5 Ways to Celebrate Spring with Asparagus!
I love this time of year! The long, depressing winter is finally coming to an end, I no longer have to scrape my car windows when I want to go anywhere, I’m already thinking about what to plant in my garden and delicious asparagus is abundant and inexpensive in the grocery store!
Asparagus is a fantastic vegetable that adds a certain elegance to just about any dish. So let’s look at five different ideas of how we can use this super sprout.
1. Asparagus for breakfast???
Sure, why not! Asparagus is versatile and pairs well with a variety of ingredients, including eggs, ham and many different kinds of cheeses.
What better way to start the day than with an omelette?
An omelette is a quick and easy breakfast or brunch that always impresses. For a simple and delicious omelette featuring asparagus, all you need is the following:
2 or 3 spears of asparagus, cut into bite size pieces, with woody ends removed
4 or 5 grape tomatoes or cherry tomatoes, cut in half or 1/4 diced Roma tomato
3 eggs, beaten and seasoned with salt and pepper
2 tablespoons chopped chives
goat cheese — as much as you dare put in your omelette!
This is super fast and simple.
Mix your chives, tomatoes and beaten eggs together and heat enough oil to coat a non-stick pan. Get it nice and hot, but not smoking.
Add the egg mixture and stir it so that it cooks evenly. Once the bottom is nice and golden brown and the middle is cooked, pile your asparagus and goat cheese onto half of it and fold the omelette in half. If you want to get fancy, you can do a triple fold, but this is just breakfast at home, so don’t worry too much about that!
If you prefer, you can do pretty much the same mixture as a frittata or just as scrambled eggs.
For a bit fancier breakfast, you could also do a really nice version of an Eggs Benedict. Use whatever you want for the bread, whether it’s a bagel, some good whole wheat toast, an English muffin or anything else that suits your taste.
Top your bread with a couple slices of smoked salmon, a few sauteed asparagus spears, some brie cheese and a poached egg.
To be honest, this should be rich enough to eat on its own, but if you really have your heart set on some Hollandaise, then go right ahead!
2. Asparagus soup
Creamy, rich, velvety asparagus soup… it’s incredible! It’s also pretty easy.
For me, soups are never very precise. It’s a handful of this and a pinch of that. So instead of giving you an exact recipe for cream of asparagus soup, I’m just going to describe the process of how I make it.
The ingredients are really, really simple… asparagus, onions, garlic, salt, pepper, water and cream.
But the one thing that I cannot stress enough is that you must, and I repeat, MUST remove all the fibrous ends of the asparagus. If you are under the impression, as I once was years ago, that these fibres will break down when you cook the soup for a long time, your soup is going to be really bad! And if you’re using an immersion blender to puree it, you’re going to have hours of untangling long asparagus fibres from it!
If you want to get more out of your asparagus, try peeling the bottoms with a vegetable peeler. Just make sure that what you’re using for your soup has no fibres.
I start the soup by heating a little vegetable oil in a pot to medium heat and adding one chopped onion and about 3 or 4 cloves of whole garlic. It doesn’t really matter too much what size the onion is chopped, as we’re going to be pureeing the soup later.
Once the onions and garlic are softened, add about two bunches of chopped asparagus and enough water to cover everything. Bring it to a boil, then reduce it to low heat and let it simmer for about an hour or until the asparagus, onions and garlic are soft enough to puree.
I like using an immersion blender for this, but you can use a food processor or regular blender as well. Just make sure that you have blended it until it’s smooth. If you want, you can push it through a mesh strainer to make sure that you haven’t missed any pieces.
Add some cream and check your seasoning. I like to season a little bit at each step, so I add some salt to my onions and garlic at the beginning, then add a bit more when I add the water and finally I check the seasoning at the end.
If you want, you can serve it with some diced, blanched asparagus, croutons and grated cheese.
3. Hot off the grill
Grilled asparagus is one of my favourite things in spring and summer. It grills fast and you don’t need to blanch it first. I just peel the bottoms of the asparagus spears, cut off anything that is too woody to eat and toss it with a little olive oil, salt and pepper.
I usually place it on the top rack of my barbecue while I’m grilling the rest of my dinner. This makes an awesome meal for vegetarians or vegans if you pair it with some grilled peppers, mushrooms and a vegan potato salad.
It also goes perfectly as a side dish with just about any kind of meat. But one of my favourite ways to eat grilled asparagus is on top of a salad. The crunch of the asparagus gives a nice texture and can be made into a meal sized salad with the addition of a salmon fillet, chicken breast or sliced flank steak.
4. Pastas and stir fries
I remember my first real restaurant job (no, Bonanza family restaurant doesn’t count!). I was seventeen years old and got a job as a line and prep cook at a neighbourhood restaurant and bar.
The fare was fairly standard… pizzas, pastas, burgers, steaks, wings, nachos. But I remember that the quality was actually pretty good.
One dish that I remember from the beginning was what they called a “chicken-asparagus saute.”
We started by making a fresh tomato-herb sauce. Instead of using canned tomatoes, we blanched and peeled dozens of fresh Roma tomatoes. Then, in a big pot, we slowly cooked garlic and onions in a good amount of olive oil. Once they were soft, we added the Roma tomatoes, basil, parsley, oregano, bay leaves, salt and pepper. We cooked this just until the tomatoes started to break down and we formed a sauce. Because it wasn’t cooked too long, it retained that fresh tomato taste.
Then the dish was really simple to put together. When we got an order, we sauteed some diced chicken and asparagus in a frying pan, added the fresh tomato-herb sauce and simmered it until it was cooked through and tossed it with some penne pasta. I still remember thinking that this dish was far and away better than any of our other pastas.
But asparagus works with other sauces as well, whether you want to do a cream sauce, a more basic tomato sauce or an aglio e olio.
I also love it in stir fries… vegetarian or with meat. Just make sure not to overcook the asparagus, that little crunch is one of the best things about it!
5. And now for something completely different!
What we’ve discussed so far is all pretty standard stuff. It’s damn tasty, but standard.
Sometimes it’s nice to try something unique. Every once in a while I have an idea that I have never seen before and I want to give it a try. Now, just because I have never seen it before doesn’t mean that nobody has done it before, just that I’ve never experienced it and have no idea how it will turn out.
These are the kinds of ideas that I try out on my wife and myself before attempting them for guests!
One of these ideas of mine was a pork-wrapped asparagus. I took 50 gram pieces of pork tenderloin and pounded them thin, like schnitzel. I then wrapped each piece of pork around two blanched asparagus spears. Finally, I wrapped one piece of prosciutto around the outside of the pork.
I heated just enough oil to coat a frying pan and quickly seared each piece before finishing it in the oven, just to make sure the pork was cooked through and the asparagus was hot in the middle.
I served two of these pieces per person with some tomato-butter sauce and risotto. And… it worked! Actually, it worked so well that this has become one of my go-to dishes.
Asparagus is a wonderfully versatile and delicious vegetable and this is the time of year to enjoy it! So, hit up your local grocery store and get cooking.
Originally published at dpcchef.com on April 2, 2019.
