Good morning. I love the green I’m seeing at the tips of the hardwoods, the bright harlequin vibrancy of the alliums along the stream beds, the way the grass in the park is starting to thrive again after a long winter of abuse at the feet of dogs. Here’s spring garlic at the market, funky bouquets of ramps and, best of all, asparagus.
Asparagus is always at the market, of course. There are no seasons in the supply chain of American food. Everything is grown somewhere all the time, and shipped to us by air and sea. But real asparagus, actual in-season local asparagus, grown somewhere within a couple hundred miles from home in warm spring sunlight and brought to you by rattletrap truck — that’s the best asparagus, a reminder of the passage of time and the promise of spring.
I’m using mine for Melissa Clark’s new recipe for creamy asparagus pasta with peas and mint (above) — a taste of now. You could follow me this evening in making it, or steer into one of these other excellent recipes for asparagus that we’ve gathered for your pleasure. I hope you do.
Featured Recipe
Creamy Asparagus Pasta With Peas and Mint
With Sunday taken care of, we can look to the rest of the week. …
Monday
We’re a long way from tomato season, but the cherry tomatoes at the market are still pretty good. (See above: hecho en Mexico.) I like them piled on Melissa’s recipe for a cherry tomato Caesar salad, with curls of shaved Parmesan and extra anchovies. Melissa drizzles the dressing over the lettuce before adding the tomatoes. I toss the salad with the dressing instead, before adding the cheese and little fishes.
Tuesday
Eric Kim brings a neat insight to his new recipe for miso salmon, cutting the salmon into strips about an inch wide, then cooking them on their cut sides. This allows the marinade to penetrate the fish more completely, and for more even cooking.
Wednesday
Charred cabbage delivers a beautiful combination of flavors, amazing in their complexity, from savory to bitter to sweet. In Ham El-Waylly’s new recipe for brown butter bucatini with charred cabbage, the vegetable turns silky and clings to the pasta in the most delicious of ways.
Thursday
I generally take boneless, skinless chicken thighs over breasts every time. But Yasmin Fahr’s new recipe for honey-garlic chicken makes a powerful argument for the white meat: juicy under the sear, with a beautiful glaze.
Friday
Recently someone wrote from what she described as the “hinterlands” to berate me for recommending “impossible-to-find ingredients” like gochujang, the Korean red chile paste. Ten seconds on the internet confirmed my hypothesis: The supermarket in her town sells gochujang. That is probably true for you as well — and definitely so if you shop online. Make Alexa Weibel’s new recipe for gochujang shrimp pasta to round out the week and you’ll understand why we love it so much.
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Now, it’s a country mile from anything to do with smothered rabbit or oysters Rockefeller, but do read Alex Williams’s Times obituary for Barbara Joans, “an iconoclastic anthropologist and feminist who, in her early 60s, became something of a Margaret Mead in black leather, steering her Harley-Davidson deep into a biker culture.” Joans, who wrote the 2001 book “Bike Lust: Harleys, Women, and American Society,” died on March 6, at 89.
Here’s a new poem from Thomas A. Clark in The New York Review of Books, “Flight Across the Heather.”
