Asparagus Take 2
After the first attempt at cooking Dutch white asparagus (post here), I decided to look for a different method that didn't involve parchment paper packets. I found a recipe on Epicurious from Bon Appetit (the magazine I love to make fun of) that worked out great. Basically the asparagus spears are the grill for a piece of salmon. Following the NY Times article advice, I peeled my asparagus first. These spears are so fat, six of them cover my entire baking dish.
Basically you just toss the asparagus in olive oil, lay the salmon on top and season with salt & pepper, then pop into a 450 degree oven for 20 minutes. So easy.
After you take the salmon out, you put on a sauce of olive oil, lemon juice, and chopped thyme, capers, and red onion. But I'm sure you can use any kind of sauce you wish. I had the salmon and asparagus with kong xing cai (morning glory), the current "seasonal" vegetable at the Asian market.
For carbohydrates, I had some penne tossed with walnut-cilantro pesto. I LOVE this pesto. It's walnuts chopped with cilantro and paprika. I made a batch with week old cilantro that was about to be tossed out, and froze them in an ice sphere (not cube) tray. A handy way to keep pestos! The other one I have here is ginger-garlic for a Chinese flavor. It's really easy to prepare pasta this way - just boil pasta, then toss a few spheres of frozen pesto into the drained pasta and it melts and coats the pasta in one step.
