Eggs. Wild greens. Sitting.

Travel

12 May

One of the geese is missing. They are beautiful gray African geese and have lived here as a mated pair for the last five years. They are friendly to humans but protective of the motley flock of ducks on the pond with their cheerful, if emphatic, honking. I can’t imagine a predator getting one of them. I hold out hope that the female has simply gone off into the bushes to sit on her eggs.

To sit the nest a goose (or a duck or a chicken) has to ‘go broody’. She goes into a kind of hormonal trance and is essentially totally committed to sitting still on the eggs until they hatch — which is 21 days for a chicken, 28 for a goose. That’s the better part of a month and often they are so focused they don’t eat or drink. It’s healthier, if you have a broody bird in your coop, to lift her daily so she can eat, drink, poop and go back to the nest. But when they go rogue it’s up to their natural instinct.

This kind of patience, commitment and ruminative sitting is what the Taurus season can teach us. The initial impulse of Aries gives way to this gestating abundance. You just have to sit with it, steep, enjoy the slow gathering of forces. You are forming the year, letting nature work through you to burst into blossom, or out from the egg with fluffy wings flapping into Gemini.

Out searching the fields and bushes I ‘forage’. This lush season is all about greens. Around the farm I find an omnibus of semi-wild leaves: wild fennel fronds, sorrel, salad burnet, nettle, dandelion, chickweed, chervil, lovage, rhubarb (not technically a green— in fact the leaf is toxic, just eat the stems!), pea tops, radish leaves, brassica flowers. Eating these greens attunes you to the minute changes in the season. The earlier greens like dandelion and chickweed are terse and cleansing. Nettle is rich and nutritive just when you need it most. The lovage and rhubarb are bright, stimulating and springy flavors. When the pea tops start I can taste the peas-to-come in June.

Of course eggs are a natural match with greens.

There’s an extra abundance of eggs in spring— at least from the hens who aren’t broody and sitting on eggs. Creamed spinach or nettle with a poached egg. Pea tops in an omelette. Victoria sponge cake (uses 3-4 eggs) with rhubarb and custard (another couple eggs).

I recently had a dessert at the lovely restaurant, Maurice, in Portland. The ice cream was bright green with the pungent celery-esque flavor of lovage, and a chervil cream floated as a layer of vegetal anise above a rhubarb compote. It was a heady, sweet and verdant experience of this moment.