Here's your meal plan for April Week 1! We've got an asparagus frittata, slow-roasted salmon, a spring minestrone soup, and more!

This month, Summer Miller is back, sharing her meal plans for April. Summer is a mom, a full-time food writer, and also helps test the fabulous recipes we bring you every week at Simply Recipes.

Warmer temperatures bring with them a familiar ease to life – more daylight hours, fewer coat buttons to button and less headwear to adorn before flinging open the front door and stepping casually into the sunshine.

Spring comes around to remind us that being outside is a privilege and not a punishment.

With winter well behind us, I have savored my last bites of hearty casseroles and sips of hot chocolate and turned fully toward lighter fare, fresh crisp salads, and the fruits and vegetables of this eagerly anticipated season.

Certain traditions surround this time of year: I ready the vegetable garden for planting, prepare the perennial beds for blooming, and check the apple trees for early blossoms. Depending on how warm the season is, we walk wooded areas in search of morel mushrooms and scan roadside ditches for “wild” asparagus, a hobby passed down from my father in law.

What we can’t forage, I plant, and by the month’s end I usually have a fair amount of radish, kale, parsnips (if I remembered to plant them in the fall for a spring harvest), and early season greens to get me through until the ground is ready for summer vegetables.

The best part of spring, at least for my family, is just how happy we are to welcome it.