The answer turned out to be ridiculously simple. David Shea, the chef I worked for, was brilliant, but it wasn’t his ego that was center stage. It was his ingredients. There is an obvious difference between a generic box-ripened tomato that grew a month earlier on another continent and a juicy red Brandywine straight off a vine in New Jersey. Grass-fed beef from a pasture in Vermont tastes a whole lot more flavorful than a corn-fed cow from a feedlot. Wild salmon is another fish altogether from the insipid variety raised on a fish farm.

So many ingredients that I thought I knew by taste took on a new dimension once I understood the depth of flavor they could achieve through cultivation in a healthy, sustainably farmed environment. Though David and his wife, Laura, who manages applewood, are too unpretentious to use this word, you could say that in their kitchen I learned about “terroir.”

I also learned that celebrating regional flavor in season is not always easy. March is a tricky month to be a locavore. Trickier still if you are running a restaurant with a menu that changes daily. In August when the peaches are ripe and the zucchini, eggplant, basil and tomatoes are practically jumping into the ratatouille pot and the corn is so tender and sweet you don’t need to cook it, life is a happy dance to the dinner table. But if it is March, after a long winter of cooking parsnips and potatoes a hundred different ways, being a chef can get a little trying.

Laura still laughs about the Meet the Farmer dinner she set up one winter evening when the guest speaker was one of her vegetable growers. “I think all he had was a box of garlic!” And so, the featured ingredient was garlic. Even the pastry chef rose to the occasion and everyone loved it.

When I showed up in my chef’s apron on the first day of March, my job was to peel a 10-pound box of Jerusalem artichokes. The next day I got to peel 10 pounds of potatoes. So it continued throughout the month with carrots, beets, rutabagas and celery root. Not a tomato or a piece of lettuce in sight.

“Huh,” David or Daniel, his sous chef, would say as one of them approached the walk-in each the morning, ready to dream up his side of the menu. Each would survey the pallets of cabbages and winter greens, and the crates full of tap roots, shake his head, and then head back upstairs to seek inspiration. It always came quickly. If last night the celery root had been puréed with creamer potatoes, tonight it would be julienned into remoulade. Sweet potatoes that had recently been made into dumplings might get smoked in a homemade rig on the stove. Carrots that had been puréed into last night’s soup now became a spicy slaw. But still there would be a wistful sigh and the expressed wish that spring be soon to arrive.

And then very modestly it did. There was a box of pea shoots in the walk-in. It was as if there was a celebrity in the room. For a salad-starved group, it was hard not to give them top billing in every dish. They crunched like watercress, wilted gracefully and intensified in flavor when sautéed, and added a vivid green to any plate that needed a colorful accent. Best of all, they tasted like springtime.

Wilted Pea Shoots, Caramelized Garlic and Diver Scallops

On a back burner at applewood, you can often find a bubbling pot of garlic cloves in olive oil. Chef David Shea uses caramelized garlic in many of his dishes. It has a sweet umami taste and a soft texture that adds character to a recipe. I love how it tastes with the earthy flavor of wilted pea shoots. You can serve it unadorned as a side dish, but because I wanted to serve it as an appetizer, I sautéed a few diver scallops and put them on top of the wilted greens. Delicious! One or two scallops make a nice appetizer. Three or four are right for a main course.

Anyway, all that walking and all those fish made us thirsty so we made our way to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Restaurant, ordered cocktails and perused the bar menu. The grilled artichokes jumped off the page. These were beautiful — slightly crisp from the grill, lightly salty and served with a spicy dipping sauce that was mostly chipotle and garlic. They were heady, to say the least, and there was nothing left on that platter but two napkins.

We have made these several times at home. I don’t make a chipotle sauce but prefer a spicy lemon aioli.

Have plenty of napkins on hand and a cold drink. And don’t bother with any other food groups, these babies deserve your total attention.

Grilled Artichokes and Meyer Lemon Aioli

Serves 2

I first had a spinach salad at my aunt Julie’s baby shower. I think it was just spinach, some nuts and a kind of thousand island dressing. I loved it so much I ate it for dinner that night. I don’t remember why I never ate more spinach after that, but when I moved to California I ate it in many salads. I found I didn’t much like it cooked unless it was drenched in a hollandaise sauce or something. Definitely not frozen or canned, though. That seemed to take away all the things I loved about it: It’s clean, crisp, fresh and crunchy, much like the first few delicious days of spring! This recipe comes straight out of my journal from culinary school.

Starburst Grapefruit Salad

This week, we asked for your favorite spring dishes, whatever spring means to you wherever you are.

THIS WEEK’S WINNER:

Pea shoots with caramelized garlic and seared scallops by Lisa Barlow: Recalling a month working at a favorite seasonal restaurant, Lisa shares the thrill of a box of pea greens, a sure sign that the Era of 100 Potatoes is coming to an end. In this simple but lovely dish, she slowly caramelizes garlic, sautés the greens in the oil, and tops it with perfectly sautéed scallops, if you’d like them.

THIS WEEK’S ALTERNATE WINNERS:

Asparagus barley risotto by Cathy Elton: Using barley instead of the traditional rice gives this satisfying vegetarian (or even vegan) springtime dish a nutty, chewy character. Roast some asparagus, get some shallots sweating in a pot, and stir away!

Grilled artichokes with spicy lemon aioli by Dawn E. Bell: The spring artichoke season is one reason to be jealous of Californians, and what better way to celebrate those sweet, savory little bulbs than to char the bejeezus out of them on a grill? (Incidentally, if artichokes aren’t really your thing, you may consider Dawn’s other entry this week: Mushroom, roasted garlic, and cheese bread.

Spinach, strawberry and grapefruit salad by Kolika Elle Kirk: It warms the cockles of our hearts when people get excited over a salad, and Kolika can barely contain her love for this mix of fruits, spinach and poppy seed dressing.

PLUS, ALSO, TOO: THE HONORABLE MENTIONS

Halibut with bacon, mushrooms and broiled Belgian endives by Hans Denee: For many, the opening of the halibut fishing season is the truest signal of spring. The thick, meaty, mild-flavored fish is a lovely counterpoint to power-packed flavors like bacon and mushrooms.

Ribollita (Tuscan bread and vegetable soup) by Vivian Henoch: So it’s not exactly a “spring” dish, but still, Vivian’s contribution of vegetables simmered in stock with savory pancetta and thickened with cubes of bread is as fundamentally satisfying a dish as there is.

Waiting-for-spring strawberry cream cheese French toast by Brandi Jo Plaster: The calendar says it’s spring, but for many who live in the frigid North, that’s just a sick joke. But Brandi, in Minnesota, makes the best of it with some strawberry preserves. And cream cheese. And eggs and milk and butter. And there you go.

Violets! Candied and jelly, by Theresa Rice: Eating flowers may not be everyone’s idea of delicious, but violets’ aroma have long made them favorites. Theresa shares her favorite ways to treat them.

And while you’re reading, you might always check out a few paeans to some favorite spring foods: The Angry Chef’s herbs and fresh green garlic, Bobbot’s song to oyster mushrooms, plucked from the trees.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

AND NOW FOR THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE:

Lately, our SKCs have seemed alarmingly earnest and nutritious. Pea shoots! Tea biscuits! Cashew spread! Props to you guys, but we’re ready to revisit good old-fashioned things-not-for-company. We admit we don’t cotton to the notion of “guilty” pleasures — I mean, if you like something, own it! — but there are still things we don’t really want to call up Ma to tell her we’re making. So this week, share with us your most satisfying recipes for curling up on the couch or for stealing bites of as a midnight snack.

Be sure to tag your posts: SKC not-too-guilty pleasures (Please note that by participating, you’re giving Salon permission to re-post your entry if it’s chosen as a winner, and acknowledging that all words and images in your post are your own, unless explicitly stated. Adaptations of existing recipes are fine, but please let us know where the original comes from. And if you’d like to participate but not have your post considered for republication on Salon, please note it in the post itself. Thanks!)

Scoring and winning

Scores will be very scientific, given for appealing photos, interesting stories behind your submissions, creativity, and execution.

Her house itself was filled with things that mystified me as a kid. She kept everything and had (for lack of a better term) a lot of Catholic swag: medals, rosary beads and palms tied into crosses and stuck behind pictures. In the air hung evidence of cooking mixed with the smell of Oil of Olay and furniture polish. I have her dining room set in my house now and sometimes stick my head into the highboy for the last lingering vestiges of that smell. I laugh when I look inside and see my pottery barn candlesticks, where she used to have statues of saints, hard candies, a bottle of old perfume, receipts and Mass cards.

The life she created around food, her unfailing desire to feed, are the stories my family still tells each other when we talk about her. I don’t think my grandmother wrote many recipes down, maybe a few in her slanted leftie backhand, but that wasn’t really her style. She wasn’t just old school, she was the old school, meaning necessity guided what she made and when she made it. (Later on, it became more about letting us have the things banned at home, like Coke and extra dessert.)

Boxty comes from an Irish word meaning “poor house bread.” And as these things go with staples like potatoes, every culture seems to have its own ways of stretching what it had, making it work. So this recipe may be what my Irish grandmother did with leftover potatoes but it could just as easily be what your Jewish grandmother did, or Polish, etc. What to do with a leftover potato is in itself an immigrant story, a simple one that gets told over and over again.

Nana’s Boxty