This year, we are still eating leftover corned beef brisket and noshing on a loaf of soda bread even as the Easter supplies sit in a bag on the counter. Usually there is more space between St. Pat’s and Easter, but we kind of like it — it feels like we are springing ahead to the warmer days.

This week’s food pages were full of stuff to feed this early-spring mood. The Washington Post led with a spread on vegetarian Easter recipes. The spin that writer David Hagedorn puts on this is that usually the side dishes get little attention at this holiday, so it’s fun to try to “upstage the big boys” with really excellent meat-free dishes. Good stuff. Only in D.C., kids, would you have this subtly political vibe in an Easter food article.

This is in contrast to the L.A. Times version of the Easter meal ideas piece, with its freewheeling California vibe: “Leek pancakes, gravlax, herbal tisane and chocolate-orange scones” are part of a “casual meal.”

The Times also has an excellent piece on that symbol of springtime: “The secret life of jelly beans.” Total candy for your mind. It is sort of a history of the candy, with plenty of fun bits sprinkled throughout. Jelly beans are a “panned” sweet, and they’re made in a “cement mixer thing” that tosses them around until they’re done.

The Most Ridiculously Cute and Beautiful Candy award goes to these marzipan treats spotlighted by Florence Fabricant in The New York Times, which are made by Betty Bakery in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. It looks like kid candy, but we think it’s really aimed more at the grown-up set (especially at $4 apiece).

Teeth aching already just thinking about all this sweetness? Maybe it’s time for a look at Russ Parson’s lovely Farmer’s Market feature, which this week highlights a color explosion of “purple artichokes, Gaviota strawberries and Cara Cara oranges.” Reading the descriptions of the strawberries will remind you that nature really does make the best candy. Too bad nature doesn’t make our bank account big enough for berries that cost $13 for three of them.

Let’s move on, as Bryant Gumbel says frequently on his fabulous cable show Real Sports. There are some restaurant writeups worth checking out, like this one about an “oddly compelling little bistro” called La Sirene in New York. For starters, reviewer Frank Bruni describes owner Didier Pawlicki as “a scolding, coddling, hyperactive presence who ricochets so rapidly through the restaurant’s cramped quarters — from the kitchen to the dining room and even into the basement, where he keeps diners’ coats — that comparing him to a pinball flatters the pinball.”

One of our favorite reviewers, Peter Meehan at the Times, writes about Roberta’s in Bushwick, Brooklyn — a new shop serving pizza til midnight (nothing new under the sun in New York, but nice in that semi-sleepy neighborhood). Even if you’re not much for this oft-mocked kind of pie, the description sounds good to us: “Roberta’s take on a Hawaiian pizza comes topped with paper-thin sheets of ripe pineapple, shreds of ham, sliced jalapeños and dabs of ricotta cheese.”

And from Washington, Jane Black reviews the new Bice in Bethesda. It is an updated version of the original, which closed in ‘95 and was “one of the places downtown (in D.C.) to see and be seen in the 1990s.” Black says that stylewise, it is “surprisingly unchanged” from the original; foodwise, everything she tried was “respectable,” but the highest praise isn’t for the menu, which “is a lengthy list of Italian cuisine’s greatest hits: prosciutto and melon, Caprese salad and carpaccio to start; 11 pastas and risottos, seafood soup, veal scaloppine and osso buco.” Instead, Black’s favorite item is one of the desserts. Maybe she is, along with lots of others, in sweet-tooth mode as springtime begins.