Asparagus, fiddleheads, some lettuce, radishes, green onions and spinach are all spring vegetables that you can likely pick up at the grocery store or local farmers market these days. And the bonus is they will count towards your quota in becoming a locavore, or someone who eats locally grown food. (I just read the term recently online, too cute.)

Whether local eating is important to you or not, the extra flavour that you’ll find in something that hasn’t travelled thousands of kilometres can be really surprising, and it has certainly caught my attention. The ultimate in local for me is tomatoes grown in the backyard garden in the summer, those winter greenhouse tomatoes that ripen on the truck just can’t compete in the flavour or texture department.