Spring has sprung! It's wet and cold here, but green things are poking up from the ground, which is springy enough by comparison to what came before. In honor of April, tonight for dinner we had a pound of asparagus, roasted in olive oil and then dressed with lemon and salt, accompanied by scrambled eggs with onion jam. Delicious. Also delicious: the several quality minutes Snark and I spend in the kitchen afterwards, dipping our fingers in the oil and lemon at the bottom of the roasting pan.

ROAST ASPARAGUS
This hardly even counts as a recipe. Just heat your oven to 425° F and prep as much asparagus as you like -- the usual way, by washing it, then snapping off the woody ends where they naturally break when you bend each stalk. Pour a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into a roasting pan and add the asparagus. Roll the stalks around until they're well coated and sprinkle with salt. Roast until at least the tips (and possibly more) get toasty. How long depends on the thickness of your stalks and how cooked you want them to be. We had fairly thick, not that recently harvested stalks, so I opted to cook them to super-roasty and super tender-y, which took twenty minutes. For more bite and/or thinner stalks, adjust accordingly. (Don't forget: thinness isn't a sign of particular quality in asparagus. Early in the season, stalks tend to be fatter; later, they're thinner, but generally the main thing is that they should be nice and green and fresh.)

Then gorge! That's what asparagus is for.