By Leigh O’Connor.
There are days when the kitchen feels less like a room and more like a garden gate. You step through it with damp hands and a mind willing to be surprised. Seasonal cooking begins there: not in the recipe, but in the body, in the way you lean toward light, toward warmth, toward the small urgencies of ripening things.
Imagine the first touch of soil in late Winter, cool as clay, a little reluctant to open. You press your fingers in and feel the quiet life beneath - worms threading darkness, roots thinking about Spring. That same patience lives in beans left to soften, dough that waits for yeast to wake. The earth teaches tempo. It says: not yet. Then, suddenly, now.
Come early Spring, the garden is all new sentences. Tendrils curl like question marks. Leaves are thin and translucent, as if they still remember being sunlight. You harvest with reverence for fragility - pea shoots, baby carrots, lettuce that snaps like silk. In the kitchen, your hands stay gentle. A breath of lemon, a pinch of salt. Flavours don’t need to shout; they’re still learning their names.
Summer arrives barefoot. It smells of crushed basil on your thumb and tomatoes warmed to the core. You pluck them and the skin gives way, a sweet rupture and you understand how desire can be simple.
The garden hums - bees in zucchini flowers, cicadas in the heat, the faint applause of rain on raised beds after a long dry spell. You cook with windows open. You slice peaches and their perfume fills the air like a song. You grill eggplant until it turns to smoke and satin.
By late Summer the plants grow heavy with confidence. Corn stands tall, beans climb, cucumbers hide like jokes you haven’t found yet. You follow abundance without trying to possess it. A pot of ratatouille becomes a way of saying thank you. A bowl of berries, rinsed and shining, reminds you that sweetness wasn’t invented by sugar. You preserve what you can - jars clicking shut like small time capsules - knowing you’ll need these colours later.
Autumn is the season of smoke and thinning light. Soil feels warmer now, having kept the sun’s secrets all year and you kneel into it with gratitude. The garden turns deep: pumpkins with their quiet heft, beetroot bleeding rubies on the board, brassicas braced for cold. You roast, you braise, you let flavours darken and linger. The kitchen fills with caramelising onions and woodsy herbs. Comfort here is sturdy, like a well-worn coat.
Then Winter, the hush. Beds sleep under mulch; only the hardiest greens keep watch. You cook close to the stove, listening to rain speak on the roof. You simmer soups that taste like shelter. You peel citrus and the bright oils burst into the air - sunlight distilled, Winter’s small rebellion. Scarcity is not emptiness; it’s a narrowed palette that teaches attention.
Seasonal cooking is a love affair with impermanence. It asks you to meet each ingredient where it is - tender, riotous, fading, or sleeping. It brings your senses back to their original work: feel the grit of potatoes, smell mint when it bruises, hear a carrot’s crisp surrender, watch steam rise like a ghost of Summer.
The garden of earthly delights is not somewhere you visit. It is something you practice, meal by meal, season by season, until your hands remember the shape of time.
