Slender asparagus and fresh ricotta are easy to find in spring, and these savory crespelle offer a winning combination of the seasonal favorites.

Adapted from a recipe from Tuscan food writer and chef Giulia Scarpaleggia, the two ingredients are paired in a fresh and creamy filling for lacy, tender homemade crepes that can either be rolled up like burritos, or folded into elegant handkerchief-like triangles.

The asparagus is first simmered in boiling water until just tender and then pureed in a blender. The bright green puree then goes into a bowl with ricotta, grated Parmesan and just enough lemon zest and mint to cut through the richness of the dairy.

I baked the filled crepes on a parchment paper-covered cookie sheet, but you also could line them in a buttered casserole dish.

These are topped with a super-simple Bechamel sauce, but if you’re feeling adventurous, you also could drizzle the crepes with Hollandaise sauce. The chopped pistachios add a slightly crunchy, salty finish.

Asparagus and Ricotta Crepes

INGREDIENTS

For crepes:

1 1/3 cups whole milk, room temperature
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 large eggs
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Generous pinch fine sea salt

For filling:

1 pound asparagus
2 cups fresh ricotta
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Zest of 1/2 lemon
3 or 4 mint leaves, finely chopped
Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

For Bechamel sauce:

1-3/4 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1-1/4 cups milk
Salt and pepper
Grated nutmeg

For garnish:

2 tablespoons pistachios, chopped
Fresh mint leaves
Olive oil

DIRECTIONS

Prepare crepe batter. Mix milk, flour, eggs, melted butter and salt in blender just until smooth. (It will be thin.) Cover batter and chill at least 15 minutes while you prepare filling, and up to 1 day.
Prepare filling. Remove woody ends from asparagus, then cook in a saucepan with 1 inch of boiling, salted water until just tender, 2 to 4 minutes depending on thickness of spears. Remove from hot water into a bowl of ice water to blanche, then remove and allow to dry on a paper towel.
Cut off and set aside tips. Place the rest of the asparagus into a food processor or blender and add just enough water (a teaspoon or 2) to blend until smooth.
Add puree to bowl with the ricotta, grated Parmesan, lemon zest and chopped mint. Season to taste with salt and pepper. If it’s too bland, add more Parmesan or a bit more lemon.

Prepare crepes:

Heat a large nonstick saute pan over medium heat. (I used a 9-inch shallow saute pan.) Brush pan with a little melted butter or paper towel soaked with olive oil.
Whisk crepe batter to combine, then pour about 1/4 cup into the pan, swirling it to cover the bottom of pan with a thin layer. Cook for 2 minutes, or until the crepe is golden brown on the edges. Carefully flip with a spatula and cook on the other side for 1 more minute. Remove to plate. (The first crepe might not be perfect, but that’s okay! It will ready the pan.)
Continue process until you have 12 crepes set aside and stacked. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Make Bechamel sauce:

Melt butter in saucepan on medium heat. Spoon in flour and whisk until golden brown and toasted.
Pour in cold milk in a thin stream, stirring to avoid lumps. Cook over medium-low heat until thickened, then season with salt, pepper and ground nutmeg.

Compose crepes:

Spread each crepe with the asparagus and ricotta filling, then roll them up as cannelloni or fold them as a handkerchief, first in half and then in half again.
Arrange in a casserole pan or on a rimmed baking sheet on top of parchment paper.
Drizzle the crepes with the Bechamel sauce, then decorate each with cooked tips of asparagus, chopped pistachios and a drizzle of olive oil.

Final steps:

Place pan in oven and bake for about 15-20 minutes, or until golden brown and bubbling on the sides.
Serve hot out of the pan, with more chopped mint as a garnish. You also can warm any leftovers in 350-degree oven.

Makes 10-12 crepes.

— adapted from julskitchen.com

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Bunches of fresh mint and piles of sugar snap peas are still weeks away from showing up at my local farmers market, but April’s lengthening days and warming temperatures already have me craving that classic spring pairing. Luckily, they can also be foraged right now at the supermarket down the street.

Usually, I toss my mint and sugar snaps into a big, ebullient salad, but I was more in the mood for something substantial that could be rounded out with a protein. So, I also picked up a package of ground turkey to turn everything into a satisfying and colorful skillet dinner.

Ground turkey is ideal for all manner of impromptu cooking. Not only is it economical and convenient, it’s also mild and adaptable, a chameleon-like ingredient that blends in wherever you use it. It can anchor almost any skillet meal when you sear it until golden and crisp, especially if you throw in enough vegetables and vivid seasonings to bring out its best.

Still, I wanted a pungent sauce to spark the sweetness of the peas and the easygoing turkey, blazing them out of their quiet complacency. For that, I borrowed some of the zesty, spicy flavors of larb.

Popular in Thailand and Laos, larb is at once crunchy and soft, fiery and cooling. It’s a dish of thrilling contrasts that shift from bite to bite — just the thing to perk up a turkey and snap pea meal.

As the turkey sputtered and crisped in the pan, I mixed together a simple larb-inspired sauce of lime juice, fish sauce and chile flakes, which I drizzled onto the meat once it was browned. Then I added the sugar snaps and covered the pan so they could steam in those savory juices.

Not wanting to add a step to my dinner, I skipped toasting and grinding rice into a powder (which is typical of most larb recipes), and finished the dish instead with some chopped roasted nuts to add richness and crunch. Then I folded in the mint.

In Thailand and Laos, larb is considered a hot-weather dish. But mint and sugar snap peas make this larb-inspired meal perfect for the chilly spring nights that herald their arrival.

Spicy Skillet Ground Turkey and Snap Peas

By Melissa Clark

Inspired by the bold and zesty flavors of a Thai larb, this easy skillet meal pairs nuggets of golden ground turkey with sugar snap peas and a mound of fresh herbs. The sauce, a combination of fish sauce, lime juice and red-pepper flakes, makes everything taste both bright and deep, while an optional sprinkling of chopped nuts adds richness and crunch. Serve over rice or rice noodles, or with flatbread.

Yield: 4 servings

Total time: 35 minutes

INGREDIENTS

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion, halved and thinly sliced into half-moons
1 pound ground turkey
Salt, as needed
1/4 cup fresh lime juice (from 2 to 3 limes), more to taste
2 tablespoons fish sauce (or coconut aminos or soy sauce), more to taste
1/2 teaspoon red-pepper flakes
1/2 cup torn mint leaves, more for topping
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro or basil, more for topping
3 scallions, thinly sliced, dark green parts saved for topping
1 pound sugar snap peas, trimmed
2 tablespoons chopped roasted cashews or peanuts (optional)

DIRECTIONS

Heat a large skillet over medium-high. Add the oil and red onion slices to the skillet and cook until soft and deeply brown, 7 to 10 minutes. Crumble in the ground turkey and a pinch of salt, breaking up the meat. Cook until crisp and dark brown, about 8 minutes.
While the turkey is cooking, whisk together the lime juice, fish sauce, red-pepper flakes, torn mint leaves, cilantro and scallion whites and light green parts. Pour the sauce into the skillet and add the sugar snap peas. Toss until combined. Cover and let the snap peas steam until tender and cooked through, about 3 to 5 minutes.
Taste and add more fish sauce, salt and lime juice as needed to make everything bright and savory. Stir in the chopped cashews or peanuts, if using. Top with more torn mint leaves, chopped cilantro and dark green scallion slices.

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It’s been a rough season for the Minnesota Wild, full of injuries to key players, big victories despite those injuries, and inexplicable losses that ultimately kept the team from making its fourth straight postseason tournament.

In the end, they were undone early by a 5-10-4 start from which they could never recover, but you can’t say they didn’t go down fighting. They’ve been playing winning hockey ever since, and were still a longshot to make the postseason.

That officially died on Tuesday in Denver, where the Wild rallied from an early two-goal deficit against playoff-bound Colorado before absorbing a 5-2 loss at Ball Arena that officially eliminated them from the playoffs with four regular-season games remaining.

Battling Tampa Bay’s Nikita Kucherov for the NHL points lead, Avalanche forward Nathan MacKinnon had a hat trick and assist as Colorado took a 5-2 second period lead and never looked back.

“Obviously, tonight’s tough,” Wild veteran blue liner Zach Bogosian told reporters who traveled to Denver for the game. “They’re a good team, and a player like MacKinnon — he can take over a game, and he showed tonight why he’s a world-class player.”

Kirill Kaprizov scored his 42nd goal of the season, and Matt Boldy scored his 27th to tie the game 2-2 after one period, but the Wild couldn’t stop the NHL’s best offense, which entered the game averaging a league-best 3.71 goals a game, or their best player.

MacKinnon beat Filip Gustavsson on three breakaways and had the first assist when Artturi Lehkonen opened the scoring with a power-play goal 4:34 into the game to give him 51 goals and 137 points this season. That’s two points behind Kucherov, who had three assists in Tampa Bay’s 5-2 victory over visiting Columbus to give him 139.

The Wild have four regular-season games remaining, on the road against Vegas, San Jose and Los Angeles, then the final at home against Seattle on April 18.

“Nothing changes,” coach John Hynes told reporters at Ball Arena. “An elite player made some elite plays tonight. I think with the other components of the game, that was a huge difference. I’m not down on the team.

“I don’t like the fact that we lost the game, but we’ve got to continue to compete hard and play and find ways to win.”

Gustavsson made 28 saves for the Wild. Cale Makar also scored a goal, and Alexandar Georgiev stopped 20 of 22 shots for the Avalanche, which swept the season series from their Central Division rival (0-3-1).

The Wild’s points ceiling is now 91, one fewer point than Vegas, holding the last playoff spot in the West, already has. Seventh-place Los Angeles had 93 points before their late game at Anaheim. They entered with a slim chance at the postseason because they were 7-3-3 since March 10, and 32-21-5 since Hynes replaced Dean Evason as head coach on Nov. 28.

But limited by $14.7 million in dead salary cap space, the result of buying out the contracts of Zach Parise and Ryan Suter in 2021, the Wild started the season with no margin for error or misfortune — and immediately had their share of both.

They lost captain Jared Spurgeon before the season started, getting him on the ice for only 16 games all season because of back and hip injuries, then had to weather injury absences by such key contributors as Kaprizov, Boldy, Gustavsson, Mats Zuccarello, Jonas Brodin and Marcus Foligno.

Despite that, they played some good hockey, twice beating Eastern Conference leader Boston with depleted lineups in December, and scoring seven third-period goals to rally past then-NHL points leader Vancouver, 10-7, in February.

But the Wild also lost some costly head-scratchers, most notably a 6-0 loss to Arizona and 3-2 setback against Anaheim, both at Xcel Energy Center, when they were making headway in January.

Asked why he thinks the Wild finished short this season after making the playoffs the past three seasons, veteran defenseman Brodin said, “I don’t know right now. I have no clue. I haven’t thought about that. We’ll see after the season. We’ll play hard the rest of the season and then see after.”

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PHOENIX — The Arizona Supreme Court has delivered a landmark decision in giving the go-ahead to enforce a long-dormant law that bans nearly all abortions, drastically altering the legal landscape within the state around terminating pregnancies.

The law predating Arizona’s statehood provides no exceptions for rape or incest and allows abortions only if the mother’s life is in jeopardy. Arizona’s highest court suggested doctors can be prosecuted under the 1864 law, though the opinion written by the court’s majority didn’t explicitly say that.

The Tuesday decision threw out an earlier lower-court decision that concluded doctors couldn’t be charged for performing abortions in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The law was enacted decades before Arizona became a state on Feb. 14, 1912. A court in Tucson had blocked its enforcement shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing the constitutional right to an abortion.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe decision in June 2022, then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, successfully requested that a state judge lift an injunction that blocked enforcement of the 1864 ban.

The state Court of Appeals suspended the law as Brnovich’s Democratic successor, Attorney General Kris Mayes, urged the state’s high court to uphold the appellate court’s decision.

The law orders prosecution for “a person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life.”

The Arizona Supreme Court suggested in its ruling Tuesday that physicians can be prosecuted, though justices didn’t say that outright.

“In light of this Opinion, physicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal” the ruling said. The justices noted additional criminal and regulatory sanctions may apply to abortions performed after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The law carries a sentence of two to five years in prison upon conviction. Lawyers for Planned Parenthood Arizona said they believe criminal penalties will apply only to doctors.

The high court said enforcement won’t begin for at least two weeks. However, plaintiffs say it could be up to two months, based on an agreement in a related case to delay enforcement if the justices upheld the pre-statehood ban.

The ruling puts the issue of abortion access front and center in a battleground state for the 2024 presidential election and partisan control of the U.S. Senate.

Democrats immediately pounced on the ruling, blaming former President Donald Trump for the loss of abortion access after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the national right to abortion.

President Joe Biden and his allies are emphasizing efforts to restore abortion rights, while Trump has avoided endorsing a national abortion ban and warned that the issue could lead to Republican losses. The decision will give Arizona the strictest abortion law of the top-tier battleground states.

Staunch Trump ally and abortion opponent Kari Lake is challenging Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego in an Arizona race for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Kyrsten Sinema, who isn’t seeking a second term.

Under a near-total ban, the number of abortions in Arizona is expected to drop drastically from about 1,100 monthly, as estimated by a survey for the Society of Family Planning.

This past summer, abortion rights advocates began a push to ask Arizona voters to create a constitutional right to abortion. If proponents collect enough signatures, Arizona would become the latest state to put the question of reproductive rights directly before voters.

The proposed constitutional amendment would guarantee abortion rights until a fetus could survive outside the womb, typically around 24 weeks. It also would allow later abortions to save the mother’s life, or to protect her physical or mental health.

___

Lee reported from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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