Asparagus cheese torte!

Lenten thanks, Day 17

LOL! Thanks, God, for making us hungry and providing plenty of delicious veggies for us to deal with that. Oh yeah: and for coming up with that fire thing so we can cook the stuff.

Now, I ripped this idea off from a recent issue of Sunset magazine. The original had a different variety of cheese—don’t remember which, but it was something melty like gruyère or Emmenthaler. I happen to have a wheel of brie sized to feed a small army, courtesy of Costco, home of the Lifetime Supply of Just About Anything. From the same bottomless well came a gigantic package of lovely crisp spring asparagus. And deep in the freezer lurked the remains of a package of frozen puff pastry; in the fridge, some leftover caramelized onion.

Here’s how this goes:

You need…

• Some sort of delicious, meltable cheese
• A fistful of asparagus
• A little butter
• A little olive oil
• Maybe a little nutmeg
• Sautéed onions, if you so desire
• Frozen puff pastry dough
• Flour for rolling out the pastry dough
• A small oven-proof vessel sized to fit the amount of ingredients you have.

Preheat the oven to around 375 degrees.

Break the asparagi into pieces that will fit into whatever you’re going to cook with; ideally, leave them long, but if push comes to shove, snap them into pieces.

Place the asparagus on a little dish, dribble some olive oil over it, sprinkle on some nutmeg (probably optional; you could use tarragon, or nothing), and roll it all around to coat the veggies.

Defrost the pastry dough (I did this in the microwave: about 20 seconds at medium on one side; 10 seconds on the other). Flour a pastry board and roll out the pastry so you can cover the bottom and (ideally) the sides of your cooking vessel. Line the vessel with this stuff; you may want to butter the pan or pottery first.

Slice the cheese and layer it over the pastry. Next time, I think I’d pre-bake the pastry shell for 8 or 10 minutes to crisp it up, but it probably doesn’t matter much. If you try that and you have enough pastry to make a rim around the dish (I didn’t, here), you may have to cover the rim with a little tinfoil to keep it from over-darkening.

Place the onions, if you so choose, over the cheese.

Finally layer on the nicely oiled asparagi.

Place this lovely little package into the hot oven and let it cook until the cheese is exquisitely melted, about 20 minutes (for brie, anyway).

Serve with some wonderful bread.