"Spring food" followup

Well, here's how today's lunch turned out (and yes, I'm unemployed, if you were wondering how the HECK I'm posting about homecooking lunch!)

Luckily, since I was able to homecook, I got to venture into recipes that are meant to be eaten right away. Could've been a lot more of a challenge if I'd had to prepare food to refrigerate, take to work, and reheat.

Recipe #1:
After a lot of searching, at first trying to use my baby turnips' greens, I settled on this recipe, of course substituting the white parts at the bottom of garlic greens for an actual clove of garlic. Everything else I had in stock (including parsley. Lucky me! This year my parsley in a pot hasn't all died right away).

Triumph: I did NOT burn the butter or set off the fire alarm with smoke! I paid attention for a full 3 minutes!!!

Turns out my turnip bunch only had 6 turnips at the end of it! Definitely not the amount the recipe had been looking for, and I'd already chopped off all my garlic's ends. I didn't want more garlic breath than the meal merited, so I only cutsmooshed** up 2 white garlic green strips and threw them in after the turnips had been in the pan for about 2 minutes.

(By the way, I had to look up "sweating" to see what it was and how to do it right. It was worth it, though. I used my new knowledge to decide how much of the time I wanted to leave the pot's lid on in recipe #2.)

Review:
Sadly, turnips at any age (baby or ripe) taste bland. They tasted bland in my "root veggie stew" in February and they tasted bland covered in butter, olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and parsley.

Nevertheless, it's nice to know that I have made an edible dish out of a plant that grows here at this time of year.


Recipe #2:
There was a significant bit of butter/oil left in the pan, so I searched for "garlic" and "asparagus" on Google and, luckily, found a sauteed recipe first. Just what I needed, since sauteeing usually means cooking something in a pan with butter and/or oil.

I mixed and matched the original recipe and the modifications in the comments.

• I added more oil to the pan, but no more butter. I'm not sure if I got up to the original 3-tablespoon recommendation of oil/butter.
• I added balsamic vinaigrette to the oil/butter mix.
• I threw in the garlic greens first on my own advice and let them cook ahead of the asparagus a little.
• As far as covering the or not, I was going to go with the recommendation not to cover, but the asparagus just looked so dry that I decided to "sweat" it by covering the pan.
• On my own advice I added pepper and some marjoram while it was cooking (I really wanted powdered sage, since that stuff does frozen veggies wondered, but the only powdered green plant we had was marjoram).

I thought I'd stay well below the recommended 7-10 minutes and hit the 3-4 minute sautee suggested by a commenter, but I think that, in the end, that asparagus was in the pan, either cover off or cover on, for 7-10 minutes.


To prevent overcooking on the small stalks, I ate them. While the rest cooked.

Only one medium-sized stalk came out undercooked. The rest were just right! (I jumped from taste-testing the small ones to taste-testing the fattest one when they all started to look done. How do I know when asparagus looks done? As I said in my post earlier today, I've eaten potentially unhealthy amounts of it lately.)



Review:
I like plain old boiled-for-3-minutes-and-plunged-into-ice-water asparagus just as much as I liked this recipe. Probably more.

A lot of the flavor this dish offered was from the butter, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, garlic, and cheese (lucky me, I'd bought locally made hard cheese at the co-op. I never buy hard cheese!) I can't say all of it was, though, because I just tried practically the same recipe with turnips, and it didn't taste at all the same.

The garlic was better in recipe #2 than recipe #1. It cooked longer and soaked up balsamic vinegar. In fact, I'd say this recipe, while useless for asparagus unless you're looking for something to fill the pan with and looking for a new asparagus trick, is fabulous for the white parts of garlic greens.


I might make it again with the rest of the garlic greens (the green part) if I don't end up using them in that crazy soup I'm thinking about making.


Scrape all the bottom stuff out of the pan and throw it onto the asparagus & garlic. I wouldn't recommend pouring all the remaining olive oil all over your asparagus & garlic (they're oily enough), but definitely scrape up that goop on the bottom. I was almost licking this up (I'm sure the cheese helped, too, of course).


Remaining:

• Baby turnip greens
• Garlic green tops
• Arugula
• Basil (not much)

I hope to use them all without incorporating any non-local perishables.

Wish me luck.



** cutsmoosh: Recipe #1 called for crushed garlic that was "still together" in 1 clove. Since onion-like things don't "smash" as well as garlic cloves, I ran the stem through a dull, serrated knife that never quite made it down to the cutting board. The result was, I presume, flavorfully as close to "smooshing" this thing as I could get. Looked more scalloped.)