Nature’s First Green is...
I
Asparagus!
have a dear friend who I affectionately refer to as Lil T. He is small in stature, but big in the personality department. Lil T also boasts a voracious appetite, which is a quality I deeply admire. Over the years, we’ve shared many wonderful meals together and spent even more time detailing meals we made for our respective families. We used to work side by side and, instead of discussing our ridiculously stressful workload, we would share our kitchen triumphs from the previous evening oftentimes exchanging leftovers and sharing morsels carefully balanced on plastic spoons. Lil T, who grew up in Spain, introduced
me to paella. Through the little tastes he handed me over the stack of work on my desk, I discovered the prized bits of crispy rice that form on the bottom of a paella pan. Those tastes were nearly transcendent. He also exposed my fears of cooking certain foods and meats as foolish and immature. And he is responsible, in part, for my foray back to meat eating. For these tastes and this education, I am eternally grateful. Those were fun days. And, although I don’t miss the job, I miss those chats and the culinary discovery, which blossomed in the most unexpected of places. A government office is certainly not the kind of place you expect to discover anything revelatory. 33