Nettle and Quince

A few years ago ramps became fashionable; quite soon after, the trend was to dis the fad. I’ve held my first impression and agree with Bill Telepan’s post on Grub Street: ramps are awesome. The whole point of seasonality is change. Eating becomes monotonous when we steam asparagus in winter and peel oranges year-round, but the anticipation of tender greens after months of cabbage and increasingly gnarly carrots makes cooking feel like an adventure. So to me there is no way but to be excited about ramps. Ramps!

And so I must mention photographer Andrea Gentl’s stunning blog Hungy Ghost Food + Travel, which recently featured beautiful posts about the first wild greens of spring: dandelion, nettles, of course ramps, and, currently, knotweed — which I didn’t know. It may feel a bit frustrating to read these without personally having easy access to forests and meadows, and it did lead me to buy (buy!) nettles at the farmer’s market, but it’s definitely worth the slight bittersweet vexation.

And last but not least, given an entire afternoon or two I’d amble through the list of finalists of Saveur’s Best Food Blog award. I already regularly read some of the nominated blogs but there are many I don’t know, so, with no single full afternoon in sight, I’ve decided, in very organized manner, to read a couple every day.

Temperatures are soaring toward summer here today. Happy Sunday!

Tags: Andrea Gentl, Bill Telepan, blog awards, ramps, Saveur

This entry was posted on 15 April 2012 at 11:11 and is filed under Sunday reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.