There's a week in April, sometimes two if you're lucky, when the woods smell of garlic before you see a single leaf. You catch it on the path, that green, peppery warmth rising from the ground, and then you look down and there it is: a carpet of broad, bright leaves pushing through the leaf litter. Pick a carrier bag full. They won't last, and neither will the season.

Pea shoots arrived at the market on Saturday, the first of the year, pale-stemmed and curling at the tips like something still deciding which way to grow. I bought two bags without a plan, which is how the best meals start. The plan came later, standing in the kitchen with the wild garlic already pounded into a rough pesto that smelled like spring condensed into a jar.

This is barely a recipe. It's a bowl of leaves dressed with something good, eaten quickly, in the narrow window when everything tastes of itself and nothing needs improving. The pea shoots are sweet and grassy. The wild garlic pesto is sharp and green and faintly hot. Together they taste like the turning point of the year, that moment when the cold lifts and the garden starts to mean something again.

I wrote it down in the notebook: wild garlic pesto, pea shoots, April light through the kitchen window. Some meals don't need more than a sentence.