 I'm Chris Dickerson with Corner Taco. I'm here at Ard Wolf in San Marco to demonstrate a simple vegetable dish, seared asparagus. We're preheating a cast iron skillet over medium-high on a very primitive burner. If I can cook on this burner, then you can certainly cook it at home. Buy asparagus from your local grocery store. You see this is still in the tray. Place it on a cutting board, a little tip. Whenever I use a cutting board at home or at work, I always put a wet towel underneath to give it traction. Leave it in the tray. Place it on top of the cutting board. Cut about a third of the way from the bottom. Basically, you want to remove any of the fibrous parts. Just like that. This is grape seed oil. Grape seed oil has a really high smoke point. You can use olive oil, canola oil. Grape seed oil is what we use on the truck. It's readily available at any grocery store. Put oil on the pan. You want to put enough so that it covers the bottom of the pan by, let's say, about a sixteenth of an inch. If you put too much oil in, you'll simply fry it. And here we want to be searing. So you have the pan starting to smoke. It looks like asphalt on a hot summer day. That's how you know it's hot enough. You don't want to crowd the pan. You want to fit whatever you put in the pan like you'd fit a shoe. You want to hear that nice sizzle. You want one even coat. You don't want to, if you overcrowd the pan, you'll cool the pan down. Resist the temptation to move the asparagus. If you do that, you'll destroy the crust. This will take about one and a half minutes per side. And typically, whenever I'm seizing vegetables or meat, I typically season it in advance with something as fibrous as asparagus, broccoli is another example. I don't season it until the end. Otherwise, the salt will just roll right off. I can smell it starting to smell like toasted hazelnuts. That's an indication that it's starting to brown. It's ready to be flipped. I just do one motion with the tongs. See how the asparagus is starting to blister? This is definitely not something that you want to overcook. You want to pull it off before it's actually done because it'll continue to cook as it sits. At this point, I can actually season it because it's got a nice coating of oil, which will help the salt to stick. Coarser salt mixed with a little bit of white pepper and a ratio of about five parts. Coarser salt to one part pepper. It's pretty much done. Put that on a plate and that's seared asparagus.