White Gold 2021

It’s spring and it’s the season of the white gold or the queen of vegetables as white asparagus is called here. We love it!

These two recipes are how we like to enjoy white asparagus. We also have a third way: with hollandaise sauce. Yummy!

This recipe I got from a Belgian guy during my Erasmus exchange in the Netherlands. He served it with home-made Belgian fries – so good!

Asparagus ‘the Flemmish’ way, 2 persons and baby

• 500g white asparagus
• 100g clarified butter
• 1 bunch of curly or flat parsley (I used frozen this time, I would recommend fresh)
• 4 eggs
• pepper, nutmeg

Hard-boil the eggs. Prepare the asparagus: Peel them and cut off the ends, about 3-4 cm from the end. Save these for the next recipe! You can throw them in the freezer for another day or store them in the fridge for the next day. Heat up the butter gently and seperate the milk protein (the whitish substance that drop to the bottom of the pan) to make clarified butter. Chop the parsley. Boil the asparagus very gently for 5 minutes. Drain or save the liquid for stock. For our daughter I let one small top piece (the best piece of course) boil a bit longer. I then mashed it up with a fork. Chop up the eggs with an egg chopper (the recipe states to mash the eggs, I didn’t do that this time). Put the asparagus on a plate. Pile the eggs on top. Pour on the clarified butter. Season with pepper and nutmeg (optional – is nice when you mash the eggs to add). Enjoy with ham!

White asparagus soup, 2 persons and baby

• Leftover peel and ends of 500grams white asparagus
• A small knob of margarine
• 6 dl water
• 1/2 bouillon cube or less (depends on taste)
• about 2 tablespoons cream
• pepper
• For baby: about 40-50 ml breastmilk

Defrost the leftover asparagus if needed. Heat up a pot. Melt the margarine and fry the leftover asparagus for a few minutes. Add water. Boil for 20-25 minutes until the ends are very soft. Let it cool before you put the ends, the peel and the boiling liquid in the blender. Blend until smooth. Put a small amount in a different pot (this is for the baby). In the big pot, add the rest of the soup and add bouillon cube and let it boil gently until the bouillon cube is dissolved. Add cream. In the baby pot, add the breastmilk. Heat very gently on very low heat (or don’t heat it up at all, the milk I had was defrosted, so it was very cold). Serve with sandwiches or garlic bread. We added some ham in the soup for the adults. Delicious! Our daughter loved it 🙂

I wish the season for white gold was longer!

It’s so much fun to try to figure out how to serve our normal dishes to the baby. We do a mix of traditional puree-style introduction of food and baby-led weaning giving her bigger pieces of fruit or vegetables to get acquainted with and chew on. At 7 months though, the bulk is still mother’s milk.