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By Root 934 0

key to consuming enough produce and reaping maximum nutritional benefits is planning meals around whatever you have. This presents opportunities to get inventive in the kitchen and try new things, like stuffed zucchini. How many spinach dishes can you have in one week without getting sick of it? When working with fresh ingredients, the answer is, a lot! The variety comes automatically, as you eat loads of leafy greens in April, but find them petering out soon, with broccoli becoming the dark green vegetable of choice. You won’t have time to get too tired of any one food, and your nutrient needs will be met. There’s no need to measure out every tedious one-quarter cup of raisins and half cup of chopped peppers.

Two things that are impossible to get tired of are asparagus and morels, because neither one stays around long enough. If you have them on the same day in April, you’ll forget all about peaches and can make this dish from Local Flavors, by Deborah Madison.

ASPARAGUS AND MOREL BREAD PUDDING

3 cups milk

1 cup chopped spring onions with green shoots

Add onions to milk in saucepan and bring to a boil; remove from heat and set aside to steep.

1 loaf stale or toasted multigrain bread, broken into crouton-sized crumbs

Pour milk over crumbs and allow bread to soak.

1 pound asparagus

Chop into ½-inch pieces and simmer in boiling water until bright green.

2 tablespoons butter 1 pound morels (or other wild mushrooms)

Salt and pepper to taste

Melt butter in skillet, cook mushrooms until tender, add salt and pepper, and set aside.

4 eggs

1/3 cup chopped parsley

3 tablespoons oregano

3 cups grated Swiss cheese

Break eggs and beat until smooth, add herbs and plenty of salt and pepper, add bread crumbs with remaining milk, asparagus, mushrooms with their juices, and ? of the cheese. Mix thoroughly and pour into a greased 8 by 12-inch baking dish; sprinkle remaining cheese on top and bake at 350° for about 45 minutes (until puffy and golden).

Download this and all Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recipes at www.AnimalVegetableMiracle.com

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6 • THE BIRDS AND THE BEES

One of my favorite short stories is Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” It’s a dead-on comic satire of a certain spirit of family life, and it feeds my private fantasy that I too might someday take up residence in the USPO. If other people don’t share this ambition, they just haven’t been blessed as I have. Latest in the line of my estimable mail associates was Postmistress Anne, manager of all things postal in our little town—these things taking place within a building about the size of a two-car garage. When we moved, I rented one of their largest boxes for my writer mail, apologizing in advance for the load of stuff I’d be causing them to handle. Anne and her colleagues insisted the pleasure was all theirs. We’re lucky we still have a P.O. in our little town, they explained. The government keeps track of what’s moving through, and if the number is too low they’ll close the branch. “I’ll bet you get lots of interesting things in the mail,” they surmised.

I thought to myself: You have no idea.

So I turned over three pieces of ID to prove I was citizen enough to rent a postal box in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and since then I have wondered if they’ve ever had second thoughts. Such surprising gifts come to me through the U.S. mail: a “Can-Jo” (rhymes with “banjo,” with a body made from a Mountain Dew can) hand-crafted by a man who felt I needed to have one. (So did, he felt, President Carter.) Class projects. Paintings of imaginary people. More books than probably burned in the Alexandria library. Anne sounded unfazed on the morning she called to say, “You’d better come get this one, it’s making a pretty good racket.”

Maybe in places like Hollywood, California, postal clerks would be uneasy about weighing packages and selling stamps while twenty-eight baby chickens peeped loudly into their right ear and four crates of angry insects buzzed in their left. Not here. They all just grinned when Lily and I came in. The insects weren’t ours,