The weather has been amazing (apart from the fun little storm that whipped through on Saturday), and the asparagus has been gorgeous. How many reasons do you need to fire up the grill? This was a fabulous dinner that Jon cooked up last week: an entire bunch of grilled asparagus, grilled shrimp bathed in a lemon and garlic butter sauce, and good local bread. It’s very fast to prepare, apart from getting the coals going, and really, really good.

Jon’s grilled shrimp is a wonderful thing. It gets packed tightly on skewers, sprinkled with sugar, then grilled on the sugar side to give it a bit of caramelization. After a quick grill on the flip side, you slide the shrimp off the skewers into a pan of butter, garlic, lemon juice, red pepper flakes and salt that you have previously melted and kept warm on the side of the grill in a metal roasting pan. The shrimp finishes cooking in the hot butter, but has that lovely smoky grill taste. Parsley gets stirred in at the end, and the sauce is served with the shrimp, preferably poured over grilled asparagus and bread as well. I highly recommend the method.

We almost managed to eat the entire bunch of asparagus, but a little was left over. I chopped it up and put it on top of leftover pizza for lunch a few days later. Mm.