Veggie envy

No greenmarket this week - I was low on funds (okay, totally broke), and uninspired by my last two trips. (Also, my search for recipes featuring ramps, the only new springtime vegetable I found last week, led to my understanding that they taste like onions. I may still try them, but that killed my motivation.) However, on the food blogs I read, everyone is talking about how delicious this season's a) asparagus and b) artichokes are. Neither of these are availably locally in the market. And I dearly love them both.

So I think I might take part of my food budget to Garden Of Eden and buy artichokes and asparagus to steam and roast, respectively, while my photo assistant is still out of town. That's the other reason I skipped the greenmarket - it's funny how much more inspiring I find it to make meals for another person. When it's just me, I generally come up with some concoction of brown rice and frozen vegetables (last night it was shelled edamame and corn), sauced with a combination of nutritional yeast, garlic, pepper sauce, and soy sauce. It's nothing to write home about, but it's reasonably healthy and can be thrown together with a minimum of effort and dishes.

Anyhow, tomorrow I should have more interesting vegetable news to report...I'm quite looking forward to trying the roasted asparagus technique from Cook's Illustrated, so I'll share the results. And let's not get into how much I love artichokes. Man. When I was a vegetarian teenager, I used to have an artichoke every year for Thanksgiving dinner instead of turkey. My grandmother would always scoff and say that artichokes seemed like nothing more than an excuse to eat the lemon butter dipping sauce, at which I would respond "so?"