A Mid-June Recipe

If you are someone who likes to eat "seasonally," then you probably have some little tricks up your sleeve with respect to dishes you like to create when the production of two crops intersect.  Now, Tammy is typically the person in our household who is known for her culinary skills.  But, I recently showed that I could manage well enough when pressed into service for creating meals.

Tammy said she really enjoyed this meal, so I thought I would share it here.  Please remember, Tammy might still have been a little bit out of it due to the Achilles tendon surgery - so maybe she just meant something along the lines of "I ate this, because it was warm and I needed something edible - and this passed that test."  However, I have some hope for it because she asked for it a second time! 

The overlap this time around is the last of the asparagus with the first of the snow peas.  The asparagus had been cut about a week prior, so it wasn't exactly "fresh" from the garden, but it was still quite tasty.

I took out a deep sided pan that had a fitted lid to do a bit of a stir fry, keeping it just over medium heat on the stove top.

1. Start with some real butter in the pan.  I just put what felt like would "grease" the pan for me.  
2. Once the butter melts, roll the pan around so the surfaces are covered.
3. Add the asparagus, cut into 1 to 2 inch lengths (shorter for thicker stalks, longer for thinner).  I pushed that around the pan for a very short bit (a minute or so).
4. Add sliced mushrooms, as many or as little as you like.  If you are a hobbit, add more mushrooms than asparagus.  If you are like me, the asparagus outnumbered the mushrooms by about 2 to 1 in volume.... though I DO like sauteed mushrooms.
5. Once the asparagus started getting soft, I added the snow peas.  The volume of snow peas was similar to the volume of the mushrooms.  But, you can do whatever you want.  Heck, I'm not an expert, I just throw stuff together I think will taste good and hope I'm right!
6. I added about two caps of olive oil... maybe a tablespoon?  And turned the heat down to medium.
7. I added a pinch of sea salt and stirred all of that up a bit.
8. Then I covered the pan for the remainder of the cook time, waiting for the snow peas to turn a deep green color (or until I could smell the snow peas as I walked by the stove).
9. I gave it all one more stir and served it up.  After a short while, both plates were clean - which is usually a good sign that the offering was accepted around here.
   

Yep, that was it.  Pretty fancy, eh?  

Ok, pretty typical for me because I didn't want to create too many dishes to clean up afterward, but I still wanted to eat some asparagus, snow peas and mushrooms.  We've done the asparagus and mushrooms before, and seemed like the snow peas would fit in well.

The first time around I added a little pre-cooked hamburger (equivalent to about a third of a hamburger patty) into the mix at about the same time I added the mushrooms.  It tasted fine either way (with or without the hamburger).  It would be interesting to see how the taste changes if I cooked the hamburger in the pan first and then added the veggies, but we didn't try it a third time and the asparagus is gone now.

I know, I know.  This is not how professionals present recipes, so it might not help anyone out.  I just cut up asparagus until I felt like there was enough for two of us and then cut up more so there would be leftovers for lunch.  The rest just followed from there.  Oh!  I see a few people nodding in the back!  You cook like this too?

Well, I've been able to watch one of the best at this approach to cooking, and she's been able to get back into the kitchen and cook meals with some help this past week.  See Tammy?  I can be taught!