WHAT GROWS TOGETHER
Finally.
That’s what Wisconsinites exhale with a sigh of relief, when the first warm breezes blow, the sun climbs higher in the sky, and the last remnants of crusty slush and mud finally begin to glow with countless shades of green. For anyone with a connection to local food, late April and May offer additional ecstasies.
But say it’s your first year of trying to eat seasonally—or you’ve decided to finally try signing up for a local farm’s Community Supported Agriculture share. You walk into the produce section at your Co-op, or open your first CSA box, and you’re met with much that’s unfamiliar. How do they expect me to eat stinging nettles? What do I do with these stringy vines labeled “pea shoots?” What on earth is a ramp?
Spring produce is ephemeral by nature. Many of our earliest edibles (like arugula, watercress, rhubarb, and asparagus) are essentially wild, evolved to germinate before trees leaf out and compete for light. Spring plants are often too delicate to ship from far away, so we don’t see them on grocery store shelves year-round, like we do peppers and tomatoes. While we’re used to the latter, and comfortable working with them in the kitchen, spring produce can be comparatively mystifying.
There’s a saying in the food world: “What grows together, goes together—” and it’s true. It’s hard to go wrong when combining almost any seasonal, local produce item with another. These foods complement each other perfectly.
With the delicacy of the first lettuces, the crisp bite of radishes and salad turnips, the lemony brightness of sorrel, the sweet heat of spring onions, and the incomparable umami of morel mushrooms, the first produce of the year almost constitutes a regional cuisine in itself. Where the harvest season of late summer and early autumn is one of almost hedonistic abundance, spring produce awakens the body, beginning with the tastebuds, refreshing us and inviting us to welcome back our long-absent companions in the plant and fungal kingdoms. This welcome is best made simply.
EAT IT RAW
Spring is by far the best time for raw foods. It’s an ancestral truth as well as a culinary dogma. We’ve evolved to eat things in the ways that taste best at a given stage of their growth, and our relation to flavor is biologically linked with our nutritional needs at different times of year. Young raw plants are packed with vitamins, and their tenderness makes them easily digestible—all of which we’ve traditionally needed after a long winter.
Primarily, when we’re talking about raw produce, we’re talking salads. Rarely the most celebrated part of a meal, we tend to dress them up in all kinds of ways to make them more appealing. A perfect spring salad, though, is anything but boring. The key is to highlight the diversity of fresh flavors and textures different plants offer. It’s a study in contrast and harmony, in which everything gets connected, without being blurred together, by something as simple as a good vinaigrette.
Making this most basic of dressings is easy, and a jar of it lasts for ages in the refrigerator. One part vinegar gets poured into a jar with two parts of the best oil you have around–really good Greek or Palestinian olive oil, local Wisconsin sunflower or hickory nut oil. Good fats do so much to maximize the enjoyment and digestibility of any food. Add a tiny spoonful of mustard (Dijon is great, but any will do) and a generous pinch of salt, shake well, and you’re there.
Let a baby lettuce be your base; its crinkly texture holds everything up. Invite the dark smoothness of overwintered spinach, arugula’s peppery bite, a little bitterness from dandelion greens, the light sweetness of pea shoots, and sorrel’s sourness to the party. By all means include the alliums; chopped raw chives, ramps, green garlic, or spring onion bulbs take a salad above and beyond. Sliced radishes and baby turnips provide extra crunch and a little kick. If you have edible flowers around, they’ll add even more variation of texture, flavor and color. Aside from its simple dressing, such a salad needs almost nothing else—perhaps a handful of toasted sunflower or pumpkin seeds and a little crumbly, briny, fresh local feta cheese, which lends a little magic to almost any spring recipe. These salads are so good that you may not want one for the rest of the year, switching to cooking your greens instead (thoroughly appropriate to a natural, seasonal diet) and enjoying tomatoes and cucumbers raw in their peak summer season.
FRY IT
Simple sautéeing is a great way to include much larger quantities of nutritious greens in your diet than anyone would or could consume raw. Frying greens is also a nutritious part of a balanced spring diet; cooking, while reducing vitamin content to some extent, actually makes minerals more accessible to our bodies. In addition, there are many greens (like baby kales and turnip and dandelion greens) most people find much more delectable when cooked.
In the South, greens of all kinds are rinsed and drained, then fried in fat—usually bacon grease or lard—often with some onion, then dressed with salt and a little vinegar. A touch of maple syrup makes it even better. The fat makes the greens more digestible, and tames strong flavors. Don’t buy the dogma against saturated fats, but good plant-based oils will also make for a delicious dish. Stinging nettle, a culinary treasure with a rich, oceanic flavor, does well with even less—just a brief steaming in the water left from rinsing, then a little salt and fat to finish.
There’s also nothing wrong with blanching and freezing spring greens. Just dunk them for a minute or two in boiling, well-salted water. Drain, plunge into water, and drain again. Squeeze out as much liquid as possible, form into balls, and pack into freezer bags. There’s something particularly satisfying about pulling local greens out of the freezer during the winter.
And let’s not forget the stir-fry in all its forms. The three keys to a good one are: prepare everything in advance, including any seasoning; make sure the ingredients are as dry as possible; add ingredients in small amounts and stir constantly in an extremely hot wok pan for a short time. Enjoy a hot meal that tastes as fresh as a salad, while unlocking unique flavors. Roasting and grilling, on the other hand, will bring out a sweetness that may be more appealing to any kids you may have in your life. It’s all about simple transformations.
BLEND IT
Act quickly. Throw your intimidating amount of produce in a blender or food processor with a few other ingredients and pulverize it. A spoonful of vibrant green paste added to a soup, vinaigrette, fresh pasta bowl, egg dish, cut of meat, or pan of roasted vegetables can turn a good meal into a gourmet marvel.
Ramps and green garlic make a stellar base for spring pestos. Blend them with any delectable vegetable oil, add some salt, and add grated hard cheese and pine nuts (or walnuts or sunflower seeds), or don’t add anything. Nettles, baby kale, and other greens deepen and darken the flavor, while sorrel and cilantro bring light.
Add vinegar and some dried chilies to any similar concoction, and you have chimichurri, a flavor explosion that brightens any plate. Replace the heat with a few capers, thin with water, and you have an Italian-style salsa verde. ForagerChef’s website includes a recipe for a ramp version that, as he says, would make a shoe taste good.
Any of these blends can be frozen. Half-pint jars do fine. Many people fill ice cube trays or parchment-lined rimmed baking sheets and slice the semi-frozen paste into portions before transferring to freezer bags. Whatever method you employ, these condiments are wonderful to have around throughout the year. While you’re at it, don’t forget to cook that enormous amount of rhubarb down into a sauce you can freeze or can for later use.
PICKLE IT
Pickling is a wonderful way to preserve and transform many spring treasures. Cover sliced radishes or spring onions in a hot solution of vinegar, water, salt, and sugar, and you’ll have a perfect garnish for tacos that will last for months in a jar in the fridge, or—if you can your pickles in a hot water bath—for a year or more in the cabinet. Pickled salad turnips are traditional in Middle Eastern cuisine. Local asparagus, pickled in its prime season, may ruin anything brought in from California for you.
Fermenting in salt brine brings out more depth and complexity of flavor, and is much easier than newcomers might think. It can be done in many kinds of vessels; you don’t need a fancy kit to get started. Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation is a classic introduction.
Fermented onions, radishes and turnips will taste (and smell) stronger than vinegar pickles. Garlic scapes (the twisty flower stalks of the plant) ferment beautifully. Lacto-fermented ramp bulbs are a revelation, with lemony notes and glowing purple tones. Ramp greens can be chopped, salted, packed into jars and weighed down without additional water, and the result will be a deeply funky ferment. Mixed half-and-half with sour cream or cream cheese, they make for one of the most astonishing condiments this author has tasted.
The possibilities of fermentation are nearly endless. Katz’s recent Fermentation Journeys includes recipes for “perpetual brines” like those used in China, in which fresh veggies can be submerged into a jar or crock full of bacteria-rich liquid that will pickle them within a day or two. They can then be eaten immediately or moved to the fridge for longer storage. These vessels, occasionally refreshed by adding salt and herbs, can welcome a variety of vegetables throughout the changing seasons. Lacto-fermented pickles, for those who become enthusiastic about them, can become a delightful addition to daily meals, and a great way to stretch the season.
SOUP IT UP
While a good, hearty winter soup or stew requires layering flavors and cooking for a long while to let everything meld, a fine spring soup requires very few ingredients and little time. Heat a decent amount of butter or oil. Throw in a small handful of flour and stir until it turns golden. You could briefly sautée a little onion in the fat first, though you don’t need to. Add some stock, stir, and simmer for fifteen minutes. Taste for salt. Toss in a couple of big handfuls of watercress or nettles, and let them cook for another five minutes. Blend, briefly if you like some texture, and longer if you want silky smoothness. Turn off the heat and stir in a little vinegar or lemon juice. Just a little. Fancy it up with a drizzle of oil and/or some black pepper if you want. That won’t hurt, but the soup is already perfect, and will make you feel like you’ve added years to your life.
Just about the only reasonable thing to do with morel mushrooms besides cooking them in butter, sprinkling them with salt, and eating them, is to turn them into a simple cream soup. Fry chopped mushrooms with some larger pieces until golden, add a little flour and brown it, add some dry sherry and stock, let it cook softly for a little while, then add heavy cream and cook for a few more minutes. The mushroom flavor will explode. You can sprinkle chopped chives or ramps on at the end, before you faint with pleasure. Speaking of ramps, use up two or three bunches by slowly sautéeing the chopped bulbs with some salt until they turn a shade or two darker. Add stock, or even just water, and simmer for 15 minutes or so to let the flavors blend. Throw in the finely chopped leaves and cook for another few minutes, then do nothing aside from experiencing pure wild leek in all its glory.
PALETTE AND PALATE
The spring palette is wondrous. Its range may be narrower than the rainbow of high summer, but that constraint is one of its delights. The flavors that go along with all the shades of green, with just a little purple, red, and white thrown in, make for easy composition in which the plants do most of the inventing for you, and your palate can simply enjoy the masterpiece.
Really, this article could have been much shorter: if it’s edible raw, just eat it, maybe dipped in a little good oil. If it’s better cooked, do it quickly, without much fuss. If it grows together, it will satisfy and enliven. Spring produce, like spring itself, is a gift we can accept with deep yet easy gratitude and a light heart.
