strawberry season is here
I’m emerging — slowly, squinting, blinking — back into the light of day after a six-week work tunnel. It happens that way sometimes, gradually then all at once, that everything converges and the walls cave in and tout à coup I’m working every weekend and attending meetings at midnight and sharing pizza with my colleagues at my desk at 2am to stay awake. When life outside work is condensed only to its most basic and essential components: eat, sleep, wash, reopen the laptop. The waters might reclaim the earth & I probably wouldn’t notice until I was myself subsumed.
I’m grateful to enjoy my work and to have colleagues I can laugh with, even at the toughest moments, but it always takes a while to readjust after such periods — the crash that comes from the adrenaline finally leaving the body is a deep and lingering one. But here we are, I’ve emerged, and I can notice the world around me afresh: the pink cherry blossoms of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the evening birdsong which I’m finally at home to hear, the plane trees that line the Champs-Élysées in full, majestic leaf once more. And the strawberries have returned in the meantime.
It’s my third spring in the city of lights & its beauty is still fresh to me each year; its joy, its collective exhale, a thing of grandeur unto itself. And now that work is a little calmer I’m ready to enjoy it to its full. The suffocating heat of summer is far enough away still, but the ice cold of winter is past. The time is now: now for leisurely morning coffees sur terrace, long French lunches with chilled white wine, morning runs by the Seine, the majestic orange-pink sunsets best observed from the quai with a spritz Saint-Germain. Now, in other words, for that infamous joie de vivre. As I write, it is 28 degrees, I’m slightly sunburnt, and three of the next four weeks contains a bank holiday. I’ll be spending May Day picnicking in the Parc Monceau in a linen dress with my friends, and I’m currently on the lookout for picnic / snack inspiration, if you have any to share.
I did bake for the first time in a long time this weekend, to celebrate the return of both sufficient energy for cooking, and strawberry season. In truth I think it has been a few weeks since the strawberries arrived, but it was my first trip to the farm shop in about a month, so I cannot be sure exactly. Irrespective, it is here now. Each year I look forward to the arrival of the strawberries as indicative of the arrival of spring itself, and so this year I baked strawberry scones to celebrate. The recipe needs more work, which is unsurprising given I baked with more passion than precision, so I cannot share it, but I nonetheless encourage you to mark the arrival of strawberry season in some way, however belatedly. For late April / early May is truly peak spring in the city: blink and you will miss it. And what a waste that would be.
My favourite ways to eat strawberries:
The easiest of all: these chocolate (orange) coated strawberries
This strawberry crumble cake I baked last spring
A strawberry and rhubarb crumble, like this one
Sliced over bowls of yoghurt and granola, and an iced coffee on the side
Pimms, of course
Strawberries can also be great in salads, particularly paired with balsamic vinegar, like this one or this one
They’re also nice on cheesecake — working on that one.
Oh I want to make a strawberry crumble! New summer recipe alert.