Our first cut of asparagus for dinner tonight, with fresh broccoli from the garden with a bacon wrapped chicken breast.
To celebrate I made a sabayon and converted it into a light tarragon and lemon flavoured hollandaise.for the veg.
Wonderful, to die for, food of the Gods! You can stick those bloody pizzas and chocolate bars in a very dark place! We shall now be forced to eat vast quantities of asparagus to keep up with the bed which is now seven years old and in top notch production. I am seriously going to miss that bed when we move. No doubt it will be wrecked within a year by some bloody peasant. I shall make a point of never driving down this road again or else I might well invade and dish out a few pieces of my mind when the garden goes to wrack and ruin. I am now in the throes of deciding which plants should be saved from such a dreadful fate as new idiot ownership. Too many round here garden with a JCB!
Sad.
Boadicea's Chariot 
You’re making my mouth water, Christina. When will you be moving?
It was not until somebody told me that I ever noticed the fact that eating asparagus has a slightly unpleasant after effect. But it is worth it.
CO: Congrats on the asparagus bed, patience is called for and rewarded.
Asparagus grows wild by the side of the back roads here, not native, but as a result of many years of cultivation by the local “Truck Farms” (market gardens in English?), when the farms converted to grain or soy the asparagus survived on the edges of the fields and returns annually. The new shoots are hard to find in the spring but in the summer they develop an enormous ferny top.
Hello Sipu: The “asparagus reaction” is a genetic marker, only about 50% of the population have it (I’m one) and quite surprisingly a minority of those who do are insensitive to the smell and unable to detect it.
Asparagus is one of only TWO common garden plants which are perennial. The other one also has a significant effect on some peoples digestive system. It is of course…….?
Thanks LW, I did not know that.
CO, I can identify with your wish not to see your place after you leave. My garden becomes very personal and I hate thought of it being ‘re-organised’.
LW strawberries?
sheona, haven’t sold yet! Just agonising at the thought of it all!
Janus, yeah, just best not to. All quite easy if you are leaving the area but if you are hanging around much harder to do. Fortunately with parallel grid iron roads over part of the county it will be reasonably easy to avoid this property.
I know my roses are doomed, very few round here know how to prune, they leave them in festering heaps and then grub them out! But they are the main framework of the garden and must stay but can easily be replaced. It is my rare paeonies that are causing the angst, am wondering how many of them I dare remove!
Having to go back to the UK and being ill since I haven’t lifted them when I should have, ie before they broke, now I have a fair chance of killing them.
Doomed, thrice doomed!
A golden ray of sunshine, perhaps we won’t sell it! We really ought to, 5 acres is bloody ridiculous, but the more things grow the less I want to.
I did wonder how you would cope with leaving your garden, Tina, but it is very hard work, and none of us are getting any younger.
As for removing them, it’s easy here, you just list the plants you want to take, and it’s not usually a problem. I suppose this is especially true if you sell it to a JCB owner.
It happens here too, actually. An elderly friend sold the family house with a delightful garden which took about thirty years to create. She spend a week with her next door neighbour before moving into her new home abroad, and watched the new owner destroy the lot. She was absolutely heartbroken.
CO, good evening,
As I desultorily browsed the Web this morning looking for interesting things to cook for this Sunday’s all day Bridge funfest, I saw your ‘sabayon’. New word to me
Naturally, of course, I suspected a zabaglione conection and Google confirmed this. I’m going to give it a go for supper but I would really appreciate your recipe. Marsala or not for the savoury version?
CO: Maybe I should have said vegetables? I was thinking of Rhubarb.
JM sabayon sauce is a hot emulsion like a light hollandaise.
3 egg yolks, 4 tbspns water, beat in basin at room temp with rotary hand beater till at least 5 times the vol, about 5 mins,
Put basin on top of pan with v hot, not boiling water and continue to beat until eggs partly set, aboput another 5 mins, then add 2 oz melted butter in a thin stream, beat well to integrate. Do not allow mixture to get above 180F.
At this point you can take it sweet or savoury, I added 1/4 lemon juice, pepper and tarragon.
For sweet you would use the masala instead.
Basically the emulsion is held together with water rather than butter, were this to be a hollandaise you would have had to use about 9 oz butter with the commensurate calories to hold this together. HOWEVER, hollandaise is far more stable than sabayon which should be used immediately or held for no longer than 10 minutes. Hollandaise can be kept for a fair long time over a water bath if drawn off the stove.
Savour sabayon is most suitable for dressing veg rather than the main dish.
LW ah the dreaded rhubarb!
Hi CO and thanks
I went for it this afternoon and almost got it. Waitrose let me down this morning by having no asparagus so I got a bottle of Marsala and went for the sweet option.
Did my best but know that I let the water in the pan get too hot.
Never mind. Next time.
Mr Mackie: You are a brave man to first try this for guests, making Marsala flavored scrambled eggs is easy making sabayon is a whole different story. An Italian chef friend makes it look easy he beats them up over an open flame, perfect every time, but he has had about thirty years of practice. Keep trying.
Wasn’t there a singer called Lena Zabaglione? ‘Mamma, he’s making eyes at me!’.