And now for something delightfully different: Artichokes
When I put the words "food + spring + Mediterranean" into my mental search engine, artichokes are first to pop up. A couple of years back, I spent a week in Sicily in April, which is peak artichoke season there. You could buy a dozen for 1 euro, and they were on every restaurant menu in every imaginable form: baby ones fried crisp, large whole globes stuffed with bread crumbs, and artichoke hearts in salads, vegetable medleys and pasta sauces. I returned home forever artichoke-inspired.
The accompanying recipe taps that inspiration in a way that requires minimal effort and yields maximum pleasure and healthfulness. Artichokes top the nutritional charts with their concentration of protective antioxidants. By steaming them and serving them whole, you don't need to fuss with scooping out their chokes (the inedible purple-ish inner fibers) or removing the hearts before cooking.
Here, what can be tedious for the cook becomes fun for diners of all ages once the vegetable is cooked, as they pluck off each leaf, dipping it in sauce before scraping the meaty part off with their teeth. They eventually get to the tender treasure of the heart, and the choke easily falls away from it when scraped with a butter knife.
Rather than the butter- or mayonnaise-based dip that is typically served with artichokes prepared this way, I up the nutritional ante on the creamy accompaniment with a savory yogurt dip that is enriched with extra-virgin olive oil, parsley and saffron.
The steamed artichokes and sauce are sumptuously delicious together and make for a delightfully different start to a meal. Their flavor never fails to take me back - if not to Sicily, exactly, certainly to somewhere along the Mediterranean, and definitely during spring.
• Ellie Krieger's newest cookbook is "You Have It Made: Delicious, Healthy, Do-Ahead Meals" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). She blogs and offers a weekly newsletter at www.elliekrieger.com.