More from my favorite Colorado Chef, Christopher Cina. This recipe for a Colorado Asparagus Salad is perfect as a salad before dinner or as a meal in itself. It took me a while to like asparagus, but I can’t get enough of it now. As Christopher says at the bottom, as near a perfect vegetable as it is, it can make certain bodily functions quite stinky :) It’s a small price to pay for something so good.
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“…It’s no secret that chefs recycle dishes they have done in the past, most times those dishes will be tweaked to make them better, make them more seasonal, or just because they work really well. The Lobster Tacos I’ve brought to the restaurant are a version of the ones I used to do a couple of years ago. This asparagus salad though, is exactly the way I created it more than 12 years ago. The only exception I make to the original recipe is the use of local asparagus.
Asparagus is one of the cool-season vegetables that does well in Colorado as long as we avoid that early spring snow. Local asparagus usually becomes available right around Easter at the earliest and is in full swing through May. Other vegetables that do well in the cool Colorado spring are horseradish, rhubarb and shallots. While asparagus is available year round from Mexico, Peru and California, it’s hard to beat asparagus grown just up the road.
Asparagus was easily one of the first vegetables I enjoyed as a kid. My mom would blanch it quickly so it was still crisp and drench it in butter and salt, so much butter in fact that a greasy chin was part of the fun. It is one of the most versatile vegetables being that the preparations are endless. A chef friend of mine candies asparagus tips to serve over sweetbreads and lemon risotto, yeah, it’s awesome. Save for the tremendous odor it imparts to urine, asparagus could be the perfect vegetable…”
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