There are nights when dinner is an undertaking, and there are nights when you look inside the refrigerator, discover that you have purchased what appears to be a small agricultural harvest of asparagus, and decide that this is what we’re doing now.

This was an asparagus night.

I started, as I usually do when roasting vegetables, by lining a baking sheet with brown parchment paper. I switched to the brown kind after reading somewhere that it was the healthier choice, which is the sort of fact I apparently absorbed once and have never revisited. Brown parchment it is.

Then came a completely unnecessary but highly enjoyable step: the apron.

[VIDEO INSERT: Reel begins here. Finished asparagus first, followed by parchment paper and putting on the new apron.]

A friend recently gave me a brand-spankin’-new apron, and I love it. It deserved a debut. I put it on, gave it a twirl, and proceeded toward the enormous quantity of asparagus waiting on the counter.

Asparagus has that annoying little instruction attached to it that you’re supposed to bend each individual spear until it snaps naturally, thereby revealing precisely where the tender stalk ends and the woody part begins.

That is lovely when you have twelve asparagus.

I did not have twelve asparagus.

So I lined mine up, took a knife, estimated where the tougher ends stopped, and cut straight across. The USDA actually offers the similarly pragmatic instruction of simply cutting the bottom portion from the stalks, so I feel quite comfortable with my asparagus efficiency.

There was, however, a brief interruption in food preparation when I realized that this much asparagus looks remarkably like a bridal bouquet.

Obviously, I became a bride.

“When life hands you an unreasonable amount of asparagus, sometimes you make a side dish. Sometimes you become a bride.”

After my brief second wedding, I spread the asparagus across the parchment-lined baking sheet and moved on to my favorite part: garlic.

I suppose there are households in which “a few cloves of garlic” means two or three cloves. We are not one of those households.

Garlic went onto the cutting board. Then a little more garlic went onto the cutting board. At some point, I abandoned any pretense of following an amount because we love garlic, and fresh garlic with olive oil and roasted vegetables is one of those combinations that makes the kitchen smell like you did considerably more work than you actually did.

Asparagus itself brings fiber, folate and several vitamins to the plate, so it is a rather respectable little vegetable underneath all of this theatrical treatment.

And then my phone died.

Right before the actual cooking part.

Perfect.

So you’ll have to trust me on the remainder, which is fortunately so simple that it barely requires documentation.