As-par-a-gus
Now’s the time of year in Seattle when some days it’s spring, some days it’s summer, and some days it’s still winter. We like to pretend it’s spring on the winter days, otherwise we begin to second-guess why we moved to a place where, in a bad year, it can be miserable from October 15 until July 5. One of the best ways we’ve found to embrace the season is to eat asparagus.
We buy asparagus from the supermarket, the farmer’s market, and Costco, so it is not unusual for us to come home and open the fridge to put away a nice, crisp bunch of asparagus and find one already there waiting for us. Oh well. So we get creative.
As far as cleaning asparagus goes, there are two camps – the snappers and the cutters.
The snappers bend each asparagus spear until they snap, and they throw away the bottom section. We have found that, depending on the asparagus, snapping can sometimes leave you with a whole plate of tips, and nothing much else. So we are cutters, and remove only the bottom inch or two (depending on the asparagus). Since the end of the spear can be tough, we use a potato peeler to peel the bottom two-thirds of the asparagus, and voila! No more tough. The stems are much sweeter than the tips so we like to conserve as much of them as we can.
Our favorite way to consume asparagus (when it isn’t raining) is grilled, with shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano. We lightly brush the peeled spears with olive oil, sprinkle them with kosher salt, and grill them just until the tips are showing some color and grill marks appear, turning them once, but the stalks should remain crisp in the center (the super-fat stalks are best for this). Take them from the grill and immediately shave some top-quality Parmigiano Reggiano over them using a potato peeler.
Roasted asparagus make a good substitute if the weather isn’t cooperating – just prepare the spears in the same way, but lay them in a single layer on a sheet pan and roast at 425° until bright green and the tips are starting to color.
Roasted or steamed, asparagus are also great at room temperature, and you can really dress them up with a nice shallot-heavy vinaigrette.
The Herbfarm’s Jerry Traunfeld has a fabulously easy recipe for asparagus soup in his second book, “The Herbal Kitchen”, which uses just leeks, butter, chicken stock, and a little white rice (and asparagus, obviously). It also calls for lemon-thyme, but we forgot to get some on that shopping trip, and the soup was still not only delicious, but gorgeous.
Jaques Pepin has a recipe in “Fast Food My Way” that’s easy enough to make for no reason except that you’ve got asparagus lying around, but it’s so beautiful, and has so much flavor, it’s turned into our standard dinner-party side-dish. To make it, you basically stir-fry asparagus spears that have been cut into two-inch lengths along with a whole lot of sliced shallots in a bit of olive oil. The shallots get wonderfully caramelized at, for some miraculous reason, the exact same moment that the asparagus pieces are perfectly cooked. Since Pepin is French, the recipe ends with you gently stirring in a nugget of butter with your salt and pepper. Butter really does make everything taste better…
