Eating with the seasons — late spring

Seasonal eating gets romanticized into something complicated. It isn't. It's buying the things the farm has a lot of right now, and using them within a week. Late spring is one of the easier windows — the variety is wide and most of it forgives a forgetful cook.

What's actually showing up

In May and June across most of the country, expect: asparagus tapering off, the first strawberries (small, intensely sweet), spring onions and green garlic, radishes of every color, salad greens at their peak, spinach, arugula, snap peas, the first summer squash, rhubarb, fresh herbs, and pastured eggs whose yolks look like sunsets because the hens are back on grass.

Stone fruit and tomatoes are not yet here, no matter what the grocery store implies. If your farm has them in May, ask where they came from.

The "use it this week" approach

Buy three things you have a plan for and one thing you don't. The thing you don't have a plan for is how you learn. Salad turnips raw with butter and salt. Garlic scapes blitzed into pesto. Rhubarb stewed with a spoon of sugar and folded into yogurt.

The single most useful skill is roasting. A sheet pan, 425°F, olive oil, salt, twenty minutes. This works on almost everything green or root-like that came out of the ground this month.

What to do with leafy greens before they wilt

Wash them the day you get them. Spin dry. Wrap in a clean towel inside a bag in the fridge. They keep five to seven days like this. Without that step, three.

If they're already on the edge, they're soup. Anything wilted blends into a green soup with a potato and an onion. It is impossible to mess up and it freezes.

Why this matters more than the recipes

A weekly pickup forces a shift from "I need ingredients for tonight's recipe" to "what do I have, and what does it want to be." That shift is the actual point. Recipes are downstream of ingredients, not upstream.