May Day mix

City

I was prepared since yesterday for a long walk, to smell mushrooms and search for comestible flowers on my way.

– It’s raining, raining good in Barcelona, which is incredible, a long-awaited tune.
My tea has a fresh herbal aroma, a bit of wild mint and citrus.
Relax, breathe in, breathe out,
Instant ballet –
the body moves as a natural reaction to sound,
muscles are awake.

Facing reality: on this day, in some cultures working women and farm animals are free and workers alike celebrate it, yuppi!

Sounds old fashion, but still, 1st of May is one rare occasion to enjoy urban socializing and barbeque in many countries. I used to love it, I still do: socata, barbeque, mujdei, crema de Focsani, chiftele, vinete, yummy fries, fresh salad, sweet and salted bread, fruit tarts and the most attractive and impossible of all: stuffed savage champignons, the mushroom of the season who´s basket shape makes it splendid to fill in with cheese and herbs.

I admire them as they fast cook on the barbeque, spreading aromas, making those squishy sounds and always imagine eating them, how they taste, oh, looking so good…but it´s too dangerous, I´m intolerant. Most of the eating together moments are endless efforts to avoid people´s invitations and by that intoxication. Still, to enjoy the culinary show and detect different scents, this I can do.

Rural

May 1 was something different on the rural side of the world, in the heart of Transylvania, where people had no stores and prepared all their food from scratch, after eating only vegetables for 40 days, or not eating at all, as the Pascua celebration requires.

The lamb’s cry like a sudden chorus of despair was heard during the holiday preparations and it will always hunt me down. Only the scream of the violin can put it out. Faced with barbaric standards, I prefer to eat some mushrooms. Meat has never been my thing and the standard national celebration menu feels heavy.

Since childhood, on May 1 I used to go to the forest to look for Untisor – Ficaria verna, it is the first easy-to-find green salad of the year. Preparing rich salads with sweet honey and lemongrass or thyme was my alternative to the festive slaughter.

Excepting the horror part and non-stop drinking, as if the water never existed, the rural side has this glorious reality where you can infiltrate: a sudden smell of flowers on every corner, running without shoes on fresh, wet grass and eating fruit straight from the tree.

My long walks are now concentrated in the city area, but I have the same experiences: yesterday I found some wild mushrooms in a garden and felt magnificent just looking at them, then there are the flowers, perfect for tempura, that we just admire, in a city. A great diversity of fruits forms between the leaves, still green now. In the sunlight they will be soon ready to eat.

There´s a certain functionality of the rural life: nature is offering, no reason to fear hunger in the countryside. Simple, easy to do and non-expensive things are just missing in the cities. Urban people have so much to discover…Time is needed to search for beautiful, daisy-yellow-chanterelle and to acknowledge that they have a fruity scent.