Savoring the garden’s bounty

JENNY LEHMAN

I want you to feel joy. Real joy. Not the fleeting, easily replaced, brightly-wrapped pleasure of selfies and the flavorless strawberries that fill grocery stores in February, but the true joy of gathering with the people who make your life matter for dinners around the kitchen table. The joy of summer’s sweetest peaches, available for only a few weeks. The ones that are so ripe, they are gently bruised before the bushel baskets leave the field.

Joy, true joy, isn’t fleeting, it is scarce. And through that scarcity, it is precious. It’s my brother’s 7th birthday party, celebrated on a heavy August night, under our large covered porch. We bite the season’s last truly sweet corn off the cob, kernels catching between our teeth. Juice runs down wrists and over chins from thick slabs of sugary watermelon. Aunts, uncles, grandmothers and cousins, brothers and sisters, gather together, easy and familiar, in the kitchen, at the grill, and around the table. Yesterday’s freshly-cut grass still sticks to our bare feet, picked up on a dew-soaked morning walk out to the vegetable garden, where we harvested the green beans, tomatoes and peppers that fill the table.

This moment will never happen again. These people, some now gone, will never gather as the same group. Next summer will be wetter or drier, hotter or cooler. We’ll plant new varieties in our gardens and find a change of crops at the farm market. And this next summer, unique and scarce, like every other summer of our lives, will be precious and filled with joy.

The other seasons will be, too. A harvest of more turnips and fewer pumpkins will change Thanksgiving dinner. In a few years, we’ll forget the high piles of snow, but remember the gift of unexpected pancake breakfasts on mornings of weather-bestowed leisure. Spring will return and we’ll watch carefully as each plant emerges from the ground. We’ll celebrate subtleties of color, form and flavor that would be lost amidst the approaching riot of summer’s bright bounty.

As you read this book, as you cook the recipes, may each story and each meal be shaped by the people gathered at your table — both family and friends — and by the community of farmers and purveyors who connect you to food at its best, fresh and seasonal. Let this year’s bounties shape each meal in a way that will never return, one that will be truly precious. And then, next year, may you experience it — new, fresh, and different — all over again.

Q&A with Jonathan Bardzik

Garden Center: Why did you decide to organize your book by the seasons and why was it important to you?

Jonathan Bardzik: The idea originally grew out of four years now of cooking demonstrations at Washington D.C.’s historic Eastern Market. Every week I show up with brand new recipes that I developed out of fresh ingredients available that weekend at the market. So it just seemed natural, because these recipes were all developed out of seasonal ingredients, to organize them that way. But in the process of writing it, I really reconnected with how important the seasons are to the way we live our lives. And I’ve thought a lot about growing up in horticulture … I think that the seasons really help us appreciate the passing of the days of our lives in a much more significant way that slows things down a little bit.

GC: You have collected, cooked and demonstrated so many recipes. How did you narrow down your choices when you were trying to determine what to include? What was your criteria for selecting the recipes that you did?

MATT HOCKING

JB: The book is 127 recipes. We create a new recipe every single week for these live cooking demonstrations … I first started with wanting to really focus on seasonal ingredients … A lot of it was making sure there wasn’t too much duplication. One of my favorite ways to throw together a quick weeknight dinner is to make quesadillas. Pretty much anything between two tortillas and cheese and lots of seasonal veggies makes a great quick, healthy weeknight dinner. You only want so many of those in any given book. There were some groupings around key seasonal ingredients or techniques so there’s a full section in the winter on soups and homemade stock. There’s a great section in spring on egg dishes. Summer talks a lot about salads. It was challenging to narrow it down and I can tell you there are definitely a few more books [in the works].

GC: How do you combat new gardeners’ and cooks’ fear of failure?

JB: I think TV exposure and magazines and everything else has done such a great job of showing people the real joy of success, whether it’s with cooking or gardening or anything else. But there’s this expectation that things can and should be done perfectly every single time. And not even the professionals get it right every single time. I think we’ve lost a little bit of this idea that you can just go out and garden or put a meal on the table because it’s fun. And because you get to share time with the people in your life who make your life matter while you’re doing this and that’s good enough. And it’s OK to hit the garden center on a Saturday morning and bring some plants home and plant some containers and put things into the garden. And you’ve won already.