Annual Lemon Squares

Here are my lemon squares. I make them once a year. This annual event is the result of my husband's finally responding to my constant demands that he name his favorite dinner/dessert/whatever of ALL TIME so that I can replicate it and thus cement his undying love, a love which one would not be out of order in thinking was already wearing concrete boots after ten years of marriage and two children. I love lemons almost beyond reason. If I were inclined to perform pagan ceremonies praising the gods for creating specific foodstuffs, lemons would be on the short-list (along with garlic, potatoes, and especially onions). So why are not lemon squares processing constantly out of my kitchen year-round? I suspect it's precisely their year-round availability that makes lemon desserts easy to take for granted. There are always more evanescent, seasonal fruits demanding to be carpe'd before their brief diem elapses, thinks like peaches, Italian plums, or crispy fall apples. There is, however, one lemon that presents the same sense of urgency as the seasonal peach or berry: Meyer lemons, those vivid thin-skinned citrus that can only be bought in springtime around these Midwestern parts.

An article about these lemons in the New York Times several years ago sparked my interest in the lemon that is Meyer, and I suspect the general public's interest as well, because that was the year the Meyer became widely available in markets (at least as far as I noticed, and I'm not one to overlook specialty produce). Its skin is more tender and easily torn and it's smaller than the pithy, horny monstrosities one customarily uses to garnish one's gin and tonic. This year's batch of squares also compelled me to finally add a microplane grater to my kitchen quiver, years after that particular tool became de rigeur. It makes me want to divorce and re-marry my husband all over again, simply to update my kitchen with a fresh Williams-Sonoma registry. So above you see the squares, nothing more than golden ingots of fat. The crust is butter with the smallest possible amount of flour and sugar required to transform it crustwise. The curd is made with youdon'twanttoknowhowmany egg yolks. I stray from the recipe insofar as I do NOT strain my lemon curd before pouring it into the crust. That curd is flavored with lemon zest, which I want to keep in my bars. I don't think the texture of the little zest-shreds is off-putting at all, and adds a bit of lemonsimilitude to the bars. Same time, next year.