I hope you like vegetables. This spring’s cookbook selection is not just vegetable-forward, it is vegetable-dominant, with an assist from books that aim to make you a better weeknight cook. The vibe? It’s a really nice time to be in the kitchen.

Let’s start with the queen of veg, Deborah Madison. After convincing Americans that vegetarian food could be sophisticated and complex with her 1987 cookbook, Greens, she strengthened her position with the seminal books Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Vegetable Literacy. It has been written that we couldn’t have the likes of Anna Jones without her, an association that could be broadened to include other vegetarian bloggers with cookbooks out this season (see: The First Mess, My New Roots, and Blissful Basil).

With In My Kitchen: A Collection of New and Favorite Vegetarian Recipes, Madison proves that she’s not just puttering around her New Mexico garden in a smart hat, looking like Diane Keaton in a Nancy Meyers film I’d very much like to see: She still has serious (meatless) game. Many of the recipes collected here are refined and reconstructed versions of her classics, which have changed as she has. But they don’t feel like Greatest Hits, Vol. 13. A chard and saffron tart is still creamy after all these years, but the rich crust has been replaced with ground almonds. A yeasted holiday bread with rosemary and lemon has become a quick bread for Sunday mornings. Even an updated 20-year-old recipe for kale and quinoa gratin feels new. When she includes a recipe for brown rice porridge with nut butter and chia seeds, it’s because she’s been eating it since before the Instagram founders were born. #respect

Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables is poised to join the veggie canon. Before he became the chef at Ava Gene’s—a BA favorite—in Portland, OR, he stopped out to work as a manager at the fabled Four Season Farm in Maine. There, he developed a deep respect for seed-to-table cooking. Although it’s organized by season and vegetable, it doesn’t read as "meh" as a seasonal vegetarian cookbook. It’s modern and bro-y in its enthusiasm; lusty rather than reverent. Mushrooms, cabbage, even kohlrabi are described as “sexy.” An in-season tomato is capable of “moving your soul.” And, yeah, there’s some meat in the mix.

Of the books I cooked through this month, Six Seasons excited me the most. The flavors are big: A slather-on-everything vinaigrette packed with balsamic-plumped golden raisins, capers, anchovies, and garlic jump-starts everything from roasted turnips to steak; tomatoes are marinated in falafel spice and zapped with herb-packed yogurt that even sneaks in some sriracha. They’re also layered and complex, despite their apparent simplicity. What will really change your cooking is his approach to seasoning, learned in part from Mona Talbott at the American Academy in Rome: Add the acid and seasoning before the oil when making salads and many veg dishes, tasting and tinkering to get it just right before you stir in the lubricant to “carry and marry all the other flavors,” writes co-author Martha Holmberg. Trust me: Read this book and you’ll never look at cabbage the same way again.

Other noteworthy releases to veg out with include Chitra Agrawal’s Vibrant India: Fresh Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore to Brooklyn; the arty garden party vibe of Julia Sherman’s Salad for President: A Cookbook Inspired by Artists (full disclosure: I wrote the foreword); Rustic Canyon chef Jeremy Fox’s restaurant-y but thought-provoking On Vegetables; and Carolynn Carreno’s Bowls of Plenty.