Food, Glorious Food ( or We Be Cooking )

Cooking is glorious. It brings about things triumphantly delicious, infused with effort as much as flavor. Often, cooking can be done fairly cheaply as well. In cooking, the real investment is time (as Josh can no doubt attest with his eight to twelve hour baking sessions. ) Solid time investment, whether through learning techniques, experimenting with recipes or just from good old-fashioned hard work always leads to a great learning experience, and often times a delicious one at that. We need not spend our whole lives pursuing the deep complexities of cooking, though. Sometimes we can cook just to cook.

Oh my yes.

While I haven't logged as many kitchen miles as some of my fellow Pockets, I've managed to hone my kitchen prowess to the point where I don't cut anything vital off or burn everything to a flaming lump of carbon and despair. I've done that through finding crazy simple recipes that I can memorize. Good for every occasion, they serve as my "Ace" in situations where cooking prowess is impressive. (Family holidays, meeting-the-inlaws, and high-powered business luncheons are all a go!)

Below is my recipe for sauteed asparagus. It takes all of about 15 minutes once the ingredients are gathered and is a sure-fire hit even with supposed asparagus-haters. (I used to be one before I found this recipe.) The origin of the recipe is unclear and I'm fairly sure it's an amalgamation of a bunch of different recipes, but I would bet berries to bushels that Alton Brown [ link ] was involved. Love that show.

Sauteed Asparagus
1/2 lb fresh asparagus
Virgin 0live 0il
2 tbsp soy sauce
Ground black pepper
Aluminum foil

Before anything else happens, tear off a sheet of aluminum foil and fold it into a packet. This is where you'll be steaming the asparagus when it comes out of the pan, so make sure it's big enough to hold the asparagus and still be folded shut or closed. Keep it nearby.

Trim the asparagus to whatever length you would like. I usually keep everything but the bottom three inches, but some asparagus can get "woody" even further than that, so use your best judgment. Wash and drain the asparagus.

After washing and draining the asparagus, place in a pan on medium-high heat. Drizzle olive oil on the asparagus and shake them around to very lightly coat them. Too much oil will cause smoke problems, so keep it light. Toss them about occasionally, rotating the asparagus. When the color shifts from a light green to a deeper forest green, take a stalk of asparagus out. Allow it to cool for a second and then shake it, held firmly between your fore-finger and thumb. If the asparagus is stiff and does not wiggle, it still must be cooked. When the asparagus wiggles a bit limply, it's time to put it in the aluminum steam packet we made earlier.

Place the asparagus in the pre-made aluminum foil packet and add the soy sauce and black ground pepper. Now is the time to add any other seasoning you'd like. I stay away from salt, as the soy sauce has it covered. Now just fold the packet up so it's in a bundle so no steam can escape and let it rest on a plate. (It may get a little leaky.) In four or five minutes, open the packet to reveal deliciously sauteed asparagus. And with so little effort as to make you look like a crazy dynamo-chef. While Club Nouveau [ link ] might not be on your mandatory cooking mix, you can dig it when I say "We be cooking!"

Asparagus. I've said it so many times, it's lost all meaning. Asparagus.

With that funky respect to Bill Withers,
-Nate Bellon(bass)