An experienced forager would probably have been able to find a feast amongst the fallen leaves and icy paths, but since I have trouble distinguishing an elm from an oak, I couldn’t take my dinner inspiration directly from the land. Instead, I took it to a more conceptual level, asking, what really is a wetland? A soupy morass, a muddy stew of plants and animals, dotted here and there with islands of reeds that floating on top.

If there’s one thing my culinary education has prepared me for up to this point, it’s the cooking of soupy morasses. I had in mind a chicken stew — duck would have been too cute, let alone turtle — full of onions, carrots, mushrooms and peas and bound together by sauce velouté — chicken stock thickened with a roux. And those fluffy islands floating on top? Biscuits.

From browning the chicken to plopping the biscuit batter on top of the stew and baking it all together, this can all be done in one pot. I used:

Stew

• Olive oil
• 3 chicken leg quarters
• 2 onions, diced
• 4 carrots, peeled and diced
• 1/2# button mushrooms, quartered
• 6 T flour
• 6 T butter
• 4 c chicken stock
• 8 oz frozen peas
• Juice of 1 lemon

Biscuits

• 2 cups white flour
• 1 T baking powder
• 1 1/2 t sugar
• 1 t salt
• 1/2  t baking soda
• 4 T cold butter, cut into cubes
• 1 1/2 c cold buttermilk

Make the Stew: Heat oven to 350ºF. Sprinkle the chicken legs with salt and pepper. In a dutch oven, or a large cast-iron pan if you’re dextrous, heat a little oil over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add the chicken, skin side down, and cook until well-browned. Turn the chicken over and immediately place the vessel in the oven. Roast until chicken registers 170ºF — about 25 minutes. Remove chicken from pan and set on a plate. Drain any accumulated chicken fat and juices to a small bowl.

Place the dutch oven back over medium heat. Pour a few teaspoons of the conserved chicken fat in and add carrots and onions. Cook the vegetables until softened and slightly browned, 10–15 minutes. Remove to a large bowl. Return dutch oven to medium heat and add a few more teaspoons of the chicken fat (if that runs out, olive oil or butter is fine). Add the mushrooms and cook until browned. Add to bowl with the onions and carrots.

When the chicken has cooled, remove the skin and discard (or, if nobody’s looking, eat). Remove the chicken from the bones and shred by hand. Add chicken to bowl with onions, carrots and mushrooms.

Heat butter over medium heat in dutch oven. When foaming subsides, whisk in flour. Cook a minute or two, stirring constantly. Gradually whisk in chicken stock—keep stirring! Bring to a boil then add reserved vegetables and chicken. Turn off the heat, stir in peas and lemon juice, and adjust seasoning to taste with salt and pepper.

Make the Biscuits: Heat the oven to 450ºF. Combine flour, baking powder, sugar, salt and baking soda in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to combine. Drop in butter cubes and pulse until distributed into flour, about eight 1-second pulses. Transfer mixture to a bowl. Fold in buttermilk with a rubber spatula until just mixed.

Using well-floured hands, plop small handfuls of biscuit dough directly on top of stew, starting in the center and working out to the edges.

Bake stew, uncovered, until biscuits are browned, about 25 minutes.

Not that the attention ratatouille garners is undeserved; packed with vegetables at the height of summer ripeness, it is one of the best testaments available to the joy of eating seasonally. In fact there may be no better way to enjoy zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, onions and tomatoes all at the same time. But the real lesson of ratatouille lies not in the adherence to those core ingredients but in the happy combination of peak season produce, with nothing that’s not in season. Just about any combination will do, as long as the vegetables are fresh and ripe.

Luckily, this is the time of summer when the overabundance in farmers markets helps keep my kitchen stocked with nothing but fresh, ripe vegetables. The motivation for this summer stew was two large eggplants, but as I stooped down to remove these from the crisper drawer I kept seeing additional prospects for a seasonal stew: half a head of cabbage, a green pepper, five small leeks, tomatoes (the latter not, of course, stored in the refrigerator).

The great thing about a stew is you can be pretty lax about procedure since it’s all getting cooked together anyway. I cubed and salted my eggplant, since conventional wisdom suggests doing so will remove some kind of bitterness. I then sauteed sliced leeks and green bell pepper in a large amount of olive oil until the leeks were starting to brown deeply. I added the eggplant cubes and let them brown a bit too. Next went in the half head of cabbage, thinly sliced, a large sprig of thyme, and about ten roma tomatoes that I had pureed (and salted and sugared to make up for really lackluster flavor — you don’t win ‘em all at the farmers market). I added water to just about cover everything and let the pot stew away for a half an hour while I cooked some white rice. Right before serving the dish, I sprinkled it with fragrant basil shreds.

I was happy with the way this turned out, but I hope I don’t have you headed to the store in search of two eggplants, a half head of cabbage, a green pepper, five leeks and ten roma tomatoes because the point of all this was that if the ingredients for your summertime stew are fresh and in season, you won’t go wrong — it’s the spirit, not the letter, 0f a ratatouille recipe.

I am confident to cook most of my farmers market haul without consulting references, but zucchini blossoms send me into panic mode and I dive deep into whatever my miscellaneous Italian cookbooks and the Internet have to tell me. In past years this has yielded up some interesting, if ultimately flawed, techniques. Patricia Wells’s Trattoria recommends making a meringue of a batter with three egg whites (along with flour, water and beer) which makes a nice fluffy coating. Nice and fluffy, that is, until the meringue produced after furious whisking starts to droop, and the battered blossoms with it. Even the first few flowers when the meringue was working were coated in a great puff of a shell that drew most of the attention to itself. I don’t remember on what website I found the recipe for the disaster of the year before that (I think club soda was involved) but if it had been any good, I would have saved it.

With two consecutive years of failure under my belt, I was determined as ever not to buy zucchini blossoms this year. I put up a pretty good fight, having delayed the purchase until late July before Martha finally got her way and we went home with a bundle of bright orange blossoms in our basket. Unsuccessful in my attempt to avoid them altogether, I was at least determined not to repeat the mistakes of the previous years, and by my calculation principal among them was reliance on dubious and finicky recipes. So I scrapped the recipes and went with what I knew in my heart to be true: when it comes to frying vegetables or anything else, you can’t go wrong with beer batter. Mine was made with half a bottle of my home-brewed Irish red ale and enough flour to achieve a thin consistency that was still substantial enough to fully coat the flowers.

It just goes to show you, to paraphrase a wiser man than myself, beer really is the solution to all of life’s problems. These fried blossoms were just what I was after: the batter was crisp but still delicate enough that you could tell you were eating a flower. Light salting after they came out of the oil was all the needed seasoning.

If you have the option, buy zucchini blossoms with long stems. These impart two advantages: the stem serves as a handle allowing you to swirl the flower fully in batter without getting your hand dirty, and this handle also affords you a method for lowering the blossoms into 350°F vegetable oil without burning off your fingerprints. It’s a real win-win.

While I’ve faced substantial doubt in the past about what to fry zucchini blossoms in, there’s never been any question what to dip them in once they are fried. I make aioli (whisk together a mashed clove of garlic, an egg yolk, citrus juice, salt, pepper and a little mustard then slowly whisk in about 3/4 of a cup of oil) thinned by using a higher proportion of lime or lemon juice — the thinness of the sauce is important as the delicate flowers won’t stand up to being dragged through a thick mayo.

What I did have, though, were cucumbers. And what are pickles but cucumbers plus vinegar plus salt—and maybe sugar—plus time? I could kill two birds with one stone here: I could start my salad dressing while at the same time transforming fresh cucumbers into quick pickled ones, another key ingredient to the salad.

I began by whisking two tablespoons of brown sugar and two teaspoons of salt into about a cup of white vinegar until the sugar and salt were dissolved. To this I added one peeled, seeded, quartered and thinly sliced cucumber and stirred well. I also added a few chopped small onions to the cucumber, thinking the vinegar might tame some of the onions’ wicked heat. I let the cucumber and onions sit and pickle while I boiled thick slices of potato for the salad.

When the potatoes were just cooked, but not at all falling apart, I drained them and added them to the bowl with the cucumber, onions and vinegar. Adding the potatoes to the vinegar while they’re hot helps to season them. After the potatoes had cooled, I added a healthy scoop of mayonnaise (Hellman’s, or you could use homemade), a quarter cup of minced cilantro, and salt and pepper to taste.

To taste, by the way, is an instruction that shows up in recipes again and again, especially in reference to salt and pepper, but that’s rarely explained. It’s a great cop-out for recipe writers, actually: if the recipe ends up sucking, you probably didn’t salt it properly (or you have bad taste). I’m sure each cook has a different definition. In the case of this potato salad, though, and actually most instances where I use the phrase, what I mean by “salt to taste” is keep adding salt until you take a taste of the dish and you immediately go back for another, and another, and you almost can’t stop. That’s what happened when I got the salt right in this potato salad — I actually yelled out an expletive, and that’s not something I usually do in the kitchen unless I’m bleeding or on fire.

My pickle shortage ended up being a blessing in disguise. Freshly pickled cucumbers — soft yet still crisp, sweet and sour — were better than anything found in a jar.

When the first stalks of asparagus crop up at the market, I rush them home and into a pot of heavily salted water (I’ve read Thomas Keller recommends blanching vegetables in the equivalent of seawater). The hurry is not simply enthusiasm to finally be eating asparagus again: asparagus, like sweet corn, continues to process its sugars after picking, losing sweetness by the hour post-harvest. Asparagus also gets less sweet as the season goes on as sugars in the rhizome that produces the stalks are depleted (for more information see Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking). You can partially combat this by keeping asparagus cold and hydrated. I’ve been keeping my latest haul in the refrigerator in a vase of water.

But better than storing asparagus is to eat it right away. Boil it so briefly that the stalks are still crisp and green and serve it warm with a generous dollop of lemony homemade mayonnaise. Strict locavores might poo-poo my use of lemon, but there are some pairings in this world that were just meant to be, and asparagus and lemon is one of them (asparagus and eggs is another, so with mayo you get a twofer). This is really the only recipe needed for asparagus all year; I would be happy eating it with breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Speaking of breakfast, asparagus is one of the best vegetables for the morning meal. A quick asparagus frittata or scrambled eggs with asparagus are regular, quick breakfasts during the season. If I’m feeling ambitious enough to make pastry, asparagus is also excellent in quiche. I used Cook’s Illustrated’s Thomas Keller-inspired Deep Quiche Lorraine recipe, but added asparagus in place of the onion.

Deep-Dish Asparagus Quiche

For the Pastry

• 8 3/4 oz AP flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 12 Tbsp unsalted butter, cold, cut into cubes
• 3 Tbsp sour cream
• 1/4–1/3 cup ice water
• 1 large egg white, beaten

For the Filling

• 8 oz bacon, cut into 1/4 inch pieces (I used 4 oz; it would have been better with eight.)
• 1# asparagus, cut into 1″ pieces
• 1 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 8 large eggs plus one egg yolk
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• 1/2 tsp table salt
• 1/4 tsp ground black pepper
• 1/8 tsp grated nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp ground cayenne
• 6 oz gruyere, shredded

Pastry: Process flour and salt in food processor to combine. Add butter and pulse until butter is in pea-sized chunks. Mix sour cream and 1/4 cup water in a small bowl. Add half of mixture to flour and pulse to combine. Repeat with remaining sour cream and water. Add additional water as necessary to hydrate flour.

Turn the dough out onto a floured counter and form it into a six-inch diameter disk. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least one or up to 24 hours.

Cook’s suggests linking a deep cake pan with a foil sling to facilitate removing the quiche later; I had a lot of luck with a spring-form pan. Whatever vessel you use, roll the dough out into a 15-inch diameter circle and place in the pan. Allow the dough to overhang the pan slightly to anchor the sides. Refrigerate the pan for 30 minutes and then freeze it for 20 minutes.

Heat the oven to 375ºF. Line the dough with parchment and fill with pie weights, beans, or loose change. Bake until edges begin to brown, 30–40 minutes. Remove pie weights and return shell to oven until bottom is browned, 15–20 minutes more. Brush baked crust with egg white.

Filling: Cook bacon in a 12-inch skillet until crisp. Remove bacon bits and cook asparagus in bacon fat until browned. Set aside.

Whisk together cornstarch and 3 tablespoons of milk in a large bowl. Add remaining milk, eggs, yolk, cream, and spices and whisk till smooth.

Sprinkle bacon and asparagus on pastry shell. Slowly pour egg mixture over top. Run a fork through the eggs to evenly distribute the bacon and asparagus and remove air bubbles.

Bake at 350ºF for 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours, until center is set and registers 170ºF. Allow to cool to room temperature, remove from pan, and cut into wedges to serve.

If a quiche with more than a cup of cream strikes you as a little rich, you’ll be relieved to know that asparagus also makes a perfect salad ingredient. Thin stalks can be broken, raw, directly into a salad. Even more fun is to take slightly thicker spears of asparagus and — very carefully if you value your fingertips — running them down a mandoline. The resulting asparagus ribbons are beautiful and have a lot of applications, but one of my favorites is to toss them in a salad. For some contrast, I also roasted a few spears of asparagus in a hot oven until they were deeply caramelized — almost burnt — and nearly disintegrated. It is astounding that the two flavors come from the same vegetable: the roasted asparagus is sweet, smoky, and a very soft, while the asparagus ribbons are crisp with a green, grasslike flavor.

Asparagus Salad

• 3/4# new potatoes
• 1/2# asparagus spears, cut into 1″ pieces
• 1/2# asparagus spears, sliced into ribbons on a mandoline
• Salad greens
• Romaine lettuce, in bite sized pieces
• Arugula
• Pecorino Romano cheese

Balsamic Vinaigrette:

• 1 small clove of garlic, crushed
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 tsp dijon mustard
• 1/4 cup (or so) balsamic vinegar
• 1/2 cup olive oil and/or vegetable oil
• Additional salt and pepper to taste

For the dressing: Mash the garlic with the salt in a medium bowl to form a paste. Add yolk, mustard, and vinegar and whisk to combine. Slowly drizzle in oil, whisking constantly, to form an emulsion. Taste for seasoning and adjust consistency and acidity with additional vinegar.

For the salad: Boil potatoes until nearly done. Cut in half. Toss 1″ pieces of asparagus in oil and roast in 450ºF oven until deeply caramelized, about 30 minutes. Set aside. Toss potato halves in oil and roast, cut side down, until cut side is deep brown.

Toss asparagus ribbons, greens and lettuce with an appropriate amount of the dressing and place in serving bowl. Toss potatoes and roasted asparagus with dressing and arrange over top of the greens. Shave cheese over salad and serve.

Early season asparagus is so sweet and tender that it barely needs to be touched, but as stalks get thicker and starchier more aggressive techniques, like the roasting above or grilling/broiling become useful. If you’re reluctant to introduce delicate spears of asparagus directly to the intense heat of the grill or broiler, you can always wrap them in something – preferably a pork product. I would be letting down the Internet if I didn’t mention that you can wrap asparagus in bacon and grill it. For a subtler pleasure, wrap to-be-grilled asparagus in prosciutto. Not good prosciutto — that should be wrapped raw around spears post-cooking — but lackluster supermarket prosciutto is great for high heat. You don’t need to use any additional fat as the fat in the ham will render out during cooking and coat the asparagus in its porcine glory.

Enough with novel treatments; take a break for some simple asparagus again. A few spears steamed, dipped in cheaters aïoli: jarred mayo, a garlic clove and some lemon juice. Ah, simple pleasures.

By the time I was about half way through the recipes for this post (4# of asparagus later, if you’re counting), this post appeared on Serious Eats. (I promise I had the idea of writing this post well before that particular Food Lab was published!) J. Kenji Lopez-Alt covers a lot of the great preparations for asparagus that I  already knew and loved, but also introduced me to a new one: braised asparagus. Following Kenji’s lead, I peeled some of the larger spears I had and sauteed them in a large pat of butter before adding a couple of cubes of frozen chicken stock, covering the pan and letting the asparagus cook well longer than I would if I were interested in preserving green-ness and crispiness.

Braised asparagus is rich and warm, imbued with mature asparagus flavor without the grassy freshness of lighter techniques. A great side dish with simply cooked meat.

There are (hopefully) a few more weeks of asparagus ahead of us, and perhaps the most exciting thing to look forward to in the world of asparagus is the potential combinations with other produce that is just about to come into season. Herbs are already beginning to flourish, radishes must be right around the corner, and spring peas cannot be too far off. The latter combines beautifully with asparagus. Peas are not available at the farmers market yet, so I resorted to using frozen for this risotto, but believe I’ll be making this all over again — and again and again — when peas return to Minnesota’s gardens and farms.

Risotto Verde

• 5 cups chicken stock
• Olive oil
• 1# asparagus, cut into 1″ pieces
• 1 medium onion, chopped medium
• 2 cups arborio rice

(Confession #2: I combined 1 cup of arborio with 1 cup of generic long grain rice in order to avoid a trip to the store. I am almost too ashamed to type this, but there it is. Don’t judge me too harshly.)

• 1/2 cup vinho verde

(You can use any white wine, but vinho verde makes this risotto that much more verde.)

• Salt and Pepper to taste
• 1 cup peas, fresh or frozen
• 1/4 cup fresh herbs, minced (I used chives and oregano, but I think almost anything would work.)
• 2 Tbsp butter
• Grated Parmesan cheese

Bring stock to a bare simmer in a medium saucepan with any extra asparagus ends you have lying around. In a large skillet or dutch oven, heat two teaspoons of olive oil over medium high heat. Add asparagus (and peas, if using fresh) and saute until bright green and slightly cooked, about five minutes. Remove vegetables from pan and set aside. Add another 2 teaspoons of oil and add onion. Cook until softened and just beginning to brown. Add rice and cook until grains become mostly white. Add white wine and cook, scraping browned bits off the bottom of the pan, until wine is totally absorbed by the rice. Add about 3 cups of stock (strain out the asparagus ends) and bring to a simmer. Simmer ten or so minutes, stirring occasionally. After stock is mostly absorbed, begin stirring risotto constantly and adding more stock as necessary until the rice is cooked to the point you like it. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add asparagus, peas, and butter and cover. Let sit (off heat or over very low heat) for five to ten minutes. Add herbs and a healthy pile of parmesan cheese and stir. Taste for seasoning. Serve.

There was just ½# of asparagus remaining in my fridge, but another three pounds came from the market today, so there are many more asparagus preparations on my horizon. But springtime is off to a great start!