Recipe gets me back with asparagus again

For quite a while until recently, I was off asparagus.
   I ate it a lot until a couple of years ago, when I stopped.
   This happens to me occasionally, and usually because I’ve eaten the food item in question badly prepared after eating it well-prepared for years.
   This happened with asparagus. I had it soft, drippy and yucky somewhere, and it was a bad experience – bad enough that I didn’t want to touch it for a long time.
   But I wanted to get back with asparagus. Those lovely green stalks have so much potential when cooked properly. In my mind, that’s crisp-tender.
   So when I happened across a collection of asparagus recipes in the April/May 2012 issue of Fine Cooking magazine, I decided to pick one and go for it.
   I have always found Fine Cooking to be a good source of trustworthy, delicious recipes.
   I picked Stir-Fried Asparagus and Shiitake with Ginger and Sesame (click for the recipe), and it turned out to be a very good choice.
   The asparagus, crisp-tender just as I like it, was a great match for the other recipe items in the title: Shiitake mushrooms, fresh ginger and sesame seeds.
   It is a lovely spring side dish, and was very easy to make.
   The collection of asparagus recipes offered some good advice about buying asparagus. Don’t buy them if the stalks are small and flimsy. You want the asparagus with wide, firm stalks, and that should not be a hard thing to obtain this time of year.
   Asparagus, trimmed of woody stems and cut into two-inch pieces, are cooked in a skillet with sliced shiitake mushrooms and scallions (also called green onions or spring onions).
   Minced garlic, minced fresh ginger (also called gingerroot), sesame seeds and water are added and ingredients are cooked just a bit longer. Soy sauce and sesame oil are stirred in.

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