I make as much an effort as anyone to feign enthusiasm for ramps, but the real excitement of spring and the produce it brings doesn’t begin for me until I see the first spears of asparagus at the farmers market. Asparagus is a bellwether crop, like the late summer tomato, that signals the arrival of the season. More importantly, asparagus is delicious; while a single bunch of ramps usually satisfies my seasonal curiosity, I’ll keep buying asparagus each week by the several pounds (10# this year so far) until that sad week in June when it disappears from the farmers market for another year. Like the year’s last tomatoes or sweet corn, the departure of asparagus fills me with deep sense of loss — as opposed to, say, kohlrabi, which frankly I could take or leave. And while eating winter squash for five days straight feels like some kind of satanic trial, I could shove asparagus down my throat for days and weeks on end without getting sick of it. And since it’s in season for just a few short weeks, that’s more or less what I do.

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!

As I was wracking my brain trying to come up with a Saint Patrick’s day post for this blog that wasn’t corned beef and cabbage — because I had to post something, right? — I kept coming back to bangers and mash. I’ve never been to the Emerald Isle, and while like many Americans I boast of substantial Irish heritage — real or imagined — unfortunately the recipes of the homeland did not make their way down the generations to me — I guess there are only so many ways to prepare blighted potato. Bereft of any reference from travel or tradition, I turned to the Internet.

It’s pretty easy to find recipes for bangers and mash with a search; after all, it’s just sausages with mashed potatoes and maybe some onion gravy. But my searches also revealed a disturbing truth: while there were cursory references to “Irish” bangers and mash, the dish was mostly called “British pub grub”. The British?! No! How could we celebrate Saint Patrick’s day eating the food of the hated oppressors, the colonizers? The blood of my ancestors boiled at these revelations as my blogger gut sank knowing I didn’t have a post for Saint Patrick’s day.

But further research and reflection calmed the rage and doubt. After all, many recipes did refer to the dish as a British and Irish favourite. Many authors seemed to suggest that the dish emerged some time around World War I — 1919 to be precise, which is when the first reference to sausage as bangers is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary. This also happens to be the year the Irish Republic declared its independence from those hated British, the year in which the Irish war for independence began. Could those recently invented bangers have been the thing that emboldened the Irish patriots to cast off the yoke of servitude?

Like most food origin stories, the 1919 creation of bangers and mash shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It’s useful from a linguistic perspective, representing the beginning of the use of the word bangers, heretofore a word for dynamite, to refer to sausages, but thinking culinarily, do you really think it took humans until the 20th century to realize that sausages and mashed potatoes are a delicious combination? More likely, this dish has been enjoyed anywhere people share a love for sausage and potatoes, and on that score Ireland certainly qualifies. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Bangers

There’s no canonical sausage for this dish; the spirit of it is to use whatever sausage is available locally that you like. In my research, Cumberland sausage often came up as popular in the British version of the dish. I found a recipe on the highly trustworthy sausagemaking.org from none other than forum user “sausagemaker” himself, who claimed to be Cumbrian. I was just excited to find a British sausage recipe with no sage in it.

Sausage:

• 60% pork shoulder (346 g)
• 15% pork belly (232 g)
• 7.5% breadcrumbs (58 g)
• 15% water (116 g)
• 2.5% spice mixture (19 g)

Spice Mixture

• 72% salt (13.9 g)
• 13.5% black pepper (2.6 g)
• 4.5% nutmeg (.9 g)
• 4.5% mace (.9 g)
• 4.5% coriander (.9 g)

Follow standard sausage-making procedure: dice the meats and freeze them for 30 minutes, then grind them once through the coarse plate. Mix in the spices and grind again. Mix in the rest of the sausage ingredients.

Cumberland sausage is unique in that it is not twisted into links, but rather is sold by the inch from a large coil. This makes for some fun times in the frying pan, let me tell you.

To cook the stuffed sausage, I first poached it for twenty minutes in 150ºF water (following this ridiculous recipe) before browning it in a skillet.

Mash

Boil a few russet potatoes in their skins. Pass through a ricer and fold in warm milk and butter until just smooth.

Onion Gravy

• One large onion, sliced thin
• 3 T butter
• 3 T flour
• 1.5 cups beef stock
• Salt and pepper, to taste

Melt the butter in a skillet and add the onion. Caramelize over medium-low heat. Stir in the flour. Gradually stir in the beef stock and bring to a simmer. Add salt and pepper to taste.

To serve the whole dish, nestle pieces of cooked sausage in a mound of mashed potatoes and spoon on a healthy portion of gravy.

Some days, everything goes right: the sun is shining, you can ride your bike around town carefree after a winter full of slow ice-patch vigilance, you’ve just eaten a fine lunch and there’s nothing in particular to do that afternoon. You roll into your favorite butcher shop — just to say hello — and suddenly your day gets even better because staring out from behind the butcher’s glass is a shining, garnet mound of fresh blood sausage.

Last Saturday was just such a day for Martha and me; our ride to Clancey’s Meat and Fish was rewarded with several links of blood sausage. Kristin and crew make it fresh a few times a year but it only stays in the display case briefly before it is frozen — blood sausage is not especially shelf stable. The good news is even if you missed it fresh last weekend, Clancey’s probably has all the frozen blood sausage your heart desires.

Desires, but for what? I certainly couldn’t reach back into my personal culinary heritage; my parents never cooked the stuff — in fact I’m quite sure that my dad will read this post with a mixture of horror and disgust. The Spanish, on the other hand, are great lovers of morcilla; it is a mainstay of at least a couple of hearty stews (fabada asturiana and cocido madrileño) and also finds its way into various tapas and pintxos.

I took the inspiration for this dish from the latter of the stews, the venerable cocido. (I was actually leaning toward fabada, but can you believe the Wedge doesn’t carry fabes asturianas?) Inspiration is all I took, though — I wasn’t interested in buying the many required meats or serving each pot ingredient as a separate course. So before any Madrileños arrive decrying my affront to their cultural patrimony, let me be clear: this not an authentic cocido madrileño. It is, however, a great way to highlight the flavor of blood sausage and a nice stew for a cold winter night, of which I am sure there are only a few left this year.

Cocido

• 1# dried chickpeas
• 1 ham hock
• 2 bay leaves
• Chicken stock
• 1 T olive oil
• ½ onion plus 2 chopped medium onions
• 1 celery stalk, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• ½# blood sausage
• ¼ cup parsley, minced
• Salt and pepper

Soak the chickpeas overnight, or quick soak by placing in a pot with heavily salted water, bringing to a boil and then turning off the heat, covering, and allowing to sit for one hour.

After the beans are soaked, drain and rinse them. Place in a stockpot and add the ham hock, bay leaves and half onion. Add chicken stock and water to cover generously — you will want plenty of broth. Bring to a boil and then simmer until beans are almost completely soft. Drain chickpeas, reserving cooking liquid, and remove ham hock. Discard the bay leaves and onion.

When ham hock is cool enough to handle, remove meat from  bones, fat and gristle. Shred the meat and reserve; discard the rest.

In a large pot or dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onions and celery and cook, stirring now and then, until the vegetables soften and start to brown. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add cooked chickpeas, reserved ham, and enough reserved cooking liquid to just cover the beans. If you don’t have enough cooking liquid, add water or chicken stock. Bring to a simmer. Lightly — lovingly — nestle the sausages on top of the stew and simmer gently, partially covered, until the sausage is warmed through and the beans are as soft as you like — maybe 20 minutes.

To serve, remove the sausage links from the pot and slice. Return the sausage slices to the stew along with the parsley and stir to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve in shallow bowls with plenty of crusty bread on the side to soak up the broth.

Tilapia has a lot to recommend it: it’s cheap, grows fast, can be sustainably farmed, and is low in mercury. Probably the only thing not to love about tilapia is its flavor. Not that it’s actively offensive, just that even in terms of white-fleshed fish tilapia is pretty bland.

That blandness can be remedied with ingredients with serious flavor: fish sauce, ginger, chiles, lime juice and herbs. All these are found in larb, the Laotian meat salad that also happens to be the perfect antidote to a long and dreary winter.

My recipe, from Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America by Sami Scripter and Sheng Yang, lists a number of herbs you can choose from: mint, cilantro, Vietnamese coriander, culantro, rice paddy herb, Thai basil, Chinese boxthorn. Tragically our co-op doesn’t carry most of those, so I limited my larb to mint, cilantro, and Thai basil — in spite of the authors’ insistence that authentic larb must contain culantro — but it was still delicious.

The word larb for me is associated with raw meat, particularly raw beef. That’s not necessarily the case — larb can be made with cooked or raw meat — but if the idea of raw beef gives you pause, making the salad with raw fish might be a little easier. Just think of it as a south-Asian ceviche.

Tilapia Larb

Adapted from Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America

• ¾# Tilapia filets
• Juice of two limes
• 2 T minced ginger
• 1 stalk lemon grass, tough parts removed, minced
• 1 hot chili pepper, minced
• 1/3 cup chopped mint
• 1/3 cup chopped cilantro
• 1/3 cup Thai basil
• ½ bunch green onions, chopped
• 1 T fish sauce
• 1 t salt
• 1/4 c toasted rice flour

Chop the tilapia into fine pieces. Toss with lime juice and leave to sit until fish turns opaque. Squeeze off excess lime juice and place tilapia in a large bowl.

Add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl and toss. Serve with lettuce leaves for scooping.

A note on toasted rice flour: I made this by toasting some rice in a skillet until it was tan and then grinding it in my spice grinder. Unfortunately, I didn’t grind it fine enough, and the rice left unsettling crunchy granules throughout the salad. If you’re going to include it, make sure you grind the rice fully to the consistency of flour. You could also leave it out — the salad wouldn’t be authentic, but I think it would taste fine.

As a relative newbie in the world of cocktails, I find them totally mysterious. How is it that pouring apparently random amounts of ingredients that are often quite challenging to drink on their own transform in the shaker into a magical elixir? When I am cooking, at least, I have some confidence in my ability to play with ratios and substitute ingredients to manipulate flavor; mixing a cocktail, on the other hand, is an exercise in total blind recipe faith for me. Measure, mix, pour, pray. Unhappy with my cocktail impotence, I added “understanding cocktail anatomy” to my long-term life and blog to-do list.

As it turns out Esquire magazine has beaten me to the punch. Their reductionist cocktail recipe allows anyone to mix up a reliably drinkable invention using a simple ratio: 3 parts liquor, 1 part liqueur, 1 part Aperol and 1 part citrus juice.

Any time someone claims to have discovered a foolproof recipe, it is my duty to attempt to break it, so for my first Esquire cocktail I broke out the most shameful contents of our liquor cabinet: 1½ oz Sauza Gold tequila, ½ oz Southern Comfort, ½ oz Aperol and ½ oz lime juice. Between the SoCo and the tequila, I wasn’t expecting much from this. But I was pleasantly surprised. While the cheap tequila’s familiar sting was present, it only lingered ethereally over the cocktail, rather than entirely defining it like the cheap tequila cocktails I invented in college. The drink was more or less as promised: smooth and not too sweet. Kind of boring, but not offensive.

Another iteration using 100 Proof Wild Turkey, Benedictine and lemon juice mixed with Aperol turned out the same way: not terribly interesting, but pretty good. Definitely drinkable.

This is not my favorite cocktail recipe. I’ve had way more fun and discovered far more interesting flavors and drinks in Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, which I’ve only scratched the surface of. But when it’s just too much to run out for that obscure new ingredient — or if it’s Sunday in this backwards state — it’s nice to know there’s a cocktail I can mix up with what I’ve got on hand, even if it’s SoCo.