Everything shall be forth coming. It shall all be clear. And yes you can make your own dough... and you shall.
No those are not chunks of chorizo... they are pieces of cardboard painted to look like chorizo. Please remove before serving. I apologize for the slight shutter shake. I was drunk.
Daddy why do my pee stank?
No those are not chunks of chorizo... they are pieces of cardboard painted to look like chorizo. Please remove before serving. I apologize for the slight shutter shake. I was drunk.
Hey let's do today's entry in twitter speak. Ok here goes.
#recipe aspgz spnh unñ + mlt. ck asp spn nñ. ck mlt pt veg n mlt. eat. #good
Nah... I don't know about you but twitter just hacks me off. Terse is one thing but dumping vowels just to get under the 144 character limit just annoys me. Why don't we all just say that combing your hair with your foot is a cool rule and the world will be a better place for it. It's a gimmick folks.
But I will tell you what isn't a gimmick... Asparagus. When I was a kid I absolutely hated the stuff. OK... it came from a can and was right up there with spinach as the most gag reflex inducing vegetables ever. My childhood experience with that deadly green goo was that it was duly served up once a month by our usually quite good cook at All Saints Parochial school (AKA Lil' Auschwitz). You remember those little milk cartons? The one's with the Presidents on them? OK... I know most of you were raised on Juicy Juice Boxes and Tupperware containers of carrot sticks but I wasn't... I'm old and had a USS Seawolf lunch box and I remember catching all sorts of hooey because my mom got all creative and cut my tuna fish sandwich into the shape of a... tuna.
This image was stolen from some poor anonymous guy trying to sell this on Ebay for 2000 bucks.
My fellow travelers in the second grade and I would drain the milk as fast as we could and then like some monstrous ape bird hybrids regurgitate the spinach into the aforementioned waxed containers while Sister Goering was busy flipping the schools "Ave Maria" 45 to the "B" side which was of course, "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring." Under the watchful gaze of Ira our "Negro" janitor (who completely understood our plight and would turn a blind eye to the operation) we would then deposit the whole mess in the garbage can on the way out to either math class or yet another game of hide the challis (or was that "chablis") with Father Tobin.
The only thing worse than spinach was the stewed tomatoes... these we would have to spoon into the boxes under the table because there was no way any of that blood red mush was going into our pie holes for no matter how short a time.
Amazingly I survived All Saints (more or less) and it's canned cuisine and I now love both asparagus and spinach because I do the cooking and not Mrs. Ferguson.
So without further ado here is my rendition of:
"Not Mrs. Ferguson's Ave Maria Sauted Asparagus and Spinach with Fried Onions and Garlic on a bed of Millet."
Needs:
As always... get a pan... or in this case a small sauce pan. I am going to give up my ancient Chinese secret rice cooking technique which works just as well for millet and quinoa (we'll deal with this Andean voodoo grain in a future edition) as it does for white rice. Alert! Does not work for brown rice! Alert! Does not work for brown rice! Bomba/Abborio neither! Long grain baby. Thai jasmine, Basmati... ok... Japonica varieties... medium grain rices like Calrose too.
The Secret Chinese White Long Grain Rice/Millet/Quinoa technique
Put some Millet/White Long Grain Rice/Quinoa in a sauce pan. How much? Depends on many and whether you want left overs. Rule of thumb, and our thumbs will be getting a workout pretty damn soon... Using a 1 liter sauce pan which is 15 cm across I put in around 2 cm (1 inch-ish) of stuff for 2 people. Now here's the Chinese secret. Take your thumb and place it on top of the rice/legume like material). Add water to the pan until it comes up to the first joint. Amazingly this works with any quantity of these 3 ingredients. Now cover the pan and bring to a boil. You removed your thumb no? An indicator that it's boiling is when a murky fluid erupts from the pan and floods your stove. OK turn down the heat to as low as possible and wait for 15 minutes. Leave the lid on. Do not peek. I repeat, do not peek. Ding. Remove lid. Fluff up stuff with a fork. Turn off heat. That's it... Just like Uncle Ben's... perfect rice every time.
OK since we are cognizant beings and not mollusks... ok most of us are not mollusks... we can actually do a couple of things at a time. So while the millet has been simmering we have been preparing the rest of stuff haven't we? Why yes we have.
So we begin like in just about every recipe that I do (other than ice cream) by frying some onions. Put some oil in a skillet. Wait until it get's hot. Add onions and garlic cloves. Use sort of a medium low heat. Move them around until they are soft and translucent. Do not burn neither the onions nor the garlic. Brown is cool... black is not. The garlic will take longer but they will be cooking right along with the asparagus. Add the asparagus. Move them around until they are soft-ish (if you know how to do the saute pan flip do it... if not just, keep'em a movin').
Once these are done... and the garlic too... add the spinach and again... oscillate until cooked. This will take like 30 seconds and that big ol' whack of espinaca will be reduce down to a mere whisp of it's former self.
That's it folks. Serve it over the millet. Add some swank salt. Crack o' fresh pepper. Dusting of Pimenton de la Vera. Remove the artificial chorizo. Y'est.
