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.

Corn chips calling

An end cap at Whole Foods called to me today: “Look! Corn chips! You can make chili-Frito pie!” Apparently, that was what their marketers were thinking too, as they conveniently flanked the bags of organic yellow chips with cans of chili, mild on the left, hot on the right. Lucky for me, I have some Trader Joe’s vegetarian chili in the larder. I also had to double back to the cheese section (tasting fresh mozzarella balls and goat milk gouda as we passed) to pick up some jack cheese to grate over the whole mess.

As I grate the local Beecher’s Just Jack, I reflect on what Michael Pollan might think of this quasi-food. I haven’t quite finished his latest book, but have the basic gist. (I set it aside to read Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus, which I stayed up too late to finish last night.) The meal barely meets Michael’s basic criteria, and though I’m positive my great-grandma didn’t put it on the table, I bet my grandmother may well have done so: she was, after all, a Californian.

Chili-Frito pie is comfort food, and in its mainstream incarnation, wildly irresponsible, from its GMO corn chips fried in hydrogenated oils, down to the petroleum- and water-intensive beef by-products mass canned in a featureless cannery somewhere many miles away, and topped with an rBST-laden cheese food. Our version is a moderate improvement, but still quite processed. Organic (and thus non-GMO) corn has been ground into masa for the chips, non-GMO soy made into tofu for the chili. We won’t overeat: two cans for four people, two of whom are growing boys, is about right. Mostly plants: a vegetarian chili manages fine on this count, and the local cheese stands alone (high-ho the Derry-o, the cheese stands alone) as the lone animal product. There’s a salad on the table too, which adds some well-needed leaves to the mix. Have you noticed that the spinach gets sweeter as the days get longer?

My menu choices bring up an interesting conundrum that Michael, for all his good intentions, does not grasp, I think because he is not a mom. The reason I was at Whole Foods instead of the co-op or the farmer’s market is because I was between violin lesson and the Post Office and parent-teacher conferences, and I knew we were out of milk and bread and salad. Whole Foods was conveniently situated (between the Post Office and home), and conveniently situated also applies to the end cap display with what is now our supper. Stopping by the store gave us a chance to have lunch at home (leftovers). Yes, I could have made this a better dinner by making the chili myself from local grass-fed beef (or making fresh tofu from the soymilk I make myself), but then I wouldn’t be writing this; I’d still be in the kitchen. And convenience food would have been on the menu for lunch. Instead of supper.