Now I love asparagus, especially in spring when greens are craved.  This recipe combines asparagus with butter and what a better combination can be had?

Esparechs

(Fried Asparagus)

Translation:

If you wish to eat asparagus, take them, and clean them, and parboil them.  And when they are parboiled, flour them with wheat flour; and then put them in the paella, and fry them until they are cooked.  And they go on platters.  And whoever wishes, put vinegar on it.

(McDonald, pp. 19)

Ingredients:

Asparagus

1 C. wheat flour            2 Tbs salted butter        ¼ C. red wine (or balsamic) vinegar

*McDonald suggest olive oil instead of butter and red wine vinegar – I liked butter and balsamic vinegar better, so cooked the asparagus accordingly.

Redaction:

The ingredients for this are pretty straight forward.  Wheat flour, asparagus, and butter.

I took a large handful of asparagus and cut off the last 2-3 inches so that only the tender top 5 inches were left.

The ends are cut off as they are usually tasteless and woody.  Not some thing even the best butter can remedy, so just remove them until you get to the green tasty parts!

I then placed the spears into water and let these be parboiled for 1 minute.  After that the spears were drained.

Parboiling does a quick cook with out destroying.  Note: do not over boil!  Just a quick hot boiling bath for 1-2 minutes. to soften up the asparagus cell fibers and you are good to go for the frying!  (well after draining off the water that is.

The wheat flour was spread out onto a small plate, where the individual spears were rolled.

After the spears were rolled in the wheat flour, 1 Tbs of butter was melted into a pan and half of the asparagus was fried until golden brown on all sides.

*hint: if you want to use 2 Tbs of butter per batch, don’t hesitate.  There can almost never be to much butter where asparagus is concerned!

Then the cooked spears were removed onto a clean plate.

The last Tbs of butter was melted and the remaining asparagus was fried.

Once all the asparagus was cooked, a bowl with balsamic vinegar was placed to the side for easy dipping.  These are excellent either plain or with vinegar!

This batch never made it out of the kitchen.  I munched on these till they were all gone.  So the word of warning is: if you like asparagus and are serving more then just yourself…make LOTS!