Celebrate April with dandelions, asparagus, and plenty of butter and eggs

Happy Late Early Spring! If that sounds confusing, it's because according to The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980), early spring began on the spring equinox (or March 22-- it lists both), so I'm wishing you a happy early spring more than a week late.

The Political Palate is pretty serious about listing seasonally appropriate dishes. Early spring gets a recipe for the first of the dandelions, for instance.

I love the specificity of this one: dandelion leaves without the first signs of flower buds. No inferior lawn dandelions-- you want the ones from "a waste space that dandelions are making their own." Use only "the cleaner central leaves." This definitely seems like a recipe from someone who knows their way around dandelions.

If you're not up to foraging around for waste space dandelions, there's also a recipe for an Asparagus Platter. Still spring vegetables, but these are a LOT easier to just grab at the grocery store when they're cheaper and more plentiful than usual.

And this is another reminder that though the book is an older vegetarian one, it does not follow the health food fads that so many old earth-mother-type vegetarian cookbooks do. The asparagus is served with buttery white rice (not brown rice with a smattering of sesame and/or sunflower seeds if the cook felt playful) and sauce Maltaise, an orangey variation of hollandaise. 

Of course, early spring can still get pretty cold, so you might need some substantial desserts to get through April. While the headnote for Topfenkuchen claims that "This is a light cake..."

... it uses three sticks of butter, five cups of almonds, and nearly a dozen eggs. I think this still counts as substantial.

Just in case you miss the old-school health food dessert vibes, the book also offers a carob-based confection. While the book mostly avoids old-timey health food clichés, carob is apparently unavoidable.

This time, the carob is part of a coconut custard, so if spring is too chilly, you can just pretend you are at a tropical resort that has so little to eat that you've been reduced to consuming your own sunscreen. With carob.

Enjoy what's left of early spring! I'm going to try to eat seasonally by seeing if there are any Reese's peanut butter eggs on clearance now that Easter is over.