We’ve made it through winter, so let’s celebrate! It’s time for asparagus, snap peas, lettuces and vibrant greens. Time to get to the farmers market and grab rhubarb by the bundle and rush home to make a crisp.
Spring is a season of lightening and brightening, resetting and refreshing. It’s time to renew our closets, our cupboards — and our spices. Just a pinch of a balanced spice blend will round out and deepen the simplest dish with pops of color and fragrance. That includes our local spring vegetables, which are crisp and delicious and don’t need much to shine.
Just as with salad dressings, you can find plenty of prepared spice blends in the market, but it’s easy and way more expedient to make your own. Preparing these in small batches makes a lot of sense. Because they are fresher, their flavors are bolder and more intense and there’s far less waste. Keep them close at hand to avoid scrambling when trying to season the dish at the last minute. Plus, spice blends are an easy way to bring the world’s most exciting flavors into your kitchen.
Take shichimi togarashi, a Japanese spice mix that is at once spicy, savory and nutty. It enhances a range of dishes without overpowering them. Shichi, Japanese for “seven,” refers to the number of different ingredients, and “togarashi” identifies the primary flavor (chile). The mix includes poppy seeds, sesame seeds, orange peel, pepper, sansho pepper, seaweed and ginger. It’s a wonderful finishing mix that perks up noodle bowls, scrambled eggs, roast chicken and even warm, buttered rolls.