Spring Salad Training Has Started (Boing! Boing! Boing! 🐇 )

It's also time for tapenade. Because we say so.

A PERFECT Roasted Asparagus and Arugula Salad!? This is it!

IN THE WORLD OF BASEBALL, SPRING TRAINING IS AN ESPECIALLY exciting time for passionate fans, who travel from all over the country to Florida and Arizona in late February, clamoring for a special brand of old-fashioned, intimate access to their favorite players and teams. They seem so innocent in their wholesome pursuit of our great American pastime, and appear to understand that the exhibition games don’t count. Or, at least that’s the way I like to imagine it.

Mookie Betts signing autographs during a Spring Training game in Tempe last year. (Getty images)

In the world of Salad, spring is also an especially exciting time for passionate fans, who travel back and forth from grocer to farm markets, all over town and out of town, clamoring for the earliest possible access to their favorite spring vegetables and fruits: asparagus, fiddlehead ferns, morel mushrooms, arugula, wild ramps, breakfast radishes, rainbow chard, rhubarb, soft baby lettuces, tiny peas, fava beans, stinging nettles, tatsoi, tiny artichokes, rainbow chard, and on and on.