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.

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!

In a world where many people don’t get enough to eat, the fact that Americans waste nearly half their food represents a moral failure. What’s more, with the economic crisis in this country family food budgets are stretched tighter than ever; American families can ill-afford to waste so much. A lot of this waste results from overbuying: stuffing our refrigerators with more food than we can possibly eat before the crisper drawer starts to resemble the cast of Night of the Living Dead. Also responsible, though, are some of the bad — wasteful — habits encouraged by recipe writers that have us discard perfectly good ingredients.

Take chicken skin. Quite a few recipes that call for skin-on chicken parts, browned to contribute to the fond only to remove the skin before continuing with the dish. It makes sense — if the chicken skin was left to stew in the pot it would become flabby and unappetizing, and probably add an unsightly layer of fat. But the implication of the “remove the skin” step is that you should just throw it away. And you’re throwing away a gold mine.

Last night, as I was making a paella with six skin-on chicken thighs, I saved the to-be-discarded skins on a plate. As the paella was steaming, I heated up some schmaltz (saved from a roast chicken a few weeks ago) in a non-stick pan. In went the chicken skin, fried until crisp. Just like that I had the perfect appetizer — think pork rinds, except tastes like chicken — that left me a satisfied and ethical diner.

It’s safe to say that unless I hit the internet blogging jackpot and finally get to cash in on marthaandtom.com, I’m never going to own the recently-published Modernist Cuisine. $600 for a cookbook is just a little beyond this blogger’s budget. It’s a shame, because everything I’ve seen about the book (eGullet has some of the best coverage including a Q&A with the authors) indicates that it will be an immensely useful — not to mention beautiful — reference, even if you don’t go in for the immersion circulators, centrifuges, c-vaps and other gadgets favored by the Modernist Cuisine laboratory.

Fortunately for me and anybody else that doesn’t have $600 burning a hole in their apron pocket, this book is generating enough buzz and discussion online that some of the key findings are becoming available to the rest of us. In another post on eGullet, Chris Amirault introduced the modernist pasta, and was kind enough to post the full recipe:

• 100 g ’00′ flour (100%)
• 1 g xanthan gum
• 2.5 g salt
• 9 g water
• 56.7 g egg yolk
• 10.7 g oil

Xanthan gum is something I more expect to see printed somewhere near the bottom of a package-side ingredient list than a pasta recipe. The Modernists claim that xanthan gives fresh pasta a chewier texture closer to that of dried pasta. As it turns out Xanthan gum is a popular ingredient among people with gluten intolerances — it adds structure and enhances texture in gluten-less baked goods — so obtaining a small baggy of the magic white powder was no problem — they sell it in bulk at the co-op.

While xanthan gum stands out in the recipe as a weird ingredient, far crazier was the amount of eggs called for. I tripled the base recipe to produce about a pound of pasta (539.7 g or 1.2#), which meant I needed 170.1 grams of egg yolks. Not really knowing how much an egg yolk weighs, I set a bowl on my scale and got cracking. Ten eggs later and the scale was at 168 g. Ten eggs! With the egg I mixed into the ravioli filling, this dinner took a full banker’s dozen. Anybody have a good recipe that calls for ten egg whites?

I mixed the dough in my food processor; it came together extremely dry and crumbly. Ordinarily I would have added a little more water, but the Modernist measurements being so precise — down to the tenth of a gram — I stuck with them.

The dryness was even more apparent as I tried to work the dough through my pasta machine. Even after resting it was extremely difficult to get the dough to pass through the widest setting on my hand-cranked machine. As I worked it through the progressively thinner settings, the dough became jagged on the edges and appeared brittle.

In spite of these difficulties, once the pasta was rolled the advantages of the xanthan gum started to become apparent. Normally, after rolling and cutting pasta I go into paranoid mode, spreading copious amounts of flour to try to keep all the strands separated. I usually break out the pasta tree. But with the Modernist pasta, no tree was necessary: this pasta will not stick together. I was cutting circles out of the dough to form ravioli, but rather than carefully single-layering them on a sheet pan with cornstarch on either side as I might do with regular pasta, I unceremoniously dumped them in a pile. No sticking! To tempt fate I stacked the discs into an orderly stack — still no sticking. I started to become concerned that it wouldn’t be possible to make two pieces of pasta to stick together around a ravioli filling, but water applied directly to the surface finally caused the dough to adhere.

Due to it’s non-stickiness, this dough recipe seems ideal for long shapes — provided I can address the ragged edges.

The real point of the xanthan gum, though, is not that it makes the dough easy or difficult to work with, but that it improves the texture of the finished pasta. The fair way to do this would of course have been a double-blind tasting, with ravioli made with my standard Cook’s Illustrated recipe (2 cups flour, 3 eggs, a tablespoon or so of water) put up against the new competitor. But after the several hours and many eggs already expended in this effort, I didn’t have it in me. Given those many hours I of course really wanted this experiment to have been worth it, so take my observations with a grain of salt, but the texture of this pasta really did seem better than what I am used to. After cooking in just-less-than-boiling for three and a half minutes it was a silky, smooth al dente, with none of the eggy springiness I often get from fresh pasta.

The question that will be raised with all these Modernist Cuisine innovations is, is it worth it? Is the sometimes very marginal gain in quality worth the sometimes extra effort and expense, the high price tag of the book itself not least among these? Who would make this burger? Or in the case of this pasta, is it worth the sore arms and the egg-spenditure? After one attempt at this recipe, I’m not ready to decide, but I am at least intrigued enough to try it again.

Meyer Lemon & Artichoke Ravioli

Filling:

• 1 cup minced artichoke hearts (I used a 14oz can, drained)
• 1 cup whole milk ricotta
• ¾ cup finely grated parmesan cheese
• Zest and juice from one meyer lemon
• 1 egg
• 1 clove of garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
• 1 T minced chives
• Salt and pepper to taste

1 # of your favorite fresh pasta

Sauce:

• 3 T butter
• Juice and zest of one meyer lemon
• 1 c cream

Mix all the filling ingredients in a small bowl until evenly distributed and set aside. Roll out the pasta into thin sheets and cut out as many 2″ circles as you can (I used a drinking glass). Keep cut pasta covered to prevent it from drying out. Divide the cut rounds into two even groups (tops and bottoms) and lay the bottoms out across a work surface. Place a teaspoon of filling in the center of each round. Working with a few ravioli at a time, wet the edges of the bottom circle with water and cover the filling with a top. Pinch the edges of the two rounds together to seal.

For the sauce, melt the butter in a skillet and add the cream and lemon juice. Simmer for a few minutes to reduce slightly, then cover while preparing the pasta.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add the pasta. Adjust heat so the water does not return to a rolling boil. Cook until pasta is al dente, about 3 minutes with the Modernist pasta recipe outlined above.

Carefully drain ravioli and toss with sauce and lemon zest. Serve hot, preferably in warmed bowls.

Take two cultures not exactly known for their capacity to cooperate: Israel and Egypt. Israelis might fry up a mean latke — maybe one made of turnips, even — for the eight nights of Hanukkah, but believe that an Egyptian — especially if he happens to be a nationalist or an Islamist — would not be caught frying up those quintessentially Jewish treats that time of year. Instead, he’d probably head to the shop around the corner for some ta’amiya (think of falafel, but Egyptian), fried spheres of fava beans with herbs and spices, sandwiched in country bread with salad and tahini sauce.

I’ve always been disappointed with my homemade ta’amiya;  among other problems I can’t get the binder right. Bringing the frying oil to a high enough temperature helps (if it’s too low the fritters will disintegrate), but there needs to be something more. I’ve tried eggs, but it makes the ta’amiya too heavy. But my recent experience with turnip latkes got me thinking: they are bound with egg, true, but the egg is beaten with flour to form a batter that binds the shredded vegetables together. A batter would be perfect for holding ta’amiya together: a loose slurry of water and chickpea flour helped bind the ground favas and also made for a crisper crust. My best homemade ta’amiya yet, and I never would have arrived here if not for experimenting with other fritters.

Just to mix things up a bit more, we ate the patties topped with tzatziki sauce. Greeks, Israelis and Arabs, all working together toward a common goal — the ultimate fritter? Now there’s a vision for peace in the world.

Ta’amiya of Justice and Understanding

• 1# dried favas, soaked overnight and shelled to 2# 1¼oz
• .445 oz dill (~½ cup)
• .480 oz mint (~½ cup)
• 2.5 oz chickpea (gram) flour
• ¼ tsp baking soda
• 8 oz water
• 5 scallions (1.6 oz), thinly sliced on a bias
• 6 small carrots (4 oz), julienned fine (use a mandoline)
• 6 cloves garlic (1.155 oz), minced or crushed in a garlic press
• 1.5 tsp cumin (.1 oz)
• ¾ tsp coriander (.05 oz)
• 1/8 tsp cayenne (.01 oz)
• ¼ tsp black pepper (.025 oz)
• 1 Tbsp salt (.7 oz)
• Oil for frying

Working in small batches, process the  fava beans and the herbs together to a paste (I did three batches in my 6 cup food processor). In a large bowl, whisk together chickpea flour, baking soda and water. Mix in scallions, carrots, garlic, spices and salt. Knead in the fava bean mixture until well-distributed and homogenous.

Heat oil to 375ºF. Pinch off golf-ball sized clumps of the fava bean mixture, quickly roll the mixture into a sphere (technically they should be oblate, but I thought the spheres were attractive), and place it carefully in the oil. Repeat until the pot is full but not crowded. Fry until patties are a deep brown (the oil will have recovered to 375ºF at this point) then drain on paper towels and sprinkle with salt. Continue frying in batches until the fava bean mixture is gone, periodically sampling the ta’amiya right out of the fryer to make sure they’re still good.

Serve with pita bread, greens, tomatoes if they are in seasons and tzatziki, tahini sauce, hummus, or any other sauce you feel culturally appropriate.