But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and iron a message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the little hardy courier of the fields with his rough green coat and modest air. He is a true soldier of fortune, this dent-de-lion — this lion’s tooth, as the French chefs call him. Flowered, he will assist at love-making, wreathed in my lady’s nut-brown hair; young and callow and unblossomed, he goes into the boiling pot and delivers the word of his sovereign mistress.”

– O. Henry, Springtime a la Carte

Buenos Aires – It was not a matter of substitution, basil was available, if a trifle expensive at the moment. It was not a matter of experimentation, there was no need, no impetus. It was simply a matter of late winter… early spring… caprice.

Caprice… An impulsive, often illogical turn of mind… a bee, a boutade, a conceit, a fancy, a freak, a humor, an impulse, a megrim, a notion, a vagary, a whim, a whimsy…. the thesaurus is verbose on possibilities… a megrim?

Really, it wasn’t all that illogical, it was simply that my usual verdulería had got in a crate of dandelion greens, the first of the season, and as I’d been thinking of making a winter pesto, and suddenly, there, spring had sprung, it was on to a pesto primavera – not to be confused, at all, despite its use of freshly made fettucini noodles, with the much maligned and completely inauthentic dish we think of as pasta primavera. Couple that – a large bunch, not the entire crate – with a delicious sheep’s milk cheese I’d picked up that was nice and firm and ripening nicely, a handful of garlic cloves, pinenuts, salt, pepper, and olive oil, and voila!, there you have it, the makings of a delicious, slightly bitter-edged, dandelion pesto.

Now, if only I’d had the camera on macro setting…