This Spring Vegetable Couscous serves as an easy, one-dish, vegetarian dinner during the week, or as a fun side dish for weekend entertaining. Since it's delicious hot or at room temperature, it also makes a great potluck offering.

Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Farms, wrote this op-ed cry for smaller, diversified farms and regional agriculture systems in The New York Times over the weekend. It's essential reading for anyone interested in food costs, food quality, or nutrition.

Snap Pea & Tofu Stir-fry is a quick and light spring dinner perfect for the beginning of the week. When you chop the snap pea pods into bite-size pieces some peas fall out of the pods, creating different textures in this simple dish. Serve over plain white or brown rice. Note: If you don't have spring onion simply substitute 2 or 3 green onions.

Strawberries are usually not the greatest in baked goods. They have too much moisture, turning perfectly lovely quick breads and cakes into gummy messes.

Not in this recipe! Roasting the strawberries concentrates the flavor (and the juiciness), making them the perfect foil for the light, fluffy ricotta batter in these easy, delectable Strawberry Ricotta Muffins--perfect for weekend breakfast, brunch, or just a tasty snack. I've even seen people wolf them down for dessert.

Maybe you are a strawberry fool--crazy for strawberries of all kinds. If so, try making Strawberry Fool (a.k.a. the easiest dessert in the world). It's a wonderful way to enjoy fresh, local strawberries. Whipped cream and pureed strawberries (and a bit of liqueur, if you're so inclined), folded together, served up with a garnish of fresh fruit. Your guests will never believe that's all there is to it--and who says you have to tell?

Bright red, sweet strawberries have been showing up in our CSA box, which means they're starting to show up at markets around the country. Depending on your region, local strawberries will start gracing farmers markets and farm stands between two weeks ago and June (or even July in the coldest climates). When you've had enough plain, fresh strawberries, try hulling them and eating with a bit of cream or balsamic vinegar.

Stinging nettles are chock full of nutrients (including the ever-popular omega-3s) and used as an detoxifying agent in many alternative cures. More importantly for our purposes, they're delicious. I was reminded of this fact by this ode to nettles (and spring). Make sure to use gloves (or plastic bags over your hands like I do) when handling them if you decide to make Stinging Nettles Soup.

Asparagus usually tops the list of people's favorite spring vegetable, but mine is definitely fava beans. They have a unique texture--a soft, almost chalky bite that melts as you chew--and lightly bitter taste that I adore. They are famously labor-intensive, and I don't make them everyday. But they're only around for 2 or 3 months in the spring, and when the weather turns warm I start to crave them. When I'm in the right mood the shelling, blanching, and then shelling again--which can seem punitive if you're not up for it--is mellow and meditative. The resulting Fava Bean & Pecorino Salad lets us all know spring is here.

I've been playing around with beets lately. Spring beets. Small, extra sweet, quick-to-cook spring beets. A happy discovery has been that beets fry up into chips just like their root-vegetable cousin, the potato. Crisp, a wee bit sweet, and brilliantly colored, Beet Chips are a fun, surprising, gorgeous snack.

One reason often cited for eating locally is to reduce the "carbon footprint"--how much energy is used to produce something--of your food (and thus yourself). Today's New York Times has a great article on the extent to which shipping food around the world has become the norm.