Asparagus Gruyere Tart is impressive and impressively easy

My friend Dee is celebrating a birthday this week, and I offered to host a small girls’ night dinner to celebrate this remarkable woman. I imagined spending all day cooking up all kinds of decadent delights, decorating the house, maybe even inventing a special cocktail to mark the occasion.

And then I realized that we had picked a weeknight for the dinner party, and that all of my prep work was going to have to happen sometime between the end of my work day and 7 p.m., all while helping my fifth grader with his homework, feeding him and getting him off to swim practice.

It’s times like these when I wish I had a staff the size of Downton Abbey’s, or at the very least my own Mrs. Patmore. Since I don’t, it was time to locate some elegant but simple recipes that could be executed fairly quickly.

Roasted chicken has become a standby recently. I’ve got a favorite Dutch oven recipe with tons of garlic that cooks quickly at high heat. It takes very little fuss and is impressively moist and tasty. Throw some ramps and maybe some radishes in to roast, and I’ll have a nice celebration of spring.

Ramps may be one of the first vegetative harbingers of spring, but asparagus is close behind. Governor Rick Snyder even declared last May “Michigan Asparagus Month.”