Oh asparagus, asparagus how we love thee. And so hurrah for the first asparagus of the season. This strange Spring has made us wait a lot longer than in recent years, but it’s here now and we will be eating it several times a week until the sad day in June when it runs out again. And in case I forget, we had a main course too…

Asparagus Salad with Burnt Butter Dressing
I usually keep asparagus simple so that it is unmistakably the star of the show, and so this Asparagus Salad with Burnt Butter Dressing from Thomasina Miers in The Guardian may seem a strange choice for the season’s first asparagus. But there’s something about the nuttiness of the dressing that showcases the asparagus even though it’s one ingredient in a salad.

The burnt butter dressing is really lovely and slightly healthier than it sounds. The recipe gives all the details and I stuck to this (except in one detail – see below), so suffice to say that it’s really fun to watch the butter (50g) and the chopped almonds (90g) brown at the same time to a lovely, sticky richness. Then when you add the honey (1 heaped tbsp), white wine vinegar (2 tbsp) and half-a-lemon the butter foams up and gives off a great aroma (not unlike a well-aged white burgundy – nuts, honey and lemon). You then stir in ½ tsp of each paprika plus some oil (I am not sure it needs quite as much as 6 tbsp).

After that the salad is very straightforward – steamed asparagus, cut into shorter lengths, red chicory leaves, some chopped mint and sliced spring onions.

Here’s my exception. The actual title of this is ‘Asparagus and Goat’s Cheese Salad with Burnt Butter Dressing’. Thomasina Miers suggests using a hard goat’s cheese crumbled on top. I instead found a softer Italian goat’s cheese that could still be shaved as a topping. I duly shaved it but then completely forgot about it when it came to serving. So it’s an Asparagus and Goat’s Cheese Salad without Goat’s Cheese (reminding me of the time I was served sausages and mash without the sausages). And you know what? I think it is perfectly good without (without the cheese, not the sausages – that was disappointing). Incidentally, Miers also suggests garlic toasts on the side but since we have this as a starter, I reckon they are unnecessary.

Seared Red Mullet with Sweet Red Pepper Dressing
I have made Red Mullet with Red Pepper Dressing from Rick Stein’s Seafood Odyssey a number of times, but we normally use sea bass, which works really well. On this occasion I saw some good looking smallish red mullet and so stuck to the fish of Rick Stein’s recipe. I didn’t make a very good fist of filleting the mullets, but it generally worked out.

The glory of this dish is the dressing. Sticking closely to the recipe, I first liquidised 750g red peppers, seeded and chopped but not skinned, and passed the pulp through a sieve, forcing out as much juice as possible. Stein reckons you should end up with about 450ml, but it yielded me less this time. I boiled this until 25ml remained. You have to keep a really close eye on this stage. The pepper juice takes a while to start reducing noticeably and then (I speak from experience here) before you know where you are you have nothing left. At the same time, I reduced 85ml of sherry vinegar to a tablespoon. This needs even more vigilance. With the vinegar in particular, the trick is to stop when you have left a little more than you need because evaporation continues even after you turn off the heat.

The biggest faff with this dish is preparing small roasted red peppers to sit alongside the fish. Grilling the peppers is easy enough, but then there’s the task of peeling off the blackened skin while keeping the pepper intact and, worst of all, finding a way to remove the seeds. ‘Make a small incision and scrape them out with a teaspoon’ is far more difficult than it sounds with a juicy, floppy pepper in your hands. I don’t suppose it’s absolutely necessary to have the peppers, but it seems worthwhile for the sweet flavours and the nice juicy texture they deliver.

Once all that is done, it’s good to return to the simplicity of pan-frying the fish! Just before serving, I combined the red pepper sauce, reduced sherry vinegar, a little salt and black pepper and warmed the sauce through. It really is a divine sauce.

I didn’t make a great job of presentation, and the photo makes it even worse with the flash emphasising the vividness of the red sauce against the white plate – it looks more like I’d had an accident – but this really is a lovely dish. Not difficult, but with a certain sophistication and a feel of the Spanish coast.

Jersey Royal and Radish Salad
Jerseys are also now well in season. We actually saw some as long ago as January, which is crazy but a result of the ridiculously warm winter. We ignored them and they appeared again in April. To me, they don’t taste quite as good as usual – that unique, sweet, nutty taste – but they still represent a taste of the Spring. And they’re still pricey…

I first tried this recipe for Jersey Royal and Radish Salad from Abel and Cole’s Cooking Outside the Box last year. I was sceptical. I think of Jerseys needing only simple boiling, steaming or roasting before being embellished with mint or maybe wild garlic. This dish therefore seemed unnecessary, bordering on sacrilegious; but it works and I was sold. To a bowl of boiled Jerseys you add quartered (or further divided) radishes, capers and feta (you can vary the amounts of each to taste – I omitted black olives this time) and dress the dish with two parts olive oil to one part balsamic with a handful of chopped basil mixed in. Balsamic and Jerseys? Surely not. But yes. The flavours and textures really are complementary and they sing of Spring-like earthiness. It’s a mix of British and Mediterranean and I hoped it would make sense with a Spanish-influenced main course. It did.

Spinach with Shallots, Pine Nuts and Raisins
This side dish is from Sam and Eddie Hart’s Modern Spanish Cooking (cooking from this book makes up for never managing to get into Barrafina). It’s a good way to serve spinach and I vary it with different dishes, but since this was a Spanish-themed main course it seemed right to stick more-or-less to the recipe.

It’s pretty straightforward. First I soaked 20g of raisins in 2 tsp of sherry vinegar. When very close to serving the fish, I fried on a medium-high heat a chopped shallot (I use banana shallots so two or three normal shallots would be the equivalent), a small handful of pine nuts and the raisins with their soaking vinegar. This only needs a minute or two. Then I added the destalked, roughly chopped and washed leaves of a couple of bunches of spinach. It always seems to take longer for the spinach to wilt than the few seconds that chefs claim – perhaps they use enormous pans that keep more of the spinach in contact with the pan – but for this dish it’s important not to let the spinach do any more than wilt, which I find normally takes a minute or two. I then threw the lot into a serving dish and dressed with a little more sherry vinegar – the recipe suggests another 3 tsp. This makes a pretty big portion, but it’s such a lovely dish that you can use it as an accompaniment to other mains over the next few days.

All in all, a nice combination of dishes with the three main course dishes going well together – and a good dose of Mediterranean colour to brighten up a dull Spring!