Your June recipe playlist

and a rewind of some of my favourite spring recipes to make now

Summer officially starts on June 20. It’s time to get cooking.

The wind up to the dog days of summer is also the wind down of some of my favourite seasonal ingredients. Before you resort to supermarket strawberries, wooden winter asparagus, frozen peas and the disappearance of rhubarb, might I suggest you try one of these excellent rewinds from the Delicious Bits archive?

Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher

With our busy busy lives, creating routine can be a blessing. When you put your least fussy recipes on repeat, it can make life easier, if a little predictable. Seasonal repeats, on the other hand, come with a trifecta of different emotions: anticipation, pleasure and urgency. You eat differently when you know that you won’t taste that particular dish again until next spring.

You may think I’m being a bit pedantic. There’s no question that roasting off season ingredients can bring them a new lease on life, and a semblance of their in-season flavour profile. But there’s a reason that Italian cooks use excellent canned tomatoes year-round. When an ingredient is captured at its peak of ripeness, nothing beats it.

Herewith are the recipes you should be making now, and bookmarking to take out of the archives come the spring equinox on March 20, 2025. That’s when I’ll be starting my spring countdown to the sighting of the year’s first asparagus bundle.

Rhubarb

I’m feeling particularly frantic about rhubarb these days. It’s still around in dwindling bundles, although home gardeners will be enjoying it for some time to come. If you are a rhubarb fan, you’ll have had your fair share of rhubarb-strawberry desserts, perhaps a compote, or a rhubarb ginger jam by now.

It’s true that rhubarb is a wonderful companion to many fruits, its puckery tartness softened with plenty of sugar, but why not try using rhubarb in others ways?

I wrote last week about the savoury side of rhubarb, and to carry forward that theme, here’s a post from 2022 with a trio of rhubarb recipes that move it off the dessert menu.

Three rhubarb recipes to try now

Asparagus

Photo courtesy of Richard Paquet

Ah, asparagus. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Grilled. Raw and freshly shaved in a salad. The star of a quiche or frittata. In a risotto. But perhaps best of all in a delicious soup, green and creamy and good at any temperature. There are two asparagus soups that we have in frequent rotation, and this one, from chef Lynn Crawford, is a standout. I’d bend the seasonal rule a bit here and say that if morel mushrooms are no longer available, any wild mushroom will be a good stand in.

And if you make this soup, remember the golden rule of seasonal cooking: make more than you need and freeze some for later. You will thank me in February.

Chef Lynn Crawford’s asparagus soup with morels and creme fraiche

Peas

Photo courtesy of Richard Paquet

The good news is that pea season is here, now. The bad news is that it’s a pretty short window. Sure sure it’s much easier to buy good quality frozen peas and skip the shelling, but where’s the fun in that? There is something contemplative and soothing about sitting outside on a sunny day, a breeze blowing, the birds singing, and hearing the soft ping ping of the peas hit the bowl.

While fresh pea soup is a must to make now, I’d like to share this excellent cacio e pepe pasta recipe from Melissa Clark. It stars both peas and asparagus, making it a perfect dinner to eat on the longest day of the year. Purists might balk at any alterations to this classic, but how can the addition of asparagus and peas do anything but elevate a dish? Note that this dish benefits from choosing very thin spears.

Melissa Clark’s cacio e pepe with asparagus and peas

Strawberries

Photo courtesy of Richard Paquet

Strawberries are having a stellar season here in Ontario. The farmers’ market tables are laden with gleaming baskets filled to overflowing, and the only problem is buying too many. These delicate berries are best eaten quickly, by the large handful.

While there are many ways to enjoy this most lovely of fruits, it’s at the end of a meal that strawberries shine. Just a few weeks into strawberry season, I’ve made this absolutely delicious strawberry ricotta cake three times already, with two more turns coming later this week. It’s everything you want in a cake: moist, light, not too sweet. With a lemony tinge and strawberry in just about every bite, this is the kind of rotation I can get behind.

Elizabeth Minchilli’s strawberry ricotta cake

If the season has passed by and these treats are no longer available where you live, fret not. Summer is coming and with it an altogether different kind of abundance. Did someone say tomatoes and corn?