Contents of my Medium share this week:

• Asparagus – DE
• Beauregard Sweet Potatoes
• Green Dandelion
• Green Garlic
• Green Kale
• Green Romaine Lettuce
• Red Scallions
• Mountain Mint

With the greenness of Spring, I’ll be storing a bunch of these bunches in water. Not absolutely necessary, but I think they stay fresher, look better aesthetically, and are easier for me to remember to eat them, instead of languishing in the fridge. Scallions, green garlic, mint, and asparagus all benefit from flower-vase-storage style. If there’s enough room, I like to put the butt end of whole lettuce heads in water. The sweet potatoes will last the week, so I chucked those in the dark potato pantry.

These spring ingredients are obviously screaming for salad, but what salad? How about maroulosalata, with the lettuce, scallions and/or green garlic, and mint? Chopping the lettuce into teeny tiny bite sized pieces are necessary for this recipe, that’s just the way I think it needs to be.

Green dandelion is a green with bitterness that can be quickly blanched out (in and out of boiling water) before treating like spinach greens.

Still have greens left? I pesto-ify them. I don’t have enough green garlic for a green garlic pesto but here’s a recipe for mint pesto that calls for garlic cloves, so I think the entire green garlic, from leaf to immature cloves will be a perfect fit.

The last item on the list was going to English Thyme or Mountain Mint, depending on what they had packed in that particular box I suppose. I got the Mountain Mint, which I could tell from the square stems of mints, the large leaves, and the smell of the crushed leaves. The smell is different from more common garden mints in the Mentha species but still has that minty whiff. It’s also a regionally native plant, so here’s a cocktail recipe from Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay: Virginia Mountain Mint Julep. For a longer lasting recipe, I’m going to try fermenting the mint and turning it into this preserved mint vinaigrette I just found online.