So this morning, I wandered across the back yard and pulled up a medium-sized spinach plant (one that was crowding several others), and a spring onion. Then back inside for a little omelette — I don’t want to sound like one of those Alice Waters/Richard Olney cranks, but I have to say, growing my own produce has entirely changed my cooking. All that emphasis on freshness, and not mucking with the flavor of the ingredients — it makes much more sense when you’ve got produce so fresh that it was growing two minutes ago. (For instance, the French recipe for peas with lettuce that Julia Child is so fond of — I never really understood the combo before I started a garden. Peas and the first lettuce are ripe at about the same time. Aha! Now it makes sense in a way that it didn’t when I was standing in the grocery store.) This was a delicious omelette — saute a little spinach with the white part of the spring onion, dump it out of the pan, in with the eggs, back in with the spinach, a little grated cheese, and the sliced green top of the onion. Cook, fold, flip, cook and slide onto a plate. SO wonderful. Good for you — all that dark greenness for breakfast — and not so hard to do, this growing produce thing. Aside from a little time spent planting, really, all I do is turn the water on for fifteen minutes in the morning.