“April is the cruelest month,” a friend said to me recently, involuntarily quoting T.S. Eliot. I instantly understood all the ways they both meant it.

The trees almost have buds, the daffodils have started to open up, there’s occasionally an afternoon where it feels possible and, frankly, important to sit in the sun in the back yard. We’ve made it through winter, and as our reward we get to think about spring vegetables, about planting our herb gardens, about the long hours of sunshine that are almost to come. The cruelty is that “almost” is doing a lot of work here when the thermometer isn’t exactly cooperating with our hopes and dreams.

April is also my birth month, and every year I get to juggle whether my birthday will fall during Passover. As a kid, I celebrated with a lot more ice cream cakes than your average person, and my grandmother’s legendary seder dinners were often on nights when I would have preferred to be out with my friends getting into trouble. But the teenage angst rarely lasted too long once I was eating chopped liver on matzoh and putting tiny bumps of horseradish on nearly every bite of gefilte fish I consumed — at first to choke it down, but later because I’d acquired a taste for them both.

At this point in my life, Passover is more meaningful to me as a celebration of spring’s return than it is about the biblical story of the Jews escaping their brutal existence in Pharaoh’s Egypt. And this year I’m doing a lot of thinking about how the language in my own Pesach seder — already significantly more secular than my grandmother’s — will need to shift to reckon with the unprecedented cruelty and violence we’ve witnessed over the last six months in Palestine.

This is an easy place to get overwhelmed, but as an American Jew, I think it’s a point that demands my examination and attention. How can we tell the Torah’s story of the exodus without recognizing the humanitarian disaster that’s being perpetrated in Gaza today? It is a hard time to joyously celebrate a season’s renewal, and it would be deeply inappropriate to brush that off. On Passover, we traditionally eat horseradish to symbolize the bitterness of oppression, and that is something I will definitely be thinking extra hard about this year.

Where I find strife, anxiety, and worry for the future, I always find myself yearning to protect, tend to, and feed people. Mine is a paltry effort in the face of what we’re considering here, but one I feel compelled to attempt all the same.

In spring, that instinct trends toward the verdant. This is when my brain starts to catalog every green thing I can possibly put onto a plate to pump vitamins into us. It’s when I start to test the boundaries of how many herbs I can combine in one dish, so that we can luxuriate in small surprises when they go together well. Deep strife also always reminds me not to delay joy, and that makes me want to try something that’s so dumb it just might work. And this, my friends, is how I found my way to a big, crunchy, abundant, deeply green salad with horseradish ranch dressing.

If you’ve only had ranch dressing from a bottle, let me tell you, this version bears almost no resemblance to that. It’s worth noting that I had to substitute dried tarragon here, where I would normally use fresh, because our local supermarket has a roulette-like herb section. But it turned out to be a great move because the dried stuff packs such a powerful flavor punch. What I’m saying is that this recipe stands up well to improvisation, so don’t panic if you can’t find one of the ingredients.

If you think it’s overboard to combine peas, pea shoots, asparagus, lettuce, chicory, and the whole damn herb garden on one plate, that’s only because you haven’t tried it yet. I topped ours with soft-boiled eggs and reheated some leftover roasted potatoes, which dunk into this dressing uncommonly well. This recipe will make a great side or starter for four people. I always make double the amount of dressing because everyone always wants to sneak a little extra. I hope you and yours can tend to each other luxuriously this spring.

A BIG GREEN SALAD WITH HORSERADISH RANCH DRESSING

For the dressing
½ tsp. dried tarragon, crumbled
2 Tbsp. fresh dill, chopped
1 Tbsp. fresh chives, chopped
1 garlic clove, finely grated
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
3 tsp. prepared horseradish
1 Tbsp. mayonnaise
2 Tbsp. sour cream
½ cup well-shaken buttermilk
Salt and black pepper, to taste

Add all ingredients to a mason jar or any small container with a tight-fitting lid and shake like hell. Taste for salt and pepper (I needed more salt than I expected). You can make this up to three days in advance, keeping in mind that the horseradish and the garlic flavors will intensify as it sits.

For the salad
1 bunch asparagus, blanched and cut into bite-size pieces
1 cup frozen (and, later in the season, fresh) peas, blanched
1 head bibb lettuce, torn up a little
1 head Belgian endive, cut into chunks
2 oz. pea shoots
½ bunch flat-leaf parsley, picked
⅓ bunch cilantro, picked
2-3 mint sprigs, picked and torn up a little
Garnish with halves of soft-boiled egg, perhaps

Toss everything together in a big bowl, then divide onto four plates, making sure everyone gets some of everything. Drizzle the dressing over at the very last minute so everyone stays crunchy.