In May, I'm doing it again: 31 days, 90 meals,lots of soft-boiled eggs. In other words,#cook90.
It's the first time I'll be taking the #cook90 challenge in the spring (I've only ever done it in January) and I won't beat around the bush here: I'm nervous. On the East Coast, January is a month of hibernating and recuperating from the holidays. It's a month of motivation—new year, new meal plan. It's the obvious month to make a dramatic change.
May, of course, is exactly the opposite. If the air gets warmer than 60 degrees, I need to be outside. Here's the way my boyfriend puts it: some people are cats, some people are dogs. Cats can hang around the house, looking out the window and drinking coffee all day. Dogs, on the other hand, get restless. They need to get outside and run in a field and slobber all over a frisbee. I'm a dog.
Can a canine-minded human like me spend the beautiful month of May cooking? Or will I resent being in the kitchen when I could be drinking one of those40-ounce bottles of roséon a boat? (About that: anybody have a boat I can hang out on?)
诀窍将be to remember the reasons why I want to do #cook90 again in the first place. Chief among those is that I feel the momentum from January's #cook90 waning. And at the worst time! This is the season ofnew potatoes,spring onions,ramps,asparagus—craveable ingredients I can't cook with in winter. I want to seize this cooking moment, but if I'm not careful—if I'm not doing #cook90—I risk spending spring on gross sidewalk cafes (donotget me started on sidewalk cafes), eating overcooked omelets and underwhelming doughnuts.
I love spring too much to waste it on that. Instead, I'm having very twee fantasies of biking to myfarmers' marketand making lunch out of whatever I find. I haven't bakedfocacciain years, but I'm imagining one topped with piles and piles of caramelized spring onions. That'd make a good boat snack, right?
Allthe challenges of #cook90will be in full effect. I'll still have to balance cooking, my job, weekend visits from friends and my canine need to be outside. So I'm going to try to keep things fast. Spring meals aren't as time-consuming as winter ones—there will be no slow-cooked roasts, no simmering tomato sauces. I'm going to cook, eat, get outside. Maybe even bring the food with me.
But before I do any of this, I need to clean out my fridge. This is, really, the only "spring cleaning" I do—clearing out the half-full jar of olives I opened for Valentine's Day (romantic, right?) and that bowl that's been sitting there for weeks with just a teaspoon of dried-out pesto. Whatever I can salvage, I put into afrittata. Cooked chicken, leftover greens, the last spoonfuls from a tub of yogurt—it all goes in. If I have cooked potatoes in the fridge, I chop them hurriedly ("rustically") and pour the eggs over it. It'shalf-frittata, half Spanish tortilla, and all #cook90. Just like we'll be in May.
Yes, I said "we." I want you to cook with me in May. Let's show the world that we can do this again. Let's prove that #cook90 isn't just another New Year's resolution that doesn't stick. Nobody can do #cook90 all the time, but we can take the energy, the rejuvenation, and the fabulous foods of spring and make it work for us. Right? Hey, I'm a bit nervous and full of doubt, too. But that's par for the course when I'm about to do something I'm proud of.
