Friday, June 19, 2009

The Best Meal Ever (warning, contains vegetables)

JB started a nice freindly rant on his Blunt Instrument blog the other day about vege's, which was continued on Twitter. Much disparaging comment was made, including a paritucarly harsh comment was made about asparagus. Being a man of principals, I had to interject. Excuse me sir, I tweeted, but my best ever meal contained asparagus.
Well.
My parantage was called into question. It was suggested that I perhaps had been let out of the asylum a touch early or that my blood alchohol levels were too low or too high. I forget which.

The fact remains and there is a simple explanation for it. You see asparagus, unlike a good bottle of red, does not like being stored. In fact the ideal time for transporting asparagus is the time it takes to walk from your asparagus patch to the frypan or saucepan full of boiling water. Any longer and it turns into a different vegetable. Asparagus, like corn, starts packed with natural sugars, but the minute it's picked, those sugars start converting to starch. Nasty floury starch, which is why most asparagus you buy tastes like cardboard flavoured with cats urine.

So to the recipe. What I did see, is dreaming of a future Lantanaland I was reading a lot of permaculture, cooking and gardening books in anticipation and desire. Asparagus takes about three years to really start producing and I saw a bedragled seedling at a nursery and bought it and potted it up. Every time I passed that pot I thought of what sort of place I'd like to make it's permanent home. (10 acres of Lantana was never envisioned, but there you go.) After two years in the spring I got a crop of about ten usable spears. I wandered up the back and got four eggs from the Chooks. I put on a pot of water for poaching eggs and made up a hollandaise sauce. I melted some butter in a pan. I went an picked my aspargus spears and while they were gently frying in the butter I poached my eggs. Aspargus spears, poached egg on top, bit of hollandaise on the side.


My god, the TASTE! Sweeter than an fresh snowpea. Un-belive-able. Since that day the plants have been found a permenant home near the kitchen and this year I should get my first real crop. I tell you, spring is a good time to drop in on Lantanaland.

Mother Foccacia from the iPhone

4 comments:

  1. Most people will not have eaten newly picked asparagus and probably never will. As one of the lucky ones who has, I second, it is un-beliv-ably SWEET. Nasty name-callers have NO IDEA what they are missing out on. - The Wife

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  2. I am trying to figure out how i am going to test this theory of yours... may take a few years

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  3. I had never thouight about the difference in a produce's ability to survive the canning process until reading this. (Sorry for the OT - you never mentioned a can at all)
    Obviously canned asparagus is utter crap, relative to fresh and fresh pricked is apparantly better again than the days old stuff we get at green grocers.
    I'd never make a salad sandwich with a canned tomato, but hapily use them in pasta sauces.
    Hmm.
    Still think it would have been tastier with some bacon crumbled on top.

    And someone needs to explain in short words preferably with pictures this poached egg thing. I think I do them pretty well, but it always struck me as redundant option. There are so many already excellant ways to cook an egg - which wierdo came up with poaching?

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  4. I have to say that I love eating poached eggs when out for brekkie but whenever I have tried it at home - total crapulous mess is the outcome.

    However I did have a flatmate who used this pick-up line succesfully many times:

    'I know how to make eggs benedict for breakfast, would you like to come over and try some'

    The funny thing was - he was lying!!

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