Big questions in the neighborhood of an asparagus lasagna

Today we find ourselves with a few trepidations or qualms of conscience about these apparently-simple themes of shopping and cooking.  To try to write about such things, it seems to us, raises all manner of insistent and inescapable questions.  When too many people, even in our own local community much less in the wide world, still go hungry, isn’t it unseemly to dwell on food as though nothing could ever interrupt such plenty?  Is dwelling on the details of cuisine no more than hedonism or, even worse, an exercise in class distinction?  And what about this whole idea of “the local” that interests so many people nowadays?   Living, as we all do, in a global economy, isn’t it sentimental to imagine that there is something oppositional about local farms and local food?  In fact, by writing about shopping, cooking and eating, aren’t we still just encouraging, relishing and mystifying what amounts to good old-fashioned consumption — and therefore, finally, still contributing, however indirectly, to that global market that still today, as Marx writes, "hovers over the earth like the Fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand deals fortune and misfortune to human beings"?   

And even if one lays aside these very big questions, mightn't there still be something ridiculous or laughable about the intense interest given to locally-grown food? — for example, in the manner represented on the comedy Portlandia, where a couple insists on visiting the farm where the chicken they would eat was raised, to make sure it had lived a happy and fulfilling life, before allowing it to be roasted and served to them.

From such uncomfortable or laughable questions, there can be no escape. We began the blog because we found ourselves being asked much simpler questions, such as: what is that?  How do you cook it?  What are you going to do with all that asparagus?  Those are the only questions we can really aspire to answer here.  As we do so, however, we allow ourselves only to suspend, not to forget, the larger questions that will always linger in the same neighborhood.

 

 

Asparagus’ moment has almost come and gone.  This is an amazingly simple and light lasagna that pairs asparagus with early spring herbs.   It's based on a recipe by Martha Rose Shulman in the New York Times, June 28, 2010.  We use a regular egg-based homemade pasta.  You could do it with store-bought lasagna noodles, but it's really better with thin sheets of delicate, homemade pasta.

We won’t go over the basics of pasta-making since there are so many other places online that go over it step-by-step, not to mention many fine cookbooks.  Two of our favorites as far as making pasta are Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand, and Aliza Green’s Making Artisan Pasta.  Pasta-making is one of those things one learns on one’s hands.  There are innumerable little variations in different recipes, but they’re all basically the same thing, so try it three or four times following any recipe and you’ll soon know how you like to do it.  For this recipe, we use a durum flour mixed with at least one third semolina flour because we think the latter improves the texture.  Later, we'll be posting about some of our experiments with pasta using other kinds of flour and grain.

For this lasagna, you make a light white sauce (a béchamel or besciamella) using olive oil instead of butter, and two-percent milk.  (The original recipe called for using one-percent.)  Once your white sauce is thick and off the fire, you mix a generous handful of finely-chopped tender spring herbs — basil, parsley, oregano, rosemary, chives, thyme, tarragon, whatever you got.  We think this is really the time to use the tender new sprigs of stronger herbs like rosemary and oregano, which in high summer get too intense.

 

Then take two pounds of asparagus and trim them.  Cook the trimmed parts and two peeled cloves of garlic in simmering water for fifteen minutes.  Then blanch the asparagus stalks in the same water briefly (3-4 minutes), stop the cooking in ice water, cut into one-inch pieces, and then finally stir them gently into the herbed white sauce.  Now also cook your sheets of pasta in the same water; then mix a little bit of this pasta water (now imbued with starch and flavor) into your vegetable and white-sauce mixture so it’s a spreadable consistency.  In a greased baking dish, layer the cooked sheets of pasta with this mixture and plenty of grated parmesan cheese.  Drizzle the top with olive oil.

Bake covered for 30 minutes, then uncover to brown the top slightly for about 10 more minutes; and finally let it rest out of the oven for another 10 or 15 minutes before serving.  The whole lasagna can be made a day in advance and heated when you want it serve it.  The result is light and subtle and with an herbal undertone that no one you serve it to will be able to identify.