The ends of asparagus are chewy and woody, so they need to be trimmed before cooking, otherwise your Cream of Asparagus Soup recipe will be unpleasantly stringy. If you hold a piece of asparagus and bend it, the asparagus will naturally snap where the tough end begins. Instead of snapping the woody ends off of every piece of asparagus, I snap one piece, then line the asparagus up on a cutting board and chop off all the ends at this same snapped point. So, with just one snap and one long slice, all the asparagus are trimmed!