My favorite way to eat asparagus

Complete recipe here.

Ingredients:
red potatoes (skins on)
asparagus
garlic
rosemary
thyme
extra-virgin olive oil
kosher salt
ground pepper

and just for this time, I added some chopped parsnips, because I had bought them at the farmer's market and didn't know how else to use them up.


Here's how this works: potatoes (and also parsnips, although not mentioned in the recipe) take quite a while to cook all the way through.  They are dense and starchy.  Thus, when you roast this stuff in the oven (at 425 degrees), you have to do everything except the asparagus first, by itself, covered, for about 30 minutes, or until the potato chunks are almost done.  Then you mix in the chopped asparagus, put the cover back on, and roast for another 15 minutes.  Then you take the cover off and it looks like this:

Increase the oven temperature to 450 degrees, and put it back in (sans cover) to brown the potatoes.  This should only take ten minutes or so.  When you're done, it looks remarkably different, like this:

Not actually all that different.

Now, although I could probably eat this entire dish in one sitting, all by myself, because it is Just. That. Good, I decided I probably shouldn't.  So I grilled a chicken breast on my Foreman grill, and poured a glass of wine.

It was a very good meal.

Closeup of my dinner plate.

Now, if you were paying close attention, you might have noticed that the last photo does not, in fact, show a dinner plate.  There are two reasons for my using the small plates; first, all the big plates are in the dishwasher, and second, I wanted to save room for dessert.