 Hi, I'm Maya and welcome to my kitchen again. Today we're going to be making an asparagus torta. It's a great kid-friendly lunch that adults also love eating and it happens to be asparagus season but you can actually do this with any kind of vegetable and it gets a lot of protein into your children's lunches as well as some nice green vegetables and they usually don't complain even though there are greens in there because it's all kind of cooked into a nice pizza-style dish. It looks a bit like a pizza. Okay, so I've chopped up my asparagus and I've also finely chopped about a half of a small onion and then I have a clove of garlic. I've also finely minced my garlic and you can just use a knife like this and hold the tip down and mince it like this or you can put it into a mortar and pestle and pound it or you can push it through a garlic press. You just want to get it into small pieces. Okay, so we've heated up a frying pan here and we're just going to pour a little bit of olive oil in to kind of get our onions and garlic to release all of their flavors. I think the smell of onions and garlic, oh my goodness that's hot, sautéing in a pan is one of the nicest flavors you can get. You don't want to let it get too hot. This is a little bit hot so I'm going to turn it down a bit and I'm just going to wait for those onions to start to look glassy and then we'll know that they've started to release all of their flavors. In general I have to say I don't like hiding vegetables from the children so this dish is nice because they can actually see the vegetables but if you have children that will not eat an entire floret of broccoli they'll probably let you chop up the broccoli and do it like this. So it's kind of a half way between hiding your vegetables from your children and getting them to eat the whole thing and appreciate the taste of an asparagus. Okay, so now we're going to add our asparagus, our onions have started to get a bit transparent or translucent and we're just going to push our asparagus into there. I didn't chop all the way to the bottom because the stems can sometimes be tough so you can leave them out of this dish. Okay, and we're just going to wait for the asparagus to just start to get tender and then we're going to remove this from the heat. So while that's cooking, because I don't like to waste time in the kitchen, I'm going to crack some eggs into a bowl. Remember I'm using flat surface so that I minimize the contact of the shell with the actual egg part and I'm going to crack these four eggs in here and then I'm just going to use a whisk to basically just whisk them together. They don't really have to be overly whisked. If you have extra time and you want it to be nice and fluffy, you can keep whisking. So we've beaten our eggs and now I'm just going to move the asparagus around a little bit in the pan. Every once in a while we lose an asparagus or two but that's okay. My mom used to say to me, cooking is about being real, not being perfect. And I live by that every day. Okay, so our asparagus, it smells so nice. It's got this fresh, you can almost smell the color green when you're sauteing asparagus. Okay, so we've got that going now and this is almost, I think this is almost ready. So the asparagus is nice and tender. We're going to let it go for a few more minutes and I'll tell you about the other things we're going to add. These are panko crumbs. I've chosen gluten-free panko crumbs because I have a child who can't have wheat in his diet but they're just as good as the regular panko crumbs. You can use any kind of bread crumbs and then the only other thing we're going to add is a bit of grated parmesan cheese and some salt and pepper to flavor. So once this is tender, we're going to actually give it a few minutes to cool. Okay, so it looks as if our asparagus is almost ready to come off of the stove. One way that I test whether the asparagus is just getting tender, I kind of push my wooden spoon down onto a piece and if I can break it apart with just a little bit of pressure, it's probably ready to come off the stove. So I'm just going to turn that off. My mother told me to always rotate the pot handle when there are small children around so that nobody comes along and pulls it down on themselves. Okay, so we've allowed that to sit for a few minutes. It doesn't really have to be completely cooled and what we're going to do now is we're just going to add everything to our egg mixture, mix it all together and pour it into this pie dish that I've greased with some butter and then we're going to put it in the oven for 20 minutes to bake. So let's do that now. I'm going to start by putting my asparagus in here and then we're going to add our panko crumbs, our parmesan cheese and then we're just going to basically mix this together. You can use a whisk or you can use a spoon for this part if you like and we're going to pour it into our dish. There we go. I can hear the excitement downstairs already as they hear me whisking away. Okay, I'm going to go and put this into the oven for 20 minutes and then we'll have a nice asparagus torta to feed the children for lunch. So we've taken our asparagus torta out of the oven and I have a taste tester here with me who's going to let us know if we did a good job. Right, Miche? Do you like asparagus torta? We might have to let it cool a little bit more, we'll see. So we're going to lift that up. How does that smell to you? Not too close. Okay, I'm going to cut it up for you and then you can blow on it. Give it a big blow. Can you give it a big blow? Good. Where'd it go? You like it? Yeah. Want to have a little bit more? Here, I'll leave the fork here for you and you can eat it up. Remember, you can substitute any other vegetables for asparagus and in general, the children tend to like this one. Thanks for joining us. This is Maya and I hope to see you soon. You all right?