I don’t have as many pictures from Friday, because there was more eating and less photographing! Here are some things!

We started off at Kerbey Lane for breakfast, where I had peach-pecan pancakes. These were thick, light, fluffy, delicious pancakes! Nom!

Then, Katie took me to Barton Springs! She had explained Barton Springs to me on AIM before I got there, and told me to bring a bathing suit (which was a feat for me, and the only one I had was letting quite a bit of boobage spill out, but hey. Whatever she explained, I was not prepared for this place, which was kind of awesome and amazing.

It is half pool! It is half lake! It is a spring-fed swimming pool with seaweed on the bottom! CRAZY STUFF. It was also super cold and I kept getting seaweed in my hair which made me feel like a mermaid. Anyway, I also discovered that my upper body strength is not what it was. Man, I am a wussy. I couldn’t really tread water for very long, so I kind of hung around at the edge for a lot of the time, but it was still awesome A+ would swim again.

Then we went out for ice cream, but I totally forgot to take pictures of that. Boo. I thought I had taken a picture! Apparently not. And we went back to Katie’s and chilled with Rufus and Mishka and watched a bunch of Animaniacs, which was awesome, because I haven’t seen it since it was on the television box!

I ate the other candy that I bought at Big Top:

It’s called a Maple Bun! It was all maple flavored and peanutty, and much more delicious than the Idaho Spud. Win!

Then we got all dressed up and went downtown. There is a building which Katie told me the name of, but which I promptly forgot because she told me someone told her it looked like Totoro.

Then we went to a lovely restaurant called Peche, which was an absolutely divine bar. They had a really nice cocktail selection, plus absinthe fountains and a selection of close to twenty absinthes (17, I believe) to choose from. Katie got absinthe the traditional way; I got an absinthe cocktail. After a very nice whiskey drink. And the lovely bartender gave me two drinks for my birthday! We got dinner too– I got an absolutely scrumptious salad with sweetbreads and boudin and a beautiful runny egg on top. SO GOOD. Katie’s friend Clare met up with us, too, and she was awesome!

We went home and to bed pretty early– it was a long day and Saturday was going to be another one!

Also: rosefox made her first contribution to nommable today! Read it and look at the lovely pictures here.

I also posted a new post on how to make simple syrups out of candy! Read it here!

Delicious!

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One
Two

liret is working on a column about ice cream for Nommable, too. We discussed naming her column last night. Here’s how it went:

jess: (10:33:10 PM) I am trying to think of an overarching title for these ice cream posts
tea: (10:33:45 PM) you could do them lemony snicket style and make each of them “i scream for…”
jess: (10:34:05 PM) I could!
jess: (10:39:52 PM) or something like ‘eating new england’ which I could also use for donut and cupcake places
jess: (10:40:07 PM) there needs to be a word specifically for eating dessert.
jess: (10:40:27 PM) I suppose there’s snacking
tea: (10:40:58 PM) devouring?
jess: (10:41:20 PM) I like that because it makes me sound like a dinosaur
tea: (10:41:47 PM) yes
tea: (10:42:02 PM) that’s because you are a dinosaur
jess: (10:42:28 PM) How did you find out my secret identity?
tea: (10:42:46 PM) it’s the very small arms
jess: (10:43:17 PM) and the big head
tea: (10:43:22 PM) yes
tea: (10:43:27 PM) and the scales
tea: (10:43:30 PM) and the eating people
jess: (10:43:36 PM) well, yes
jess: (10:43:44 PM) that last one might have been a bit careless of me
jess: (10:44:09 PM) but it is hard to remember, since my brain is the size of a walnut
tea: (10:44:46 PM) i love you
jess: (10:45:03 PM) I eat you!
jess: (10:45:10 PM) No, wait, love. I meant love.
tea: (10:45:24 PM) BUT I AM SO TASTEY
jess: (10:45:30 PM) nom nom nom
jess: (10:45:56 PM) do not be offended by my cultural dialect that makes me say ‘eat’ when I really mean ‘eat’
tea: (10:46:29 PM) THAT SOUNDS LIKE A CERTAIN ROBOT I KNOW
jess: (10:47:47 PM) Robots are smart! Except for the part where they destroy instead of devour.

That comment about robots at the end is a reference to Skin Horse, btw. The strip that is referencing is hanging on my wall.

So then I was talking to my friend Steve. Remember Steve? If you don’t, you can read about him here. Steve is awesome and he’s in a new band. Here is their rendition of Folsom Prison Blues:

(Steve is on keyboard so you don’t see a lot of him in this but I figured I would post it anyway)

So then we were talking about an original song he played last night at an open mic, and then we wrote the most awesome song ever:

MY ICE CREAM IS MELTING BUT MY ARMS ARE SO SMALL.
I CAN’T SEEM TO MAKE IT REACH MY MOUTH AT ALL
MY NAME STRIKES FEAR INTO EVERY DINOSAUR.
BUT MY CHERRY VANILLA’S DRIPPING ON THE FLOOR.

As you can tell, it is sort of about Jess.

Tea: that is how he became extinct
Steve: Died with a cone in its claw. Alas.
Tea: poor t-rex, we hardly knew ye
Steve: And thanks to that one movie, velociraptors kinda stole their thunder.

I’m not sure what it MEANS, but SOMETHING, SURELY.

Anyway, there has been a dearth of actual ice cream as I went out with my mom for mango sangria and ceviche. YUM. My father says that is not as good as White Castle and he is disappointed I went without him, though :-(

I really, really need to get back into drawing comics. I have half of a one done for joeymichaels and I keep having ideas. So many things I like to do, DAYS WHY DON’T YOU HAVE THIRTY-TEN HOURS?

I think that is all for now! May your dreams be full of ice-cream-eating dinosaurs!

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Okay, this is not what I was expecting to post about today. But then it happened and it is so freaking amazing and hooray!

So, I posted a list a little while ago of a few things I wanted for my birthday. Not really because I expected to get them, mostly as a reminder for myself. But I didn’t send that list to my parents.

Today, before dinner, my mother says to me, “we need to talk about your birthday present. Do you want it today?”

And I was like, “uhh, my birthday is more than a month off.”

My mother replied by saying that my present was something I could use if I had it now, and I might like having it now as opposed to later. So I told her that it was up to you.

“I hate to admit, though,” I said to my mother. “I feel a little bad. I have a birthday present list and I never sent it to you.”

“Well,” said my mother. “Send it to me now, and I won’t look at it until after you open your present, and you can tell me if it was on your list.”

I was doubtful that it was on my list. I told my mother that the list was very short, but mostly expensive things. (It is.) I also told her that it was up to her. If she thought it was more useful to give me my present now, she could give it to me now.

Anyway, we ate our delicious dinner (of which I took plentiful photos.) At the end of dinner, my parents asked again if we should get out the birthday present. I think I asked if it was something I could use for the rest of the summer, and my father said no, it was something I could use for the rest of my life. So I asked if it was a vibrator. I was told that this present had better last longer than a vibrator. And then my mother brings out a HUGE HONKING BOX.

I looked at the box. The box needed a knife to open it. I took my butter knife from the dinner table and went to work.

The box was full of brown paper. I pulled off the paper. Here is my reaction:

“IT IS ONE OF THE THINGS ON MY LIST!” I exclaimed.

Can you guess what it is? I promptly took it out of the box, and as it was too large to hug, I sat on it:

My father got concerned about me sitting on the box for such an expensive gift. Now can you guess what it is? Hint: it is not a vibrator.

(My mother kept trying to get me to pose for photos in spite of the fact that I I pointed out to her that I am in cruddy gardening clothes and my hair is a giant puffball today anyway so I wasn’t particularly concerned about these looking like glamor shots. I posed anyway, but these are the less-posed pictures of the bunch)

Can you tell what it is from that photo? If you can’t, you should be able to tell now:

OH MY GOD NEXT STEP IS WORLD DOMINATION. YESSSSS. OR AT LEAST FIORDILATTE.

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1) Bee time!

My mama gave me a chocolate bee:

Chocolate bees are not as cute as regular bees and do not land adorably on your finger:

I have a consultation for my new tattoo today! Eeeeeee. I am getting bees on my shoulder, probably. I brought my laptop and I’m gonna print out all kinds of photos of bees to take to Joy, who happens to be shinyredtype‘s tattoo lady! So excited!

Here are some of the photos I took in preparation. Also, if you have ever wondered what bees look like at work, you can see them in the second photo, inside the hive doin’ bee things.

I was explaining to my psychologist about the misperceptions people have about bees, because a lot of people are afraid that bees will sting them when in fact they are actually quite cuddly. I can actually walk up to the hive and pet them. They’re pretty awesome.

Sunday I tried to cook dinner for my mother, since she was injured, but she kept getting up and doing stuff herself anyway. Frequently, she as doing stuff WITHOUT her leg splint on. What a bad patient!

Anyway, collaboration?! Here’s what we made:

That’s polenta with venison, fava beans, asparagus, leek scapes and pancetta.

Arugula with beets, goat cheese, and balsamic-marinated figs.

Yum! I also made this freaking amazing garlic scape-lemon-vermouth sauce on Saturday. Which is what the drink in my last post, the Citizen Charlotte, was made to mimic. And amazing turnips. But I forgot to take pictures of those.

Finally, last but not least, I was not the only one who ate well this weekend. Alas, the mosquitoes did, too:

I didn’t realize quite how many bites I had, or how horrible they were, until yesterday when I put on my sandals to go to work. I have seven on my right foot alone! And then three on my left, and three on my left ankle. I have one on the BOTTOM of each foot, which is just really kind of ridiculous. Curse you, mosquitoes!

Oh, gosh! And I keep forgetting to say, BIRTHDAY PLANS HAVE BEEN MADE, Y’ALL. I will be in Austin from August 4 to August 7. So technically I will be on an airplane on the day-of day, but god I will be having so much fun the three days before that.

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There is also a special quiz question for you today: What do the names of all these drinks have in common?

1) Dig Ophelia

Ingredients
2.5 oz G’Vine Nouaison
.5 oz Bo Nardini Rue Grappa
.25 oz St. Germain
5 sprigs lavender
1 tsp honey
2 dashes Fee Bros Grapefruit Bitters

Instructions
Add gin, grappa, and lavender to shaker, muddle
Coat chilled cocktail glass with St. Germain
Add honey to shaker and shake
Strain into glass and add bitters

2) Citizen Charlotte

Ingredients
2.5 oz G’Vine Nouaison
.5 oz Etrog Citron Liqueur
.25 oz Dolin Dry Vermouth
1 Tb thyme
1/2 of a garlic scape

Instructions
Chop scape into 1/2″ chunks
Put all ingredients except vermouth in shaker, muddle
Coat cocktail glass with vermouth
Shake contents of shaker and strain into glass!

3) Dalton Trumbo

Note: I used wild black caps for this drink. If you can’t get black caps, regular raspberries are probably the best suitable replacement. Here’s a picture of black caps in case you live somewhere where wild berries are plentiful:

So that is what is in the drink!

Ingredients
3 oz G’Vine Nouaison
4 sprigs of oregano plus one for garnish
5 black caps plus 2 for garnis
1 tsp honey

Instructions
1) Put all ingredients in shaker, muddle until berries are well-crushed and gin is bright pink.
2) Shake and strain into chilled cocktail glass
3) Garnish with oregano and additional berries

Thank you to gildedage who is my new official Drink Entitler Person.

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First off, chickie update! Look at how big! They are this big!

Secondly, and this is, admittedly, not the biggest surprise, but still terribly exciting and magical and wonderful every time it happens, WE HAVE EGGS.

That egg? That egg is ten minutes old. Ten minutes! This is the freshest egg I have ever had in my whole life!

By the end of today, we had nine eggs over the course of seven days, so it looks like both of our big hens are laying.

We had eggs on Saturday morning:

And then this morning, a little after I got up, my dad came down from the hen house with the egg in the picture above. One perfect brown egg! So we cooked it right away and ate it right away and it was pretty much incredible. We split it in three, so I had a third of an egg, and I didn’t eat another thing until two pm because it was so awesome.

EGGS. EGGS EVERY DAY. SO EXCITED.

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I am feeling uncreative and beyond naming things right now. Which you may have noticed from my last post where I just started naming things “strawberry” in different languages. I figure the options right now are 1) sit around naming them for the next hundred years or 2) just throw ‘em up without names. If you want to volunteer names, go for it!

1)

Ingredients
2 1/2 oz Small’s Gin
1/2 oz Scarborough Faire Gin (homemade infusion! I make it with Gale Force Gin and 1/2 cup each parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme)
2 sprigs oregano
1 small plum,
1/2 oz lavender syrup
1/4 oz Branca Menta

Instructions
Add cut up plum, 1 sprig oregano and regular gin to shaker.
Muddle, then add Scarborough Faire gin & syrup. Shake.
Coat chilled cocktail glass with Branca Menta, discard excess.
Pour drink into glass, add oregano for garnish.

2)

Ingredients
2 oz Magellan Blue Gin
1 oz Carpano Antica Formula
1/2 oz limoncello
1 rib rhubarb plus a small piece of rhubarb for garnish
1 Tb lemon thyme
3 dashes Fee Bros Rhubarb bitters

Instructions
Add gin, thyme and chopped rhubarb to shaker, muddle well
Add Carpano Antica & limoncello and shake
Pour into chilled cocktail glass and add bitters
Garnish with leftover piece of rhubarb!

3)

Ingredients
2 oz Dogfish Head Jin
1oz Dolin dry vermouth
1/2oz Domaine de Canton
1Tb purple basil + 1 leaf for garnish
1Tsp Vietnamese coriander (this is different from your more typical coriander/cilantro and has broad, flat, shiny leaves) +1 leaf for garnish
1 hot pickled pepper
1/8 tsp cinnamon
Bottle Green Ginger & Lemongrass Soda to top

Instructions
Soak pepper in gin for five minutes.
Add gin (with pepper), basil, lemongrass, and Domaine de Canton to shaker, muddle.
Add vermouth & cinnamon, shake
Pour into highball glass with ice, add soda until glass is full. Garnish with leaves.

4)

Ingredients
2 1/2 oz Ethereal Gin
1/2 oz Averna amaro,
1/2 oz Heering Cherry Liqueur
10 bruised sage leaves (Bruise the sage leaves by running your index finger and thumb in opposite directions against the leaf)

Instructions
Put all ingredients in a glass. Muddle, then shake.
Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Easy!

5)

Okay, I have to say, this is the best drink of the bunch. And it’s vodka. Vodka! My mother wanted a drink to showcase our new honey, so this is seriously made with honey RIGHT out of the hive. How awesome is that? But you should all try it. I recommend a lighter honey. Clover is probably fine, or acacia or tupelo.

Ingredients
3oz Comb Vodka
1/4 oz Mathilde peche
1/2 oz freshly extracted honey (any honey will do if you are not a nerd like me)
1 tb fresh lavender plus a sprig of lavender blossom for garnish
2 tb fresh mint.

Instructions
Add vodka, lavender and mint to shaker, muddle just until leaves are bruised.
Add honey and shake.
Coat chilled cocktail glass with Mathilde peche
Pour drink into glass, garnish.

Whew, okay, now I am caught up with the drinky-drinks.

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Hive #1 has been getting pretty full up with honey, so my mom and I went in and took out a few frames this weekend.

This is what the hive looks like on the inside.

Each box is full of frames where the bees build honeycomb, and then either they fill the comb with honey (or pollen, sometimes), or the queen bee lays eggs inside the comb and then there are new baby bees!

Here are some of the tools we use when we take the frames from the hive.

You use this to grab the frame out of the hive:

Now, bees are actually quite friendly. They land on me all the time and I’ve never been stung. But they do get a little bit annoyed when you take out honey or otherwise disrupt the hive, and the best way to get them to calm down is to put a little smoke in the hive.

With this!

It always reminds me a little of the Tin Man.

Anyway, here’s what a full frame of honey looks like:

When bees are done putting honey into comb, they cap it up, like this is, and that’s how you know it’s full.

So then the first thing you need to do is cut the caps off:

Then, you put all the frames in a honey extractor:

An extractor is basically a big metal tub, sort of like an old fashioned ice cream maker, and it has a crank which you use to spin the frames really really really fast:

And by the power of centripetal force, the honey all spins out!

The extractor has a spigot on the bottom, which you use to collect the honey into a bucket:

Or what you will. Theoretically you could collect it into a hat, or straight into your mouth.

Now, the cool thing is, you can give the empty frames right back to the bees, and they will just go fill them right back up!

Meanwhile, the honey has little bits of max and bee dirt in it, so it gets strained:

That’s the honey being poured through the strainer. We pour it through three different meshes before it’s ready.

You can tell it’s ready when it’s clarified, and when your hands are completely sticky:

We only took out four frames out of forty in our hive, and we got six POUNDS of honey. Eeee, so exciting. It’s really cool, because this honey tastes completely different from the honey we collected last fall. That honey is really rich and dark and mostly goldenrod. This honey is really light and clear and tastes like chamomile and strawberries. They’re both amazing, but in different ways.

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Here’s our nifty little strawberry patch:

They are covered, as you can see, with a little tent of netting that is high enough for people to go inside to pick the berries, and also high enough to keep birds away from all but the berries very, very close to the outer perimeter. We still get some slugs this way, but it is the best way to keep your berries from being eaten before you get to do the eating! Notice also that the wide netting means that bees can get in to pollinate! They are good at that.

When the strawberries are ripe, you go under the netting and pick them. Here’s a ripe strawberry along with some not-yet-ripe ones!

So pretty and red!

So far, we are getting tons of strawberries this year:

We got about 3-4 quarts the first week of strawberry picking, and 4-5 quarts the second. And they are big and ripe and juicy. We’ve had strawberries for a couple years now, and each week, we’re getting as many strawberries as we’ve ever gotten in a year before, which is pretty exciting!

We made a whole lot of things with strawberries in them! For two weekends!

Let’s start with a cocktail. I’m going to give you three variations on a similar recipe. I made one for my dad, who pretty much only drinks highballs and punchy drinks with a very little liquor in them, and then I’ll show you how to make a stronger and more sophisticated drink in two ways– one sweeter, one less sweet.

Here’s the Daddy Version:

Daddy Version Ingredients:

1.5 oz vodka
.5 oz limoncello
6 strawberries
Lemonade or Pink Lemonade to top

Daddy Version Instructions:

1) Put vodka in glass with strawberries cut into chunks and muddle well until strawberries are thoroughly pulped.
2) Add ice, limoncello, and lemonade

Here’s the Lady Version:

Lady Version #1 Ingredients:

2.5 oz Dogfish Head Brown Honey Rum
.5 oz limoncello
.5 oz cognac
4 fresh strawberries, plus one for garnish
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon thyme

Lady Version #2 Ingredients:

2 oz Dogfish Head Brown Honey Rum
.5 oz limoncello
1 oz cognac
2 fresh strawberries, plus one for garnish
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon thyme

Lady Version Instructions

1) Add rum, thyme and strawberries (cut into chunks) to shaker with ice
2) Muddle well until strawberries are fully pulped.
3) Add cognac and limoncello
4) Shake!
5) strain into chilled cocktail glasses and serve with a whole strawberry.

But that is only Strawberry Cocktail #1!

Fraise

Ingredients
2.5 oz Rogue Pink Spruce Gin
.5 oz Ramazzotti
.5 oz Domaine de Canton
3 ripe strawberries plus one for garnish
2 dashes Fee Bros Whiskey Barrel Bitters

Instructions
1) Add gin and strawberries (cut into chunks) to shaker with ice
2) Muddle well until strawberries are fully pulped.
3) Add Ramazzotti and Domaine de Canton
4) Shake!
5) strain into chilled cocktail glasses, add two dashes bitters, and serve with a whole strawberry.

This past week, I had the sublime pleasure of having quizzicalsphinx in the house. The thing is, when it comes to our imbibement habits, we could not be more dissimilar. In that I drink copious amounts of excellent liquor and she drinks non-alcoholic beverages only.

So I made her her own very special strawberry drink:

Red Beer

Ingredients
6 strawberries, cut into chunks
3 oz GUS grapefruit soda
.5 oz grenadine
.5 oz pomegranate molasses
Newman’s Own Pomegranate Lemonade to top.

Instructions
Put strawberries in glass with ice and crush with muddler.
Add all other ingredients and stir!

And finally, the last drink, which is a more negroni-style one.

Fragola

Ingredients
2 oz Comb 9 gin
1 oz Carpano Antica Formula
.5 oz Fernet Branca
4 strawberries, cut into chunks
2 dashes Bitter Truth Grapefruit Bitters

Instructions
1) Add gin, ice and strawberries to shaker.
2) Muddle until strawberries are fully pulped.
3) Add Carpano and Fernet Branca, shake.
4) Strain into short glasses, add bitters!

But that isn’t all the strawberry things we made!

My mama also made strawberry shortcake. Let’s talk about strawberry shortcake a little. This is one of my favorite foods. When I was a little kid, there were a couple years when I asked for this instead of for a cake-cake on my birthday. Excellent, huh?

It doesn’t really need a recipe, because all you need to do is whip some cream, make a batch of your favorite biscuits, slice open the biscuits and there you go. Beautiful and delicious!

I also made strawberry ice cream. I’m not as good at fruit ice creams as I am at chocolatey and herbal and caramely type ice creams, but this one came out really well!

Ingredients
2 3/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup half & half
1/3 cup sugar
4 egg yolks
2 cups chopped strawberries

Instructions
Whisk the egg yolks and the sugar together until frothy and pasty.
Mix 3/4 cups of the cream and the half & half together in a saucepan, cook just until boiling, remove from heat, wait until it stops bubbling.
Add 1 Tb of the hot cream to the sugar and egg mixture, whisk quickly to keep the eggs from cooking.
Keep adding the hot milk to the sugar and eggs in small increments, whisking and pausing between additions, until 3/4 of the hot milk has been added.
Pour the milk/egg/sugar mixture back into the saucepan, heat over medium heat, stirring frequently until mixture thickens.
Remove from heat and chill for at least four hours.
Once chilled, add heavy cream and stir until well mixed. Stir in strawberries.
Put entire mixture in ice cream mixer and follow instructions for your ice cream mixer until frozen. Put finished ice cream in freezer.
Chill for at least two hours in freezer.
Serve with strawberries, whipped cream, or just plain!

That is the end of the strawberry adventure! FOR NOW!

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That’s a two-egg omelette, 1 Tb half & half, with fresh baby onions, herbs, and asparagus from the garden.

I’d like to talk to you about asparagus.

It’s crunchy, it’s tender, it’s sweet, it’s bitter, there are pretty much limitless things you can do with it and it is freaking amazing.

When I was a kid, I didn’t eat asparagus. I haven’t the faintest idea why; I was never a picky eater in the typical little kid way– my favorite foods were liver, okra, brussels sprouts and tabouleh, and I suspect that had something to do with how unpopular I was in nursery school.

But asparagus didn’t do it for me. I mean, I’d eat it if someone put it on my plate and told me to, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to touch the stuff. Sometime when I was nine or ten, I read an article in the New York Times about how male asparagus was preferable to female asparagus, and I developed this spiel about how I was boycotting asparagus consumption due to sexism in the industry. I think it was funny and precocious for a ten year old, or something.

But sometime in my college years, I realized the joke wasn’t funny anymore, and I actually liked asparagus on account of it being an amazing vegetable with lots of delicious applications.

The thing about asparagus is that it’s insanely easy to grow, and my personal experience has been that growing it at home, provided you have the space, yields bigger, more beautiful, and more delicious asparagus than you will ever find in a store.

Anyway, when my mom started the garden a few years ago, asparagus was one of the first things we planted. This is our third year with asparagus, and to be truthful, it’s the first year that the yield is impressive enough that I want to brag about our asparagus.

Which is typical. When you grow asparagus, you’re making a commitment to a future of delicious, asparagus-laden feasts with zero in the instant gratification department. It’s never edible the first year. The second year, you’ll get a few delicious, tender, sweet spears. The third year, it will rock your world.

Okay, that’s sort of a very simplified explanation. The first year, asparagus is good for something.

You see those fine, light fronds that are in the foreground of this picture? That’s first year asparagus. It is fragile and fragrant and bitter as wormwood. What people don’t seem to grasp is its application as an herb. Those fronds are amazing on salads, or fried up in some butter and mixed into scrambled eggs, and I’ve mixed two or three gin cocktails with them. They have a flavor like nothing else you will ever eat.

Second year, you’re going to get something more like this:

It’s like a little tree! Once those branches develop, asparagus is too bitter and tough to eat, and on second year asparagus, they develop really quickly, but that’s okay, because you leave them, and they re-seed the trench. If you want to eat these babies, you have to watch them like a hawk and pick them at just the right time. But really, what you want to wait for is third-year asparagus:

It’s thick, and dark, and oh so tender and grows pretty high (about 18 inches and sometimes two feet) before it develops branches and is off-limits. It is sweet as can be and it will be a hard thing to not eat it raw out of the ground, and your reaction will be “holy crap!” because it is asparagus and you are eating it raw and goddammit, it is one of the most divine things you’ve ever eaten. But if you manage to bring some of it back to the house, you get this:

So awesome. So freaking awesome.

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