Beautiful asparagus doesn’t need much. Most of the work is in the cleaning. It’s my job to find the asparagus; it’s Alex’s job to clean it. He finds it meditative—thank goodness because I don’t. Standing there peeling off every triangle makes me a little crazy because I’m thinking of the nine thousand other things that I still need to do. It’s funny because he’s normally the more tightly strung of the two of us, but certain tasks just make me crazy. Once he is done, I toss them with a generous amount of olive oil and salt and pop them in a hot (400°F) oven for 10-20 minutes, depending on how thick the stalks are. These were beauties, thick enough to give us something to sink our teeth into, without needing to be peeled. When they came out of the oven, Alex showered them with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, and they were ready to go. We eat these with our fingers because they taste better that way. The asparagus are sweet and earthy; the cheese adds a nice accent of umami, and the olive oil adds some mellow, grassy notes. As you bite into the stalks, juices run down your palms and the cheese sticks to your fingers, and it’s the kind of gloriously messy goodness that we truly savor.
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