Contrasts

1. The leftover pork: Roasted it w/ some orange juice, soy sauce, star anise, and cinnamon until it was fully cooked; shredded it off the bone; warmed up the meat in leftover roasting sauce augmented with a little more orange juice and ate it over soba noodles with miso/cane syrup/citrus-roasted carrots and asparagus. Good; some cane syrup should have gone into the pork; and the vegetables should have gone on the side since the miso glaze was totally drowned out by the pork.

2. Made a mashup of these two recipes (did the tomatoes from the former, although only had 3 large ones; did the beans as in the latter, although used some fresh rosemary and dried sage) plus roasted asparagus and a hasty parsley-lemon gremolata; it somehow feels just as - un-austere? voluptuous? - as the pork dish despite coming from a very different place, animal-product-wise.

And both showcase asparagus in different ways - in the first, I cooked it til it was just crisp-tender, as they say; in the second, I roasted it til the stalks were shriveled and soft and the heads crunchy; scrumptious no matter what.