I miss the things I used to worry about. Those anxieties seem so pleasant in retrospect. One of the main things I used to like to mull in the years preceding 2016 was food. Especially how it could be so much more delicious if it weren’t industrial strength. I liked to lament how much flavor (not to mention farming knowledge and good topsoil) had been lost just in my own lifetime.
It seemed to me that if the world were right, certain pleasures would be self-evident and therefore would endure, like salt-rising bread from the bakery at Kamp’s at 25th Street and Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City and grandma’s tomatoes and those warm peaches that my friend Anne Marie took me to eat one Saturday in an orchard somewhere east of town. It wasn’t right that things changed, and I had to grow up in a country on its way to becoming what Eric Schlosser called a Fast Food Nation.
For feeling indignant, there was Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But that book was impossible to finish, to be honest. Better to dwell on the way Edna Lewis celebrated strawberries in The Taste of Country Cooking.
What made all my complaints so comfortable was that they were balanced by the real possibility that we would turn things around. Someone like Wendell Berry could be our spiritual guide. There were already ways to sample how very good things could be if we’d just do them right. Farmers markets. Alice Waters — even though Anthony Bourdain found her annoying.
Maybe. But Chez Panisse Vegetables, Waters’s 1996 book, is not. Alongside a remarkably spare list of vegetables, the food revolutionary gives you just a thing or two to do about each. Turning the pages, I remember that Eastham, not Ica, Peru, used to be the asparagus capital of the world. And that it still grows well in our sandy back yards. And for just a little while, making this green and earthy plate of pasta that is a lot like what Alice recommends, I remember all the pleasant little things to worry about.
SOBA NOODLES WITH ASPARAGUS AND SCALLIONS
Makes 4 servings
1 bunch asparagus (about ¾ lb.)
1 bunch scallions
1 clove garlic
1 Tbsp. olive oil
3 Tbsp. butter
Salt and pepper
½ cup vegetable or chicken stock
8 oz. buckwheat soba noodles
½ cup grated ricotta salata
A handful of parsley, minced
A few gratings of lemon zest
- Cut the asparagus into ¼-inch-thick slices, leaving the tips whole. Trim the scallions and slice them in the same way. Mince the garlic. Also: mince the parsley and set it aside along with the lemon zest for the garnish.
- Bring a pot of water to a boil for the soba noodles. Add a big pinch of salt and drop in the noodles — they’ll take about six minutes to cook, about the same amount of time the asparagus will take.
- Warm a wide sauté pan and heat the olive oil plus one tablespoon of the butter in it. Sauté the asparagus and scallions over high heat for 2 or 3 minutes. Add the garlic and stir for a minute or so, until it’s aromatic. Season with salt and pepper. Turn off the heat. Stir in the stock and swirl in the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter.
- Drain the noodles and add them to the pan with the asparagus. Toss well and serve topped with the ricotta cheese, parsley, and lemon zest.
