Greens

May has been a particularly cool month, so we're still enjoying the winter and early-spring greens from the garden. Almost every day we have a lettuce salad with scallions from the garden. Every week we cook up some escarole with pine nuts and golden raisins for a nice Italian side dish, or make some escarole and white bean soup. As we finish off the escarole and spinach from the garden, we're putting in French Emerite pole beans and French Rolande bush beans...which will be thin, delicate, and delicious.

A particularly wonderful product of the garden this year is the never-ending supply of shelling peas (now competing for bed space with the budding dahlias!). While we've grown several varieties, our favorite by far are the French petit pois...tiny pods of tiny peas nestled in close to one another. We eat them in pasta, as a side dish, raw out of the pods, and in a variety of fresh spring pea soups. We've experimented with a variety of recipes, all using homemade chicken stock and either creme fraiche or cream, and liked them all. Our favorite has creme fraiche, and a sprinkling of garden chives and mint sprigs, shown here. Perry's not sure that any of them, however, have achieved the transporting intensity of the little spring pea soup amuse bouche that he had in New York at Picholine many years ago.

Spinach: the crop that keeps on giving

As we leave February behind and begin March, we thought it appropriate to have a nice dinner of spring lamb chops with a fresh mint/parsley chimichurri, and spinach cooked slowly and briefly with olive oil, garlic, and salt.

The spinach in the garden, planted last September to be ready in time for the traditional spinach gnocchi at Thanksgiving, is still growing and yielding! Here Tess (now 10 weeks old) is "helping" to harvest some spinach for dinner. We just cut off the largest and mature leaves, as many as we need, and keep the plants in place to keep producing...as we have done all fall and winter so far.

In the kitchen, we made some spaghetti carbonara (using guanciale and pecorino, of course), to savor as a first course. Then we moved on to the lamb chops and spinach, shown here. It was a wonderful dinner, and we look forward to many more meals made with garden parsley, mint, and spinach. And, although we now have our border collie Tess to herd sheep, we doubt that we'll be growing our own lamb chops anytime soon!