Rock Island, IL
So far we haven’t had any dispatches from the summer kitchen, but then it isn’t really summer yet.
Not that the asparagus knows. Lordy it’s coming in, green and purple and stiff and tender. A mere acre of this graceful stalk will yield God’s own bounty, and up here in God’s country a fresh local pound of it will fetch a good price.
I don’t have my own patch of it, not yet, but I’ve got a line one some, and let me tell you it’s ready for the heat of my culinary space.
And as for that heat, let’s be clear about one thing. It is an offense punishable by hellfire to blanch your asparagus in boiling water. Unless you live on a damp island, have bad teeth, and occasionally sing “God Save the Queen,” do not under any circumstances boil your vegetables.
Now what I’m about to part with is a simple and beautiful way to cast asparagus on another person’s character, but understand plainly that boiling the asparagus will get you drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, and hanged at dawn—not to mention put on bread and water for a month. Asparagus is a noble manifestation of the earth’s increase. Boiling it is blasphemy of the greatest magnitude.
I’m afraid that the bibulous among us—those I am personally familiar with include Kauffman, Beer, Wilson, Shiffman, Polet, Deneen, Mitchell, Stegal, Carlson, and Hart (as well as others whom I suspect—z.B. Sabin and not a few loyal readers)—might be disappointed to know that the foreplay to this Asparagasm involves no lovingly prepared potable. The reason is that my asparagus salad is best prepared in the sobriety of late morning or early afternoon, when the anticipation of an evening cocktail hasn’t yet presented itself to the longing heart.
And also because you want the salad to cool before you feast upon it. You want it to spend the day in the deep-delved earth or, if you don’t have a root cellar, in the fridge.
But get yourself a pound of fresh local asparagus. Local. Not that stuff shipped in from California, unless you’re in California. Cut as much as an inch off the fat end of the stalk, depending on the fatness, and put the stubs in the compost pail. The stubs were made to be turned into soil anyway, so don’t lament this profligacy. It isn’t profligacy.
If you’re going to grill the asparagus, cut each stalk in half so that you have one piece for each of the two natures of Christ. If you’re going to sauté the asparagus, cut the stalks in thirds, one for each person of the Trinity.
GRILLERS: brush the asparagus with olive oil (local olive oil if you live in Greece or Italy); put the fat ends on the grill first, then, after a minute , the thin ends (& tips). Four minutes on a hot grill will be too much heat. The stalks will need salt and pepper during the grilling.
[Note: as with beef, always undercook.]
Remove.
STOVETOPPERS: heat olive oil (local olive oil if you live in Greece or Italy) in a large saucepan over medium heat. Put the fat thirds of the asparagus in first, then (after about a minute) the middle thirds, then (after about another minute), the tips. Move them around in the pan for a total of about five or six minutes. They’ll need salt and pepper during all this.
[Note: as with beef, always undercook.]
BOILERS: Go to Hell. But first …
Boil a pan of water. Throw a palm’s worth of sea salt in and drizzle in some olive oil. When the water has reached a boil, put in about a half-pound of linguine or fettuccini, depending on your preference. Be sure that you break the pasta into thirds, one piece for each time St. Peter denied his personal lord and savior, so that the strands are not too long. Strain after nine minutes and reserve.
Put the asparagus aside and think about a nice light white wine—but do not open one.
Now you must toast some sliced almonds. You probably can’t get local almonds, but try. If you can’t, adopt this motto: it is better to ask forgiveness than permission.
Toast three or four handfuls of sliced almonds either on the grill or in the oven. Don’t’ burn the little fellas. Put them aside.
Get yourself a minimum of eight ounces of mushrooms and slice them about a quarter-inch thick. Put them aside. Don’t put them anywhere near the heat.
Now just as Jesus needed a forerunner, so your bourbon (or martini or scotch) will need an iced tea. Make one. Sweeten it depending on how far below the Mason-Dixon line you live.
All the ingredients heretofore prepared and reserved (the asparagus, pasta, almonds, and mushrooms) should be placed in a single bowl and cooled.
You are now ready to make your vinaigrette.
Squeeze into a bowl the juice of no fewer than two big-ass lemons. Add about five or six finely chopped garlic cloves and at least a quarter teaspoon of crushed red pepper. Add a palmful of salt and a drizzle—say, three tablespoons—of olive oil.
Wait. Wait longer. Wait longer still. Go make love or something.
Now, having put the reserve ingredients into the same bowl, stir and then pour the vinaigrette over it, sprinkle over everything some grated parmesan (not that sawdust Kraft sells) or asagio cheese, crack a light white wine, and serve both. After dinner, read aloud some summer poetry. No one will care that you have cast asparagus on someone else’s character. My experience, in fact, is that the more asparagus cast, the better the … well … you know, the better the poetry.
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{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
Better yet, grow the asparagus yourself. We’re going to try it next year. This year, we have been absolutely insufferable about the success of our garden. (Anybody know a cure for the cucumber beetle? Despite the fact that we have no cucumbers, it attacks corn, melons, and squash as well, which we have in abundance.) I used raised beds, which produces an incredibly rich soil and eliminates the need for weeding, which no one likes to do in Texas when the temperature gets up above 100, as it will this week.
You build some bins (no more than 4 feet wide, so you can reach to the middle), lay down cardboard or thick mats of newspaper to smother the grass, alternate layers of hay and soil with a sprinkling of blood and bone meal, and top the whole think off with 4-8 inches of hay. Whenever you see a weed, smoother it with more hay. I also add the magic ingredient, worms from my worm bin.
Its practically trouble-free gardening, and unbelievably productive. Two of my neighbors, seeing how well things grow, have started their own bins. There’s now a premium on hay in the neighborhood.
“Unless you live on a damp island, have bad teeth, and occasionally sing ‘God Save the Queen,’ do not under any circumstances boil your vegetables.”
- I think if you’re British, you’re required to boil everything… including your teeth.
No one who has not eaten asparagus fresh from the garden (minutes from the ground to stove), has ever really tasted it. It’s actually a sweet vegetable, but the sugar in it converts to starch within about 12 hours–its sweetness is even more fleeting than that of sweet corn.
When you start your own asparagus patch, I strongly recommend one of the purple varieties. In my experience, these are much more robust that the green. Our little 4×6-foot patch has been established for about 4 years, and gives us 30 pounds or more of asparagus starting in early March–and it’s only now starting to slow down. And these are not your anemic little-finger-sized spears, but big fat ones thicker than your thumb, a foot long, and tender all the way down.
In the Santa Cruz mountains, asparagus is an invasive weed: it’s sprouting all over the garden. I’m going to let the patch migrate to where it wants to be over the next 10 years or so.
BTW, thanks for the grilling recipe. I am one of those hell-bound boilers, and still insist that if you do it right (no more than a couple of minutes, followed by an ice bath or immediate consumption), it’s a marvelous way to preserve the sweetness and color of fresh asparagus.
My parents always lightly steamed their asparagus. I’ve never had it raw or grilled or sauteed, but now you’ve got me thinking of planting it in our garden so I can try out those recipes. I haven’t seen too much asparagus in the stores lately, and what I have seen was expensive.
I’d love an almond tree, too, but I’ll have to find out first whether it’d even survive a Minnesota winter.
I’m a Aspy-steamer from way back. A touch of butter and pepper as they cool, and eaten in a large heap next to braised ribs.
Just for your reference, local olive oil is available in Queen Creek, Arizona.
“Anybody know a cure for the cucumber beetle?”
My grandmother swore by soapy water for all garden pests; use a mild soap, not a detergent, and not an anti-bacterial one. It doesn’t kill the bugs but it does chase and keep them away. Plus you don’t have to wash the vegetables after you pick them. ;-)
Please write a cook book ASAP.
It’s all about the tomatoes this year in our garden. Trying to see if we can actually can enough diced and stewed tomatoes, tomato sauce, and salsa, to avoid having to buy a single can of processed tomato product for a full year. All 24 plants are coming along nicely, but we’ll know for sure by late July.
Thanks for this wonderful essay.
I consider it to be one of my greater failures as a mother to have reared a son who will not eat asparagus. He’s out of college now and I see no sign of a change of heart nor palate. He has announced to me that this was my fault. I “fed it to him when he was too young” and “made him eat it”. Since I was (and still am) of the opinion that “making” children eat anything is a principle that can only backfire, hearing this just ’bout broke my heart. The idea was to introduce a little bit of everything and he’ll come to be fearless in his food explorations. “Take at least one bite.” What I learned–there really is such a thing as a picky eater. (I did notice when his girlfriend made dinner, at least two banished foods were happily ingested.)
Thanks for the recipe–asparagus pesto over pasta–another winner.
Of course you make kids eat something, just like you make them clean their room, help with the gardening, read Chaucer, not wear spaghetti straps or speedos, get up on time and say prayers before meals.
These are like brushing your teeth..good habits. Good habits do not backfire.
David–Eating a new food is not a inculcating a habit. Good heavens. One hopes for the best–I own over 150 cookbooks, but one’s children may or may not want to cook, even after watching the immediate results of mom’s efforts, and mostly enjoying meal after meal at the table with conversation. Food as homework is a very bad idea. I think.
It is a habit in my house to both “eat new foods” and to “eat what has been prepared for dinner with gratitude”. This does not mean that I am fully successful (they are children) but the great work continues.
Eating food and doing one’s homework bear a striking resemblance. Both are keen on attitude and repetition, and neither is an end in of itself (though depending on the food and the subject they may be enjoyable, but there is no guarantee and neither is their enjoyment a necessary condition of their completion).
you can also get olive oil in Calif. :
http://www.cooc.com/consumers_where.html
Oh, heck, a little–very little–boiling of asparagus is just fine, if it’s consumed immediately or shocked in an ice bath, as Dave Trowbridge recommends. Sure, grilling is better, but not always practical. Tossing the cut-up asparagus into the boiling water with the pasta for the last minute of cooking is a very easy way to go. Drain the lot, apply to it much olive oil, in which, preferably, you’ve just sauteed some minced garlic, add salt and pepper and maybe a dash of lemon juice, some of that good Parmigiano-Reggiano, and you’re good to go.
Speaking of hellworthy culinary sins, some Italians think this whole concept of pasta salad–serving pasta cold?–is an abomination. Not sharing this view, I forge ahead and commit this abomination anyhow, but I’m just saying.
I just re-read your recipe and took notice of the very generous amount of *raw* garlic that goes into your vinaigrette. Impressive. Now that would cover a multitude of sins, not that I see any sins in this dish to cover. Yum.
You can get local olive oil in California too (this is local to me http://www.lodestarfarms.com/). You can pretty much get everything local in California.
Russell Arben Fox
24 to 25 tomato plants is the magic number for 2 to 3 tomato based meals per week, for a year, for 4 to 5 mouths. Grow bottling tomatoes too, not big watery salad types. We watched our 25 San Marzanos (300+kg) as they were washed away by drought breaking flash floods this year, but the magic number holds in spite of this kind of natural indifference. We have always simply added our own basil and a bit of salt and lemon juice, the extras you add on the day. Enjoy your bounty.
like to steam ‘em unless I’m doing something fancy. Add some lemon juice if you are steaming.
About 12 years ago I threw a bunch of asparagus roots into a shady corner of my garden – I ignore them until time to harvest. This actually works – year after year for about 5 weeks we have almost daily asparagus. What a joy.
For those about to plant asparagus – do not harvest any for at least two years – give those roots time to dig in. Some say wait three years but that requires an unnatural level of self discipline
John – I do appreciate this sounds nuts but it was passed on to me by a long time farmer – buy a cheap cigar- drop it in a bucket of water – let it soak a day or so – strain out the cigar stuff (I just scoop it out) then use the water over the plant. This works for all manner of garden pests – keeps aphids off roses too.
Thanks for the recipes!
Cecelia, it would only be crazy if you suggested an expensive cigar, say Connecticut Wrapped be tossed in water for a little Nicotiana Bath on the infernal pests. This is indeed , a proven method, as is lit and furiously stoked Nat Sherman cigars as protection against black flies.
As to Calyfornya Olive Oil….there aint much better than one o them fat Calyfornya Olives from those spectacular groves pitching up and down the hills outside Petaluma…stuffed with a sweet onion and pickled. The only thing as visually arresting as silver-leafed olive groves in California is the same silver-blue color marching up the scrubby Pine-clad Sierra Madre of Jalisco, Mexico…. in the form of Agave.
Peters might know of the plant, properly ministered to, it creates Tequila and that south of the border version of Kaintuck White Lightin known as Raicilla. Not that I would know much about that. After Raicilla, one could eat Woodchuck toes and think it asparagus al dente with a little lemon and goats milk butter.
The reason is that my asparagus salad is best prepared in the sobriety of late morning or early afternoon, when the anticipation of an evening cocktail hasn’t yet presented itself to the longing heart.
This is heresy, plain and simple.
Mamma mia! You defend the honor of the asparagus, but then commit the gross heresy of breaking the pasta! This Italian is going to cry…