Smoked Trout and Asparagus Pasta

Thursday 25 June

When we have asparagus on hand, our default tends to be pasta alla Saffi.  But we had that only last week, and as we said then, it's not as easy to get Schad's ham as it used to be. 

Fortunately, we had purchased some smoked trout at Trader Joe's, and found a recipe online that suited it and the asparagus.  We did have a few doubts about the recommended techniques, though.  

We don't like our asparagus that near raw, so we did our normal thing of boiling the sliced pieces (stems first, then tender tips) in the pasta pot separately, then scooping them out and using the same water to boil the penne. 

We also cooked the garlic and cream and tossed it all together in a separate skillet, as we think garlic would burn in a flash if you tried to sauté it at the bottom of a starchy pasta pot.  
And finally, combining any or all of the fresh herbs (dill, basil, tarragon, chives, mint and thyme) as it suggested would end up as a confusing flavor mashup, with mint overpowering them all.  We confined ourselves to garden tarragon and dill, both of which work well with cream and fish, and we were happy we did.