Where you be at, Spring?!

           Ok, I know that last week I was all gung-ho about the arrival of spring, and celebrated the gorgeous weather and general euphoria with ramps, peas and mint, and a strawberry rhubarb tart. But, as spring will do, it pulled a 180 on me this week and left me wet, cold, and produceless.
           The hurricane conditions this weekend were not ripe for running, cooking, or farmers markets-- so basically my entire weekend was shot. I made the unfortunate decision to try to run a half marathon in the pouring rain on Sunday, and even my garbage bag poncho couldn't save me. I trudged home a sopping, shivering mess, and the only good thing about it was the hot chocolate I had after (and the look on the french tourists' faces when a freakish garbage bag lady tried to direct them to the empire state building in an english-french-italian patois).
           My second favorite thing to do on the weekends (second only to this), going to the farmers market, was also a flop. And I'd like to take a minute here to air a personal tiff that I am having with my frienemy, Mark "Bitt"man.

You see, in his column last wednesday Mark raved about the buttery, bittery possibilities of escarole this time of year. He wouldn't stop bragging about all he could do with it-- braise it, grill it, make a freaking soup with it. This was very exciting news to someone who has been living on ramps, kale, and bok choi for the last month. So, all pumped up about the appearance of escarole, I trudged to the farmers market in the rain to get some and.... there was none to be found! No where! Not a one little head of escarolito. The farmers looked at me as if I had asked if they had any bird flu in stock.

Of course, at first I thought that escarole might not have made it all the way out to pastoral Brooklyn, especially if greedy manhattan escarole fiends had snapped all of it up first. But I even went to the union square farmers market, and same thing! The farmers said not one little buttery, leafy escarole head had peeked out of the ground yet. This begs the question, where do you get your roughage, Mark? Is there some kind of biodome on the upper west side that we outer borough plebians don't know about? Let's look at this picture a little closer:

It is clear he is taunting us with his escarole.

          Disappointed to say the least, I vowed to get revenge on the Bittsterator. In the meantime, though, I had to satisfy myself with more ramps (yawn) from the farmers market. Needless to say, being foiled yet again by "Bitt"man didn't put me in the mood for cooking. I consoled myself with a, ahem, liquid dinner and mad men reruns.

       So here's to a lost weekend: rain, rain, some ramps, and no escarole. For shame.