Roasted Asparagus

I've waxed eloquent on asparagus before, so I'll spare you a lengthy introduction to this pinnacle of springtime vegetable perfection.

The best asparagus recipes are simple, allowing the bright green flavor of the asparagus to shine through.

Which means the best asparagus recipes are easy as pie (I have to assume that saying refers to eating pie rather than making it, as making pie crust is definitely difficult).

Say you turn the oven on to preheat while you make some biscuit dough, only to have the darn thing finish before the dough is done rising.

And say it's a warm May day and you hate to waste all that heat (and raise your gas bill) for naught.

And say you have some asparagus languishing in your vegetable drawer and not much else in the way of ingredients anywhere.

I would say you should roast the asparagus.

Simple Roasted Asparagus

Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Take a 9x13 pan (or whatever size seems appropriate for your asparagus stash) and drizzle a bit of extra virgin olive oil in it.

My bottle's almost empty, so this is pretty sparse.

Wash your asparagus and snap off the tough ends. (The ends of the asparagus (not the pointy tops but the flat ends) are tough and woody and should be trimmed. You can take the bunch, lob off the last couple inches with a knife, and hope you got all the woody bits and aren't wasting too much tender tasty stuff. Or, you can grab each piece a few inches from the bottom and bend. The asparagus will naturally snap at the border of the woody part and the tender part. Voila! Perfect asparagus spears.)

Lay the asparagus in your pan with the tender tops in the middle and the thicker ends toward the edges.

Tops in the middle.

Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Perhaps add a few peeled, crushed garlic cloves (they will flavor the asparagus and get sweet themselves with roasting--so delicious).

Could use more garlic.

Pop the pan in your preheated oven for about 10-15 minutes. The asparagus should darken and shrivel a bit, becoming fork tender, but not burn. Although, because of the strings, you'll still probably need a knife to cut them into bite size pieces.

I wish the lighting weren't different in the pictures so you
could see the difference more clearly. I have no idea why
the light changed in the course of ten minutes, but it did.

Up close and personal.

Enjoy!

Simple spring supper.

Grilled Bacon-Wrapped Asparagus

One of the culinary specialties of the region of Germany where I lived was white asparagus (weisser Spargel). During Spargelzeit (asparagus season), every meal at every restaurant in the city featured different preparations of this treat. Restaurants ran special Spargelmenus featuring secret Spargel recipes, and the local grocery store's Spargelzeit jingle (Oh die schoene Spargelzeit!) is still stuck in my head.

Asparagus--white, green, or purple--may be one of the last truly seasonal vegetables in the modern grocery store. It's everywhere for a few months in spring, and then--gone. We always ate asparagus for Easter dinner, but you couldn't have replicated the dish for Christmas if you wanted to, because there was just no asparagus to be had.

We're in the midst of die Spargelzeit in Tulsa, and the DDH and I cooked up this vegetable in a way that was completely new to us and, we though, utter genius...until I posted it on Facebook and apparently everybody around here does this already.

Still delicious.

Grilled Bacon-Wrapped Asparagus

Our version contains only two ingredients:

Bacon

and

Asparagus

We took small bundles of asparagus--ours were pretty thin, so maybe half a dozen per bundle--and wrapped them in three strips of bacon each, securing the bacon with toothpicks:

Asparagus in a blanket.

We greased our handy-dandy grill basket (which saves us from the tragedy of losing bacon between the grill slats), plopped it on the hot grill (medium high), and shut the lid.

Little pigs all in a row.

Periodically we opened the lid to turn our bacon-wrapped babies.

Unfortunately, reality bit. After about ten minutes of grilling, we ran out of propane. And even though we have not one, but two spare propane tanks taking up space on the back porch...they were both empty, too.

So we took them inside and finished them off on the stove.

Not quite done yet.

They were delicious! Green and sweet and rich and salty all at once.

We liked them just plain, but Facebook friends apparently doctor them up different ways. Try soaking the asparagus in some olive oil, salt, and/or pepper before you wrap them, or rubbing chile powder or brown sugar into the bacon before using it. You can try more or fewer asparagus stalks or bacon strips per bundle, too.

Enjoy!