Mushroom Pizza with a Salad and Roasted Asparagus

The one problem with asparagus is, unless you get a lot of it, it seldom will make a complete meal. Thus, I need to find a main dish to adequately accompany the asparagus. Since we won't get our beef until the end of April, there is still a bit of scrambling. I decided to clean out the fridge and make pizza to go with the asparagus.

Even that was a little scare. I came up with mushrooms, mozzarella cheese, fontina cheese, a little bit of pasta sauce that I stretched by rinsing out the jar with a little water and pouring on the pizza as well, and parsley from our CSA box yesterday. That said, it got pretty good! J and M helped add the toppings to the pizza, at least J "helped" until I chased him away from eating whole handfuls of cheese and not putting it on the pizza. J also had his first attempt at helping me make pizza dough---quite fun to watch him try to knead it.

Since our grill has no gas (it's a natural gas grill that previously had been tied in directly to the gas line at our house....no such amenity here), I had to come up with a different way to cook my asparagus. I didn't really want to risk overcooking it on the stove and making it mushy. Instead I found a very basic recipe for roasting asparagus in the oven that allowed me to make it crisp tender with the asparagus taste shining through.

Roasted Asparagus
a small bunch of asparagus
extra virgin olive oil
sea salt (the coarse kind)
a little coarsely ground black pepper

Drizzle a little olive oil over the asparagus and toss gently to coat. Sprinkle with sea salt and black pepper to taste. Roast in preheated 425 degree oven for 10 minutes or until desired tenderness is achieved (may be more or less depending on how thick the stalks are or how tender you like. Grocery store asparagus probably takes longer than farmer's market asparagus).