Spring.

The first day of spring was Thursday. The weather has been great and I've been out and about. Had a pretty good meal with some friends last week; last Saturday I went to the OC Swap Meet with a few of the Empirical supporters from the Burbank area; other great meals; hitting up the Farmers' Markets...



I picked up a ridiculous amount of asparagus on the first day of spring at the Downtown L.A. Farmer's Market with my cousin. It was cheaper to buy more so I did so without giving it much thought. Well, okay. Easy. Decided to re-lookup a recipe I'd seen before for an Asparagus Tart. Turns out there are a lot of variations on this so I just went with the easiest. It's the "Everyday Food" one archived on marthastewart.com. I'm not going to link it here because you can just do an easy search and find it yourself. It's not much more than a piece of store-bought puff pastry (phyllo), shredded gruyere, and asparagus stalks.

I'm not terrible at cooking. I can follow a recipe and have some idea of how to use seasonings. It's technique that I lack. Sometimes even with the simplest recipes, I can become frustrated and impatient. I would say a great deal of this has to do with prep. First problem, wrong kind of asparagus. It's so early in the season that most product is the young/thin variety whereas the recipe calls for med-thick. Secondly, no olive oil; I used little dabs of butter instead. Oh well, improvise! That's what I say. Here are results...



So, duh. Biggest issue here is craftsmanship. I was supposed to cut the asparagus to fit a uniform width, but what am I supposed to do with all the scraps? Throw it away? So wasteful! Maybe if it were for a more formal affair I would have given it more effort, but this is family. They'll eat what I serve. Ha!

Happy spring y'all.