I have a confession: I've never found a ramp in the wild. Embarrassing but true. Over the years, my foraging has turned up many prized mushrooms and choice plants, but the wild leek has remained elusive (as has the much-coveted morel). I am determined that this will be the year. In future, though, I won't have to leave it to chance. Because my crafty husband planted masses of Allium tricoccum in a shady cornder of our garden! The first patch, planted last year, came up successfully, so we planted another one last week. You're supposed to leave them mostly undisturbed for several years, allowing them to get established and really proliferate. But I've already taken a single leaf here or there. I've also bought ramps at the farmers market, where ramp frenzy is in full swing. Quite a few vendors are now selling only the leaves, because ramps have been over-harvested in many areas due to unsustainable practices. The trick is to leave at least as many bulbs behind as you take.
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Soup, salad, sandwich. It's the holy trinity of lunch. Of course modern times have brought us wraps and personal pizzas and pad thai, but those original three standbys never get old—if you don't let them. Did your mother pack your lunch for school? Mine did, and I still vividly remember the  sandwiches on whole grain bread: tuna with alfalfa sprouts, cheese and avocado, liverwurst with mustard and (wilted) lettuce. On colder days there might have been a thermos of chicken-noodle soup or some leftover bean stew. On the side there were carrot and celery sticks. Maybe a small bag of Fritos. A crisp apple. Sometimes fig newtons or animal crackers. I was never ashamed of my lunch as I've read some kids are, nor did I ever trade with anybody. It was love from my mother and I ate it up. 

Now that I work from home, I can make myself whatever I like (or have time for). And yet it's still most often soup, salad or sandwich. I use what's in the fridge, generally focusing on vegetables, though not as a rule. If there are leftovers, that's always a possibility but I like to give them new life beyond a simple re-heat. Don't fall down when it comes to your lunch. Power your brain and body so you can get through that mid-afternoon slump. Take a real break and eat something meaningful, ideally something you've cooked yourself.
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There's a game I play sometimes: I look at my life as it is in this moment, think of everything I possess right now, and ask myself if I would be happy if nothing ever changed. I won't deny that sometimes this leads to sadness bordering on desperation. What if I don't finish my novel? Never build that house on the lake? Fail to see Burma? Is this it?  Time and money often factor into this mental equation. Self-doubt can creep in. On those days, I question if I have fulfilled my potential, tried hard enough, risked enough. But I am not what I own, nor even what I do, and if I start to define myself by those measures, there is no satisfaction guaranteed.

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My love of white asparagus started early in life. I was 8 years old and living with my family in Madrid during my father's sabbatical year. We traveled around the country quite a bit, often staying at wonderful paradores. These are state-owned hotels in historic castles and monasteries, many in spectacular locations, and generally decked in musty brocade with full suits of armor lurking in corners.

It was quite standard for us to order three courses whenever we ate out—which was a lot—and my choice of appetizer was often a vegetable. I loved judías blancas, meaty white beans in a chorizo-flecked tomato sauce; and judías verdes, green beans cooked to within an inch of their lives in plenty of garlic and olive oil. But my very favorite was white asparagus: three or four jumbo spears, as silky and tender as can be, cloaked with a rich veil of yellow mayonnaise. (In Spain, the best white asparagus come from Navarra, and a great many of them are preserved for sale in tins and jars, which does not diminish their flavor at all.) It's a taste of childhood that has haunted me over the years, cropping up with reassuring consistency.
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I watched a wonderful film this weekend, Which Way Is The Front Line From Here? It's an HBO documentary made by Sebastian Junger about photojournalist Tim Hetherington who was killed on the job in Libya a couple of years ago. Junger and Hetherington collaborated on an another stunning film, Restrepo, about a group of American soldiers in Afghanistan. Hetherington was clearly an extraordinary human being. The compelling photographs he took and humanitarian work he did in war-torn countries reveal the soul of a poet and the heart of a lion. Cut down by mortar shrapnel in Libya, he bled out from a wound to his femoral artery. Junger made the film as a tribute to his friend and colleague, and also started RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues), a free intensive training in basic combat medicine for freelance journalists headed for the front line. Listen to Terry Gross' moving interview with Sebastian Junger here. In it he refers to the way in which we continually "re-traumatize" ourselves by watching the same distressing news footage over and over. It reminded me of the coverage of the tragedy in Boston this past week and the relentless replaying of the same gruesome images. I question the value of this.

And now, on to brunch. Somehow trivial in light of these terrible events, and yet necessary to celebrate any given Sunday.
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