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Cooking with Spring Ingredients

It’s spring: time to give winter staples the boot and dedicate dinnertime to those tender young things now appearing at greenmarkets and farm stands. Here are a few recipes to get you started (with a bit of trivia to impress your friends).

Apricot

Apricots

The Latin name for this fruit, praecoquum, means literally “early ripening peach.”

Artichokes

Artichokes

These edible thistles contain an acid called cynarin that makes everything taste sweet after eating them.

Asparagus

Asparagus

Asparagus is a diuretic and you may notice a distinctive odor in your urine after eating it.

Carrots

Carrots

The first carrots were cultivated in Afghanistan, and were more purplish-red than orange.

Chives

Chives freeze and rot easily, so store them in the warmest part of the refrigerator.

Fava Beans

Fava Beans

Favas were the only bean known to Europe until the discovery of the New World.

Fiddlehead Ferns

Fiddlehead Ferns

The unfurled fronds of young ferns are a popular ingredient in Indonesian cooking.

Green Garlic

Green Garlic

Green garlic is pulled from the ground before the actual garlic bulb forms.

Kohlrabi

Kohlrabi

The German-derived name translates as “cabbage turnip.”

mint

Mint

For really aromatic mint, buy it at a farmers’ market or grow it fresh.

New Potatoes

New Potatoes

New potatoes are freshly dug potatoes that have not reached maturity and have never been kept in storage.

Peas

Peas

Peas were originally very starchy; gardeners cultivated the sweet green garden pea during the Renaissance.

Ramps

Ramps

Ramps are a wild leek native to Appalachia.

Rhubarb

Rhubarb

This perennial stalk-vegetable of Asian descent has toxic leaves that shouldn’t be eaten.

Strawberries

Wild strawberries were so plentiful in America that there was limited garden cultivation of the fruit until the late 18th century.

Tarragon

Tarragon

Tarragon was once thought to ward off serpents and dragons and to heal snakebites.

White Asparagus

White Asparagus

White asparagus is grown without exposure to sunlight, which would turn the stalks green.

Comments

If we're being strictly correct fiddlehead ferns are un-unfurled, or furled, as it were, since unfurled would refer to something that was rolled and is now extended...and fiddleheads are decidedly curled.

Good story, though! I for one can't wait to get me some rhubarb.

I'm going to make the pea pancakes. A great alternative for those of us who don't eat much grain.

This is a nice article. But you ruined it with the unappetizing information on asparagus. I think most readers already know about the effect of asparagus on some people's body chemistry. We don't need to be reminded of it when reading a cooking article. Surely you could find a different factoid about asparagus -- something pleasant and appetizing.

Um, question.... what is green garlic. I thought those were green onoins. I have never heard of, or seen green garlic. Can anyone help me with my confusion!

What do you think?

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