I have to write a grocery list this morning, and it’s making me fretful. My husband – he’s back! hooray! – has offered very kindly to run to the grocery store on his lunch break and all I have to do is send him a list of groceries by 11, which is in 45 minutes. This should NOT be a big deal.
My husband was away this weekend at a church retreat and I was startled by how quickly I slipped into lazier eating habits. Without him here, the urge to make FAMILY dinners evaporated and we lived on frozen pizza and frozen lasagna and bagged salads, which are nice in a pinch but not the way I’d like to eat for the rest of my life. This three day vacation from real cooking was nice, but now I find myself yearning to REALLY cook, to make beautiful spring foods. The snow is still deep and the air is still cold, but something smells like spring and suddenly I know that winter WON’T last forever, which is the opposite of how I felt last week, this grim resignation to being chilled and bundled up forever. Now I feel like eating lemons and asparagus and going on a diet and swearing off my morning hot chocolate because spring actually WILL come, sooner or later.
The foods that promise comfort in late winter, that post-Christmas time, are a familiar crew – stews and baked pasta and molasses cookies and the smell of bread cooking in a kitchen as you come in half-frozen from some horrible storm. Summer foods are also easy to think of – a fresh tomato salad, corn on the cob, hamburgers sizzling on a grill – but the food of early spring is stumping me. It’s not REAL spring yet, so the fresh rhubarb and asparagus are still weeks away, but something in me has cheered up considerably and I want this week’s cooking to reflect that, to turn towards the hope for spring. Now all I have to do is to take this idea and translate it into a week’s worth of meal plans, turn THAT into a grocery list and email it off to my husband, easy-peasy.
Is this a general phenomenon? Are you feeling like eating lighter, springlike foods now, or are you still wanting a hot bowl of stew? And what foods say spring to you, what do you want to cook when the snow suddenly starts magically melting away?