Every year, spring rolls around and the baby leaves sprout and I am amazed by the fresh, bright green. Walking around the park today, I remembered that not long ago I found myself saying that Tooting Common is actually kind of rubbish, but I take it all back. I was blinded by the grey and the puddles and the skeletal trees. Now that the buds are back, my vision has cleared, I am seeing reason, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to celebrate the spring greens and other earthly pleasures I have been regaling in lately — mainly food but not entirely.
Starting strong with a soup I made last night that was outrageously delicious. It was Sophie Christinel’s Spring Time Soup and had everything you could possibly ever want from a soup with such a name — leeks, onions, shallots, fennel, garlic, asparagus, mushrooms, dill, parsley. And then some rogue additions like dijon mustard, nutritional yeast, orzo, cannellini beans which I happened to have lovingly prepped and ready to add to a soup. Both Andy and I were totally delighted by it and equally so when I had it again for lunch today.
Another soup to brighten up an unseasonably chilly spring day has been Theresa from
’s “Reimagined Leek and Potato Soup”, with giant couscous, thin slices of potato, and frizzled crispy leek ends on top. The thin potato slices add a sophisticated textural dimension that other, more classic L&P soups lack, and that I didn’t realise how much I appreciated until I ate this one.
Green beans! A vegetable oft-left by the way side in favour of mange-tous in this family, but which can be extremely delicious if treated with the respect they deserve. In this case, that meant making Molly Baz’s “Cold and Crunchy Green Beans with Garlic Pistachio Vinaigrette”. Blanching and then dunking the beans in cold water kept them nice and crisp, and honestly, I could have eaten this vinaigrette on its own with a spoon it was so, SO good. Lemony, salty, crunchy, creamy, perfect.
Big Lunch Salads are a concept I have adopted since reading an interview with Sharon and Paul Mrozinski in a book my friend Ebba got me called Al Fresco: Inspired Ideas for Outdoor Living. Each person featured in the book shares a recipe or two, and theirs is a very loose one for a salad made with whatever you have on hand, really.
Mine have mainly consisted of rocket, thinly sliced cabbage, edamame beans (highly recommend!!), broccoli, blood orange (a star of the season, even if it’s not green), shaved parmesan, sometimes a few chickpeas if I have them, and an extremely tangy dressing of mainly lemon juice with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper whisked in. It’s surprisingly filling and you just don’t want to stop eating.
Speaking of blood oranges, I had forgotten how much I like beetroot until I made
’s “Beets, blood orange dressing, whipped feta.” The colours matched the plates that Andy and I had picked up from a brocante in Nantes recently, and I ate two servings with the addition of toasted pumpkin and sunflower seeds on top (I have been adding these to most things lately).
In a recent newsletter about a trip to Paris with my friend Emma, I mentioned the pickled egg we ate at La Buvette. It was sprinkled with furikake, which I have since acquired and have been thoroughly enjoying. Sometimes, I’ll just pour a bit into my hand and toss it back for a quick salty snack, but it is equally as good atop a bowl of choi sum, tofu, and rice — or anything at all.
Since it has started marginally warming up, the chives and parsley we planted last year are back in abundance, and it has been such a pleasure to go out and snip a few stalks off to use in our meals. Yesterday, I brought in a handful of the parsley and couldn’t believe how strongly it smelt, which made me think that it must be more densely packed with nutrients than the supermarket stuff. We also have some spontaneous lemon balm growing which I might make some tea with, and we just planted oregano and thyme yesterday, so hopefully that takes.
On today’s walk, I noticed that the elderflower is out! Last year, I harvested some and made elderflower cordial, but it wasn’t very good. I am thinking this year I might try and make something that I can use in dressings or, as Zara (my sister who I was speaking with on the phone as I walked) suggested, I could use it as a sweetener in my matcha. If anyone knows of any recipes for such a thing, please send them my way!
Less edible but still food- and nature-adjacent was this great quote I read in Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education this morning. A few lines to put us all in our place:
While we are on the topic of reading material, I recently ordered myself a new stash of magazines — something I hadn’t done in a really long time, despite being an avid magazine collector and appreciator (I blame the economy). I bought the latest issues of Kinfolk, The Gentlewoman, and a relatively new magazine called Linseed which is only on its second issue — this one is all about “The Olive”.
All of them have been the reminder I needed to always buy magazines — they have so much to give! Kinfolk was a lot funnier than I remembered it being last time I read it. In The Gentlewoman, I particularly loved the feature interview with the Japanese author Sayaka Murata who is just the strangest, most unique person you can imagine. And Linseed tells the story of the olive through a beautiful mix of personal, generational stories, cultural and religious histories, recipes, and artwork. Plus it’s just an amazing piece of printing.
Lastly, someone who has brought me immense joy in these first few weeks of spring is my grandma. She came to visit from Brisbane and I took her on an adventure to France. Here she is looking like a bride on a sunset walk near my mum’s place.
See you in the next one!
Annabel
Sigh. Longing for spring as winter bears down in the antipodes.
Delightful ✨💛🌻