Quiet

It is that quiet part of year, where all seems still and asleep. If the rain stops, the only sounds around us are mechanical: no birds or babbling brooks, just freeway drone and heat pumps kicking in. My kids are more likely to be curled up under blankets with reading material than outside building forts. The backlog on my desk is as dry as a business text, except for the green-covered seed catalogue that I have been saving for the depths of the darkness.

And then yesterday happened. After an incredible soggy week, even by local standards, the sun dawned with just a hint of warmth. The warm water in the window-washing bucket actually stayed tepid for the time it took to wash the kitchen windows. I see a few bulbs poking out, and the little green buds are lending the palest of casts to the fruit trees. Of course, the sun is still weak and fleeting, limiting my time outdoors, but it prods me gently to dust off seed catalogues and think about planting some hope. I try to remember what sweet peas smell like and know I will sow some soon.

Fresh food is also at its low point: there are but a few stragglers in the vegetable drawers: a bunch of white turnips, a sorry wedge of cabbage and on the counter a lone acorn squash. I admit to resorting to mixed salad from California as even the local greens have all disappeared, and I'm not willing to give up on crunchy. We count the weeks (three!) until deliveries from the farm resume.

It is California that is saving us these days, as the panoply of citrus explodes at the coop: navel and blood oranges, tangelos, grapefruits, and lemons. Meyer lemons, those jewels of my childhood, warm, golden lemons, sweeter than sweet. I greedily snatched up an armful and gently lowered them into my shopping cart just as a mother lowers a sleeping baby into the crib.

At home, they clamor like children with their possibilities: Meyer lemon cake with honey-lavendar cream. Lavendar picked by the Little One in his gardening class last autumn. And since I'm already infusing the cream with the gentle purple flowers, I do a bit extra, and make a ganache for some truffles. With half a lemon leftover from that forray, I infuse some more cream with thyme, and use that for another herby-lemony combination. The final batch of truffles, to use up the last of the cream, is inspired by the lone comice pear in the bowl that will be my afternoon snack: Williams pear liqueur. I'm thinking I will be popular at pickup time after school with my little white boxes full of hand-dipped brown.

There remain ten golden beauties on the counter. Into a pot of boiling water go six of them, to be halved and salted and put up for Moroccan chicken in the coming weeks. I add chicken to the shopping list, to be ready when the preserved lemons are. And then there were four.

Four little lemons, just enough for a tiny batch of marmelade, perhaps with a vanilla bean. Another jar or two to tuck on the shelf of preserves, with a smear leftover for breakfast this week. It seems odd, preserving winter, but just as those boisterous berries of summer submit to the jar, to release their excess of summer in the dead of winter, so will these lemons impart their tiny, quiet rays of hope in their own turn.

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.