Asparagus: the vegetable of the royals
![[Print This Post]](http://www.rantlust.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-print/images/print.gif "[Print This Post]")
One of our favorite vegetables is asparagus, a shoot covered with protective leaves. The way I cook it is by stir frying it with some garlic and ginger though the normal way to cook in western cultures is to boil it and serve it with a cube of butter on top. It’s one of the few vegetables you can actually eat with your hand in a fine dining establishment. The stir fry dish is also easy and more tasty, in my opinion.
Most asparagus is green in color and this is what I use in my cooking but some are white in color. The latter is called blanched asparagus and is grown under the soil away from sunlight and is mostly found in Europe. There are special asparagus cookers available though we just use a stir fry pan for our purposes. I also sometimes use a steamer to steam the vegetable.
Asparagus has been around for a very long time and the Romans are supposed to have used it and it was known for its medicinal properties. It was also common on the tables of the Kings and Queens of Europe. The only problem with eating asparagus is that for some people, their urine will smell extremely awful after eating it.
I think upscale Indian restaurants should start not giving silverware, unless asked, just to make it cool enough to eat with your hands. How come it’s cool to learn to use chopsticks, but not cool enough to eat with your hands? Don’t tell me it’s easier to learn to use chopsticks than use your hands, for someone new to both.
Another problem is that we Indians look up to the West and offer silverware in Indian restaurants in India, as well as at home, when guests come. Oh well.
I agree that the Indian restaurants should force people to do that. Offer people finger bowls as they do in fancy restaurants back home but the default should be no silverware. However, what do you expect, considering the leader of our country makes ridiculous comments praising imperialism during his speech at Oxford recently.
I briefly skimmed through the speech. Where does he praise imperialism?
Yum! It is also very good suteed with canned salmon (skinnless and boneless) and cooked penne pasta. Or tossed with olive oil and grilled.
“How come it’s cool to learn to use chopsticks, but not cool enough to eat with your hands?”. It can be argued that exchanging one set of eating utensils for another is less of an emotional jump than exchanging them for none at all. Given that I rarely see people washing their hands before a meal at a restaurant, the hygiene question rightly or wrongly, becomes an issue.
Quoth Vinod:
See the BBC article on it. This wasn’t too long after/before the moron Advani went to Pakistan and praised Jinnah.
Also, eating with your fingers is not as common in the gentrified North as it is in the South. In fact, in Delhi, some of my North Indian friends would make fun of me for eating rice with my fingers. They would eat rotis but not rice (go figure!) And to add an interesting etymological twist to the whole thing, the Hindi word for spoon is “chamachh” and that for a base flatterer is “chamcha”. Apparently, the latter word came about because many Indians in the days of the Raj would bask in the reflected glory of the British Empire (much as our esteemed Prime Minister does these days), and in an effort to identify with the British, would eat their dal-roti with spoons.
Anyway, I shouldn’t wax too eloquent because the English language (which I love) is as much a remnant of India’s colonial past as chamchas.
Cleanliness issues aside, fingering Indian food (pardon the exp) leaves one with colorful fingers and nails, with some remnant odor to boot.
Given that fancier restaurants provide cloth napkins, one could end up with colorful napkins when said fingers are wiped… and at some point the bleach used while washing is bound to give up!
I was reading up about asparagus in the fascinating book Animal, vegetable, miracle(http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/). This seems to be the first ‘vegetable’ to appear in the spring. As this plant is a perennial, the plant survives for many years, it takes about three years for the first good harvest. Underneath the ground lies an octopus shaped chubby root called the crown that stores enough starch through the winter and sends up the shoot in the spring.The shoot grows so quickly it is called the phallic send up and one can watch it grow. This plant and the shoot was banned in the churches in Europe of the renaissance period.
The shoot has a very short life span like one can imagine, it needs to be harvested the same day and consumed the same day. Ideally. If the send up is not harvested, each triangular scale on the spear rolls out into a branch until the snake becomes a four foot tree with delicate needles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asparagus