Hello, spring! The snow has melted, the flowers are blooming and the sun is rising earlier every morning. Birds are singing show tunes. Here we have been watching clouds of pine pollen dredging every surface with yellow dust. It’s almost April and we are springing with joy for asparagus!
Asparagus tart

Humans have been gobbling up asparagus for ages. 20,000 year-old wild asparagus seeds have been found at archeological digs in Egypt. There is an image of asparagus in an Egyptian frieze that was painted before 3000 BC. Queen Nefertiti decreed asparagus to be the food of the Gods. In the first century AD Emperor Augustus quipped, “Velocius quam asparagi conquantur,” which every clever Latin wag knows means, “As quick as cooking asparagus”. A recipe for cooking asparagus even appears in the oldest known cookbook: Apicius’s Third-century AD De re coquinaria, Book III.

Asparagus, (or asparagi) named by the Romans, means “the first sprig or sprout of every plant, especially when it be tender”. There are four popular types consumed here in the twenty-first century: green, white, purple and wild. Green is what we usually find at the grocery store or farm stand. The new asparagus crops will be coming to market soon.

But I am wasting time inside here at the computer. It is spring, and time to enjoy the great outdoors and the bounty of asparagus that is rolling our way. Carpe asparagi! Seize your lively and persistent asparagus by the lapels, and cook it with abandon! I have nattered on before about our favorite way, which is to roast it on a cookie sheet under the broiler, with a scattering of salt, olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. We also like to roll it up in aluminum foil and toss it on the grill for a few minutes. You can celebrate Friday Night Pizza and add a handful to the pizza just as it goes in the oven. Or stick a few tender shoots on a piece of baguette with a schmeer of goat cheese. Don’t waste a minute, or a morsel. (Mr. Sanders has just acquired an air fryer, and has been blasting batches of broccoli, so I imagine he will be experimenting with asparagus soon enough. Updates to follow…)

Penne and Asparagus
1 pound penne or other short pasta
1 pound slender asparagus spears, trimmed, cut into one-inch pieces
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon melted butter
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
1 5-ounce log soft fresh goat cheese

Preparation
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Arrange asparagus spears in a single layer on a baking
sheet. Combine olive oil and butter and pour over asparagus. Season liberally with salt and
pepper and toss to combine. Roast, tossing as needed, for 15 minutes or until spears are
browned and tender.
2. Meanwhile, cook pasta in large pot of boiling salted water until al dente, stirring
occasionally.
3. While pasta is cooking, in a large bowl, combine lemon peel and goat cheese. Stir until
smooth.
4. Drain pasta, reserving 1 cup cooking liquid. Add hot pasta, asparagus, and 1/4 cup
reserved cooking liquid to bowl with cheese mixture. Toss to coat, adding more reserved
liquid as needed to make the sauce creamy. Season pasta to taste with salt and pepper.
4 minutes (cooking time, add some more for prep)
Asparagus

I still don’t like vegetables that have been stewed beyond recognition. And I resist kale on principal. Aren’t we lucky there are so many ways to enjoy asparagus? Lightly roasted, gently steamed, broiled, wrapped with bacon, folded into pasta, trembling on the edge of ancestral china, lightly dusted with grated egg yolks, rolled in sesame seeds, on top of pizza, in a quiche …
This might be too messy to eat with your fingers, but it is worth a try: Asparagus, Goat Cheese and Tarragon Tart I love the fact that there is no shame in using a store-bought puff pastry – life is short and pastry can be tricky.

Mass quantities of farm-fresh spring fruits and vegetables are ready for you to gobble up: The farmers’ market will be a delight! BTW – The St. Michaels Farmers Market opens for the season April 12: SMFM

Enjoy springtime!

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
—Margaret Atwood

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

It’s another cold and bleak midwinter day and I am holed up wearing a turtleneck, a sturdy L.L. Bean sweater, wool socks, and lined legging – and I am still cold. I think a lesson to be learned is that one should not visit Florida in February, because re-entry to the real world is rude indeed.

Mr. Sanders and I drove to Jacksonville Beach, Florida for a few days of R&R with our daughter, and her family of whirling dervishes over the long Valentine’s Day weekend. The weather wasn’t approved by the Florida tourism board – it was cool and breezy – so we never unpacked shorts, or bathing suits. But it was warmer than it is here, and there were sunrises and sunsets like nothing we get to see normally. There were congregations of white cattle egrets stalking through drainage ditches, and squadrons of pelicans flying in precision formations along the waterline. There were crowds of sandy, barefooted beachgoers waiting in lines for healthy green smoothies and açaí bowls for breakfast. Later we sat in folding chairs on the sidelines of a flag football game, shivering in a light drizzle, watching parents buzzing after their children. The Floridian version of winter clothing entails hoodies, and maybe socks. No one is holed up at home wearing L.L. Bean, or wool.

The dervishes, boys aged 4 and 10, needed to be re-fueled constantly, like sharks on patrol: pancakes, strawberries, carrots, pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, apples, blueberries, mac and cheese, smoothies, organic chickpea flour cheese snacks, organic seaweed snacks, crackers, celery, avocado, lemonade, Triscuits, cookies, bananas, and more grilled cheese. We thought about grilled cheese a lot.

Why does grilled cheese belong to the young? It is just as tasty now as when I walked home for lunch in elementary school, when my mother would fry up an American cheese-based sandwich in the smallest Revere Ware frying pan and crank open a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Ah, those childhood hot lunches! I did the same for my children, except I used store brand cheese product, whereas my mother bought sliced American cheese by the pound from Benny’s Butcher Shop around the corner on Belltown Road. Benny would stand behind the marble counter, rhythmically slapping a square of waxy paper between each piece of cheese as he sliced it, before wrapping it all in crackling white butcher’s paper, and tying the bundle with a neat red and white string bow.

Usually, for wintery Sunday lunches, Mr. Sanders will make his grilled cheese with Swiss cheese, and I still prefer the oozy store brand. Last night we needed warmth, and ventured into adult territory. We upped our grilled cheese game: posh bread, upscale cheese, and opulent add-ons.

I used to think that adding bacon to a grilled cheese sandwich was innovative and fancy. Sometimes including a slice of tomato was an interesting variation. But you can easily expand your repertoire just by rethinking the bread you use. This will elevate your grilled cheese sandwich experience: artisanal sourdough bread. Whoa. But you can also experiment with ciabatta, brioche, Challah bread, Kaiser rolls, or baguettes. Don’t take my word for it: Escoffier Leave the Pepperidge Farm white bread behind. Visit your local artisanal bakery and find something fresh and warm and delicious. Maybe add some fresh pastries to your order for breakfast tomorrow, too. Yumsters.

Then wander through a deli and pick up some Gruyère cheese, and some good cheddar, and invest in a nice wedge of Parmesan cheese. Wander around some more and wonder at the clever packaging and cute containers for sun-dried tomatoes, capers, pesto sauce, pickled jalapeños, chutney, sriracha, and gherkin pickles. Grab some sweet onions, basil, and bacon. Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Grilled Cheese Sandwich includes Romano and Asiago cheese, kimchi, butter, country bread, salt, and olive oil.

The Tasting Table has some great suggestions, too: Tasting Table

Punchfork suggests: Opulent Grilled Cheese

And this is very luxe indeed, with Brie, Gorgonzola, figs and prosciutto: Sugar Love Spices

Chins up! We are almost through February. The daffodils are starting to poke their heads up. I have some crocuses already blooming in the back yard, so spring is on its way. Pull on your hoodie and your wool socks and make a nice hot lunch. You’ll feel better for it. Winter’s not over yet.

“In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone…”
Song by Christina Rossetti and Gustav Holst

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

It’s Friday, the fourteenth of February, and you are reading this at your desk after a nice turkey sandwich, smugly looking forward to the weekend stretching before you. I hope you have done a little planning. It is Valentine’s Day. It is Friday. Fridays require a little flair, a touch of panache, a little extra effort, particularly if you want to enjoy the weekend. I suggest chocolate.

Homemade, store-bought, ordered from the dessert cart, frozen Sara Lee poundcake topped with ice-cream and chocolate sauce, Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, Hershey’s Kisses from the convenience store, a Whitman’s Sampler (for irony) snatched up at grocery store. These are realistic gestures of love and affection and true regard. If you are considering carnations garnered at the gas station – don’t bother. They do not sing of love and inspiration – they signal the impending rueful tales of woe. And don’t go for the over-priced roses that were flown in from gigantic farms in Latin America – they will be dead in under a week. You could use that money to invest in a sizable bower of daffodils. Plan ahead before you head home this afternoon.

Mr. Sanders and I have rarely spent Valentine’s Day together – it might be a major contributing factor to the longevity of our marriage. Most years he has had to attend an annual boat show in sunnier climes, leaving me to my own devices. Though there was the year when he was home, forgot about Valentine’s Day sentiment, and stopped at the grocery store on his way home and snatched up one of the last, limp, cellophane-wrapped bouquets of carnations in the place. You know the ones – already sitting in a shopping cart near the check out lane – not even a full dozen. He arrived home to find happy, scrubbed pajama-clad children, a home-cooked meal, flourless chocolate cake, and a nicely drawn Valentine. It was memorable.

This past Sunday afternoon I assuaged my conscience, and baked a batch of Dorie Greenspan’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies for Mr. Sanders’s early Valentine. I am paying the Valentine’s Day love forward. This is the best recipe I have found for chocolate chip cookies. I love it because the oatmeal gives it the appearance of health food and I can freeze more than half of the dough, which feels like money in the bank, knowing there is cookie material waiting for any possible emergency; better than money spent on roses that have an embarrassing carbon footprint.

Dorie Greenspan’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

I use my electronic kitchen scale for this recipe – Dorie calls for 340 grams of semisweet chocolate. I followed the recipe on the back of the Nestlé bag for years, obviously, and just dumped a bag of chocolate chips into the dough. Now I use Ghiradelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate because I am a grownup who prepares for sentimental gestures, but a bag of Ghiradelli weighs only 283 grams. It is a good thing I finally checked. I have been cheating Mr. Sanders and his children for years! Now I weigh out the prescribed amount of chocolate chips. Purists would say that I shouldn’t be using waxy chocolate chips, but should instead be chopping the chocolate – but there are limits to my devotion. But you go ahead and eyeball the amount of chocolate you want to include in your annual show of love. I’m aiming for a little overkill. I also sprinkle a smidge of Maldon salt over the cookies, so they are not cloyingly sweet. This is real life, after all.

Mr. Sanders is home this year. The happy children are off on their own, and it is just us and Luke the wonder dog here tonight. We are going to make pizza, watch No Offence on Britbox, and read for a while before bed. Life is good.

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

You’ll have to go somewhere else for your Super Bowl snacks ideas this year – although – between you and me – you really can’t do much better than a party-size bag of nacho cheese Doritos.*

While some writers wait for divine inspiration before angling their fingers over their keyboards, others of us wander dazedly through the grocery store, looking for ideas. During our COVID year I’d rush tearing through Food Lion- colors, packaging, smells, people! It was all there. I found myself photographing some loose carrots on our kitchen countertop over the weekend: the low angle of the sun setting made the carrots radiate an unearthly orange glow that I think I have only seen in the incandescent light of the genre paintings by the Vermeer and Leyster. This week, while on another motivational stroll through Food Lion (after I had scoped out the extensive and flashy Valentine candy display) I was drawn to this display of radicchio. Look at those colors! Raspberry, magenta, plum, magenta, amaranthine, violet, amethyst, fuchsia, aubergine and carmine! What could I do with those colors in real life? It’s time to make a colorful winter salad.

I love a nice leafy, crunchy salad. I was raised on iceberg lettuce salads, so the discovery of romaine lettuce in college shifted the tectonic plates of my tetchy palate. I used to eat sun-warmed tomatoes out in the garden every summer, but grew up eating tasteless, refrigerated, hothouse tomatoes in my salads all winter long. Luckily time does march on, and we can avail ourselves of healthier greens all year long. Our local farmers have also come into the twenty-first century and are ready to nourish us with their winter bounties. Look for parsnips, garlic, turnips, rutabagas, leeks, lettuce, spinach, kale, chard, potatoes (sweet or regular), and cabbage.

It might be a new year, but that doesn’t mean that I am any less inclined to take the easiest way out in preparing dinner. There is nothing like enjoying a lighter-than-air salad for a summer dinner, though in the winter it needs to be much heartier than our summertime frolics with cool cucumbers, airy vinaigrettes, and artful splashes of lemon juice. We need calories and heft right about now, just so we can go outside and do battle with snowy sidewalks, and scrape the windshield while the wind blows and the snow is still falling.

I also like to use up leftovers when I make salad, no matter what time of year it is. This is our new budget in action – less waste! In the summer I will shred leftover chicken and fling it across a bed of crisp lettuce, with a handful of sunflower seeds and some chunky homegrown tomatoes. This week I warmed up a leftover chicken breast, and sliced it, and nestled it on a bed of spinach leaves. I cooked the last three slices of bacon, and then used the resulting bacon fat for frying the best, and crunchiest, croutons (made from a loaf of old-ish French bread from the weekend). I nestled a couple of still-warm soft-boiled eggs within some of the spinach curls and scattered the bacon over everything. A heavy, homemade vinaigrette, redolent with garlic, was drizzled over the plates. Add candles. Yumsters. A warm, nutritious salad, and an efficient use of leftovers. You could even add a side dish of (canned) soup, if the shoveling has gone into overtime, and you are feeling generous.

Homemade Vinaigrette
6 tablespoons vinegar (use the fancy stuff – the ones you got for Christmas)
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 cup olive oil
1 crushed garlic clove
Pinch of ground black pepper
Pinch of nice sea salt

Bacon-fried Croutons
Bacon makes everything better – and you know it!
Cook 3 or 4 bacon slices in a frying pan. Save the grease. (Sometimes I add a little olive oil to make a deeper puddle of cooking grease – use your judgment.)
Add a handful of cubed French bread to the frying pan, cooking for 2 to 3 minutes, until golden brown on all sides. Drain on paper towels. Lightly sprinkle garlic powder, onion powder and Lawry’s Seasoning Salt over the crotons. Using Lawry’s is crucial – make no substitute – not even for “Slap Ya Mama”.

The dark of winter is a good time to introduce hints of color and sparkle to your salad. Reds, oranges, purples, yellows – a veritable rainbow of earthly delights. Cranberries! Apples! Cheddar cheese! Pomegranate seeds! Kale Salad
You can throw everything in a main course winter salad, by cleaning out the produce drawer in the fridge and adding shredded cabbage, carrots, Brussels sprouts, roasted squash, or chunks of apples. Martha knows best:
Radicchio Salad

Radicchio Salad with Oranges

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
—Jack Kerouac

*Food52 Super Bowl Snacks

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

I have retreated to the cozy bedroom to write this morning. I am back in bed-ish – lying on top of the covers, but covered by a thick down throw. It is 19 degrees outside this morning! I have a good view of our front yard, which is swaddled in a thick throw of snow. We haven’t had snow here for at least five years, and the novel beauty of it stops us in our tracks as we trot around the house, performing our daily chores and rituals. A naked shadow of the Japanese maple stretched across the snow yesterday, angled and stark, so like a master’s Sumi-e brush ink painting on pure white paper; sure, fleeting perfection.

Luke the wonder dog had forgotten about snow. He was raised in Florida, hasn’t read too many books, and is prone to forgetfulness, so I can’t blame his incredulity. His first walk yesterday was gleeful and joyous and he ran and kicked up white, fluffy clouds. By the afternoon he was less charmed by the snow, and seemed slightly spooked – everything looked, and smelled, different. I had to shovel a narrow path for him in the back by the raised garden bed so he could see the frozen ground under his cold feet. He then trotted off to happily smell the trail he had blazed earlier, reassured that his back forty was secure. He did not detect even a whiff of a neighboring cat trespasser. And the bare hydrangea bushes, with their few sodden heads, provided excellent cover and privacy. He patrolled quickly, and then came inside to reclaim his position near a hot air register.

Luke and I are clinging to our creature comforts, while Mr. Sanders has been wrapped in layers of flannel, corduroy, fleece, Heattech, alpaca, wool, Gore-Tex, and goose down; shoveling the drive and clearing off his car, happy as a new clam. He had oatmeal for breakfast, and is a furnace of hyperbolic energy. My breakfast bagel and Luke’s kibble are no match for hot, steaming, fruit-topped oatmeal. And if you have to go outside this weekend, instead of retiring to a warm indoor writing space, I encourage you to eat a hot, nourishing breakfast before you put your big boots on.

Mr. Sanders, and Ina Garten, like to cook their oatmeal in the microwave. And they are both practically perfect. Ina Garten Oatmeal

Mr. Sanders makes cold, refrigerated overnight oats 9 months out of the year. He likes to doctor his winter oatmeal with brown sugar, maple syrup, cream, and/or fruit. He suggests banana slices, blueberries, strawberries, granola, cinnamon, a splash of vanilla, pumpkin spices, almonds, Kiwi fruit, raspberries, and raisins are all viable and deelish toppings for winter oatmeal breakfasts. You could also try dried cranberries, honey, applesauce or peaches! Ina likes adding a little chocolate, for a sweet change of pace. Here are some more topping suggestions: Toppings

A more novel approach to oatmeal is to embrace the savory side of life. Add eggs, sausage, cheese, onions and greens to oatmeal! Savory Oatmeal America’s Test Kitchen

Or you can try Cooking for Peanuts’s savory oatmeal – in case you need a new way to serve kale!

Baked oatmeal? Ah, the golden era we live in. Baked Oatmeal

Here is a handy oatmeal guide – everything you should know about cooking oatmeal: Delish

Personally, I think oatmeal is best employed in Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes, but I am huddled inside, and Mr. Sanders is out there enjoying the snow. Dorie Greenspan’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

“…now and then a giggling trail of mermaids appeared in our wake. We fed them oatmeal.”
—Tove Jansson

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.