White Asparagus Tagliatelle

White asparagus are in season around here these days, but we've never had a habit of using these. One reason for that is that Mrs. Throat-Erator isn't a big fan of the hollandaise sauce often suggested served with white asparagus.

When we saw a recipe for a starter with white asparagus and no hollandaise we decided to try some elements of that - along the way it became a meal rather than just a starter.

Ingredients:
- 6 large white asparagus
- juice of 1 small lemon
- same volume olive oil
- salt
- white pepper
- tagliatelle
- ¹/₂ dL (¹/₅ cup) sunflower seeds
- ¹/₂ dL (¹/₅ cup) pumpkin seeds
- 25 g (~1 oz) walnuts
- 125 g (4.4 oz) mozzarella
- fresh chives
- fresh dill

The asparagus were peeled and boiled gently for 10 minutes in water containing 1 tsp salt. The water was drained from the asparagus and they were allowed to cool a bit while preparing a marinade of lemon juice, olive oil, salt and white pepper. The boiled asparagus were then marinaded while preparing the rest.

Tagliatelle was cooked.

The seeds and nuts were chopped coarsely and roasted in a dry pan with constant stirring till turning slightly golden and fragrant.

The marinaded asparagus were served on a bed of tagliatelle, drizzled with some of the marinade and added toasted seeds/nuts, sliced mozzarella and fresh herbs.

It was quite nice, although based on this I see little reason to prefer white asparagus over the green kind we normally get...