I thought I would start with a few delicious dishes that are decidedly seasonal. What I love about truly seasonal food is its window of availability. That's when they are naturally ready to be eaten and that's when they are tastiest.
I don't want to launch into the usual and absolutely correct rant about how immensely idiotic it is to ship strawberries that have as much flavour as a piece of wet cotton wool halfway around the globe so that in the middle of winter consumers in Europe and the US can waste money on something that looks but certainly doesn't taste like strawberries.
Strawberries like any other seasonal fruit or vegetable really only taste good and special because there is only a short period when they are truly, i.e. freshly available; making them last beyond that period requires the practice of conservation, which is interesting and can be delicious in itself, but it also changes how the produce tastes.
Anyway, what I am trying to say here is that seasonal dishes are so wonderful because you can't have them all the time, and the period when they are available is when they taste best; we should do everything to enjoy them then and in the following months do our best to recall how lovely it was to eat them at the yearly peak of their existence while looking forward to savouring them again in a year's time.
One last point before we proceed to the actual dishes: I often find that recipe writers, especially on-line recipe writers, are fond of holding forth at great length about their opinions, and I know that most foodies are by nature tremendously opinionated, yours truly being no exception. But it is my firm intention to provide lowdown on the dishes before the pontificating; this allows folks to consider the ideas for a dish and to skip the soap box stuff or the philosophy. It will be there, I'm sorry, but it won't get in the way of the central issue, which is the nice nosh!
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