'Tis the season

The weather in Seattle has very suddenly reminded me of my time growing up in Wisconsin: frigid winters trapped indoors, leading to humid and oppressively hot summers. I used to spend each Winter debating whether I hated the cold more than the heat, then flipping my position when the Summer came around. But in-between were the Fall and Spring, the really beautiful transitions that made the past suffering bearable and braced us for the polar opposite fast approaching.

But in Seattle the weather is more homogeneous; a gray, rainy season and the beautiful Summer (which is sadly quite short). Though not as extreme, it also tends to smooth out (to a vanishing, nearly flat line) the demarcations of the seasons. Where in Wisconsin I could appreciate the cycle of the year, in Seattle it all tends to blend together.

As my family has more and more started to opt out of the local Supermarkets and increasingly into the farmers' markets, we've had to adapt to a certain reality of food; namely that it is seasonal. I've always grown up in a food system where you ate whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. Strawberries in the winter? Sure, why not? Oranges and bananas apparently grew all year round and why should anyone ever want anything different? But as the plentiful growing season of the summer and fall winds to its inevitable end, we're looking at ever-shrinking options at the markets. I couldn't be more thrilled.

With so many source options at your local Supermarket, you can swing from ingredient to ingredient for a year without every really focusing on anything (or even repeating!). But when there's a glut of braising greens at the stalls, you really start to center your culinary sights on them. You clearly can't cook the same meal night after night, so you're forced to change things up. In doing so, I had suddenly reconnected with just how people had come to make so many cabbage dishes, such a variety of potato entrees, and why onions found their way into just so much. Necessity is the mother of invention, or at least in this case, the desire for variety sparks experimentation.

Rather than dabble in an ingredient for a night, we've been zeroing in on them. We've cooked kale and chard at least ten different ways by now and have a better feeling for what makes it good and what makes it go wrong. If you had told me even six months ago that pizza topped with chard would be incredibly tasty, I probably couldn't have even envisioned chard's shape in my head, much less the taste or texture.

More than anything, I wonder if I can regain some of that seasonality I've missed through the food I'm eating (and not the temperature outside). Remember that it was Fall due to what was on my plate, rather than what was outside my window.

Wild Mushroom Exhibition

My wife and I happened to stumble across an announcement for a wild mushroom exhibition promising lots of wild mushrooms and cooking demonstrations this weekend.  We decided that we wanted to check this out, see what the cooking demos were about, and hopefully buy some good, local and wild mushrooms to take home and make into a whole feast of different dishes.

Instead, we found a very small room with lots of natural displays of mostly inedible mushrooms, a booth or two for "arts and crafts in mushroom style", and a cooking demonstration that really only served to talk about mushrooms you'd be hard-pressed to find, presented in fairly routine ways.  It was a mushroom lover's dream, if by love you mean that you like to identify them for the sake of it and compare gills between species.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, it just wasn't what we were looking for.

We really wanted to find some good, local mushroom purveyors to get information on what's in season and get something more than just chanterelles and shiitakes.  We're going to visit the West Seattle farmers' market tomorrow and see if we can do just that.

In the future, we'll be looking for mushroom "festivals" and not "exhibitions".