet. Those perky little goldfinches flashed their yellow bellies. Fosythia bushes will soon burst into yellow flaming clouds. And the crocuses are defiantly gamboge YELLOW, when they are not purple or white, that is.
There are so many variations of yellow, and the names are quite evocative. You can picture each color: goldenrod, jonquil, school bus, straw, gold, day-glo, butter, butterscotch, mustard. Those names lead us to lemon yellow. And to lemons and all the miracles lemons can cause in our cooking and baking. We can make lemon bars, lemon curd, lemon cookies, lemon cake, lemon pie – all perfectly splendid and spring-y.
I like to bake a friend’s lemon cheesecake for Easter. The hoary family legend always demands full disclosure about the first lemon cheesecake I served up for the holiday. That year I prettied it up with some nasturtiums from the garden, being an edgy food experimenter. We all looked askance as a large spider skipped out from under one of the blossoms and trekked across the surface of the cake. The children were scarred for life. From the thought of ever eating spider-infested nasturtiums; not cheesecake. Never that.
https://food52.com/blog/10069-buttery-lemony-lace-cookies
https://www.npr.org/2013/04/08/176577903/preserved-lemons-older-wiser-and-full-of-flavor
https://honestcooking.com/salt-preserved-lemons-recipe/
https://www.ruthreichl.com/2012/03/sorrento-lemon-pie.html
I am looking forward to trying the preserved lemon recipes. The zing of the lemons will add piquance to my more mundane meals. I like a little lemon butter with steak; the light citrus taste elevates the ordinary without taxing my negligible Béarnaise abilities. And lemon butter, continuing with our springtime theme, is quite cheerily yellow.
Adding lemon to our comfort foods isn’t an extraordinary or original idea, but it will add layers of flavor and tone and subtlety. Having a jar with fat preserved lemons is some handy insurance that we can add a little sparkle to our lives, as we leave the drab winter, and head confidently into the spring-y sunlight.
“We live in a world where lemonade is made from artificial flavoring and furniture polish is made from real lemons.”
― MAD Magazine
That is a sign – do not give into spring-cleaning! Take off your socks. Go outside.
Here is an encouraging springtime quotation:
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood
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