what to do with the leftover asparagus

Make an omelette! Three eggs, some asparagus blanched for about 4 minutes, salt, pepper and some shavings of gruyere. Lovely.

Had it with home made soda bread - this is a useful recipe, as you can use pretty much any combination of bread flour, and it will work. And it has no yeast, so is very quick.

450g plain flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp bicarb of soda
400ml buttermilk (use plain yogurt if you haven’t got buttermilk)

Preheat oven to 230C/450F/gas 8

Sift flour, salt and bicarb into a bowl.  Make a well, and add buttermilk.

Using one hand, slowly incoporate the flour into the milk to give soft, but not sticky dough. (Or cheat - use a mixer with a dough hook :).

Turn onto a floured board, and knead lightly for 1 minute until smooth.  Shape to a round about 4cm high. Cut a deep cross from one edge to the other.

Place on a floured baking tray and bake for 15 minutes.  Reduce the heat to 200C/400C/Gas 6, and bake for a further 30 minutes.  To test if the bread is cooked, tap the underside of the loaf - if it sounds hollow, it’s cooked.

Cool on a wire rack, eat with good butter.  Gorgeous.

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Sunday supper

As previously noted, we picked up the first local asparagus of the year on Saturday; with it, we cooked one of our favourites - asparagus stir-fried with ginger and red chilli. It sounds a terrible thing to do to fresh asparagus, I know, but trust me … it really is glorious.

We followed this with a rhubarb and ginger sponge pudding - bit piggy, really, but it is Sunday. I discovered the wondrous combination of rhubarb and fresh ginger a couple of years ago; I was following a recipe that called for stem ginger in syrup, and I thought it would be too sweet, so lobbed some finely minced fresh in instead. We’ve never looked back!

If you don’t have any ginger in the house (and you *should*, of course) remember that elderflower works wonderfully well with rhubarb too, so a splash of elderflower cordial would make a very good substitute, although I’d cut the sugar down a little in that case.

Rhubarb is a Very Fine Thing indeed.

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we love asparagus

it’s just glorious stuff, but the season is so short … we won’t buy it unless its local. Not for us the “flown in from Peru” stuff, as it has no taste.

There’s some nice asparagus recipes on Nibblous - and British Asparagus is a very handy resource.

Enjoy - the glorious green stuff won’t be around much longer.

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chocolate asparagus

I really can’t think of anything else to say.

Link here.

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