Wild asparagus, not so wild any more

On Sunday I spent the afternoon with friends picking wild asparagus in the hills behind my home. Once you know where to look for it, you realise it’s everywhere, although it prefers to hide in plants with particularly vicious thorns. It’s more bitter than commercial asparagus but still tasty; the usual way of cooking it locally is to use eggs to balance the bitterness, and add whatever fresh herbs you have to hand. My version:

Wild Asparagus Scrambler (serves 2)

• 2 handfuls of wild asparagus
• 1 large onion
• 4-5 eggs
• Feta
• Butter
• Parsley (in this case, wild)
• Salt and pepper to taste

1. Remove the lower, woody parts from the stems of the asparagus.
2. Steam the asparagus for around 4-5 minutes.
3. While steaming, chop the onion finely and fry in the butter until transparent.
4. While steaming and frying, break and beat the eggs.
5. Drain the asparagus and chop into small pieces.
6. Add the asparagus and eggs to the pan with the onion.
7. Allow the eggs to begin cooking, then start scrambling.
8. Add herbs and seasoning as necessary.
9. Cube and add the feta before serving.

The next day I felt like something different, so this:

Wild Asparagus Stir Fry

• Udon noodles
• Wild asparagus
• Domestic garlic
• Red pepper
• Onion
• Soy sauce
• Sesame oil

This is simple and tasty, but no hope for you if you don’t know how to stir fry. The domestic garlic isn’t as pungent as the garlic you usually get from the market, so it doesn’t clash too much with the bitter taste of the asparagus, and the soy sauce balances the bitterness quite well. The red pepper is in there mainly to give it some colour, otherwise it just looks green.

Calcium sulfate is also “The traditional and most widely used coagulant to produce Chinese-style tofu. It produces a tofu that is tender but slightly brittle in texture.” Wikipedia claims that “the coagulant itself has no perceivable taste”, but I still appear to be eating my own house.

This makes me sad.

The sweets of Gaurnadi are famous because they’re made of fresh milk, rather than the condensed milk that is used in most other places. In the back room, weathered cooks hunch over boiling pans of white gold while stone jars line the shelves behind them. It’s all about the atmosphere, really.

In the end, we bought about eight boxes of different sweets to take back to Dhaka, and I sampled five different kinds, from the milky to the crunchy to the frankly odd. The rest of the car journey I spent buzzing off a sugar rush, which was a good thing, as it was about 6 hours of fairly similar and not particularly good roads.

For some reason, Bangladeshis appear to feel that Chinese restaurants are the height of sophistication, even when there aren’t any Chinese people involved. The first two nights I spent in Barisal, we ended up at “Best Food Garden”, a Chinese restaurant that didn’t have a garden, and didn’t live up to the best food promise either. On the third day I discovered Hotel Bismillah, though, and suddenly dinner was a treat rather than a trial.

Nothing special – the usual Bangladeshi fare – but the place was clean, the service was quick and the food was well-cooked. I had the daal bhuna, mixed vegetable and roti, all of which were excellent, but the show-stopper was the sliced beetroot dish. I haven’t seen it anywhere else, but it was tasty, tasty, tasty; but also mysterious mysterious mysterious, because none of the waiters could tell me what it was called.

Apparently not many aid workers are eating there, because the staff were moderately entertained to see us. If you’re staying in the Hotel Athena in Barisal – which you’ll have to, because it’s the only hotel in town, but you can’t, because Save the Children have booked the entire place, Bismillah provides the food there as well. So now you know where to eat if you visit Barisal – just stay away from the Chinese restaurants.

Google Recipes eventually came out, which was adequate, but not really what I was looking for – it was a bit unfriendly, plus there was no sense that the people behind it cared about food at all. Fast forward to earlier this year, when I met Brys Stephens at a dinner party given by Gordon Peters in Washington DC. Brys told me about his startup project Cookthink, and it turned out that he and his partners had the same idea – the difference between us being that they’d actually done something with it.

They’ve been blogging for a while (always interesting), but Cookthink Beta launched two weeks ago and it’s great, just like I thought it would be. The only thing I thought they should add would be more of a community element – you know, sharing recipes between members – CookTube, if you will. I’m pretty sure that they’ll get around to it sooner or later, but in the interests of practicing what I preach, I’m going to start posting recipes on this blog.

Although not today.