Life gives you lemons

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Or lemon tart. Or custard. Or lemon-blueberry muffins. Meyer lemons, those schoolbus-yellow stars of the most lemony desserts, are in season. It is a very brief season indeed, and by the end of the month, they will be impossible to find again until next year. I always buy them when I see them, and try to find ways to get them to the table. This year, we had little lemon boudini (somewhere between a custard and a soufflé), a light lemon cake dusted in powdered sugar (half went to the neighbors), and lemon-blueberry muffins (these to celebrate the beginning of midwinter break).

I understand the Meyer’s one brief shining moment, as a white pot embossed with Tuscan-looking fruit sat on our back patio during my California childhood, and in it lived a small Meyer lemon tree. Its twin pot held kumquats, but we knew which one would bring the most joy to our table. It was a small tree, so we could hope for two or three lemons at the most, but that was plenty for a sugary lemon cake.

When I moved to Germany, it was lemon season, but there were no local lemons in that northern clime. Instead, people counted the days until asparagus season. This didn’t compute for me, since the green spears were ubiquitous year-round in the Golden State. For a few brief weeks, Germans made hollandaise, steamed little new potatoes, pulled corks from green bottles, and sliced the ham thickly. And then it was over, and we were back to broccoli and pork chops.

Barbara Kingsolver’s chronicle of a year of living off local foods is on my nightstand. My evenings seems to have been preempted far too often these past two weeks, and I am only two chapters in. Still, in one of those two chapters, she has taught me the why of the wait. The plant sends up shoots that can only be harvested and eaten in a very short period of time. And more importantly, only some spears can be harvested, as the plant needs some greenery to survive its retreat underground for another winter. Maintaining the bed’s viability over the years is as much part of growing asparagus as is learning to make hollandaise.

Our family’s kumquat did not survive the cold, dark years when we lived in Portland, but we spoiled the lemon tree, wrapping it in quilts on cold nights and bringing it inside to the warmest southern window we could give it. It got scraggly over those years, but the embossed pot now sits in the California sun on my mother’s back deck, and still gives her lemons.