This time of the year, the asparagus crop is in full swing. I recall about six months ago that Kevin from Seriously Good ran a month long asparagus recipe feature that had me absolutely drooling and somewhat envious as asparagus was out of season here. Well now it's my turn and what better vegetable to feature for weekend herb blogging which this month is being hosted by Nandita of Saffron Trail.

At a time when I still had plenty of hair, some twenty-five years ago, I used to visit an Italian hairdresser who looked after it. She was about the same age as me and did some pretty wild things with her hair, all sorts of different cuts and amazing colours, until the day she finally ran out of hair to mess about with.

My hairdresser came from the family farm at KooWee Rup on the top of Western Port, which is on the edge of what was formerly known as the Great Swamp that stretched out through Gippsland until the late 1800’s, when an Italian engineer, Carlo Catani, was employed to dig drainage channels which transformed the area into prime farmland.

Koo Wee Rup originally gained fame as a potato growing district and a potato festival is held in March every year to celebrate the relationship between the town and this mainstay vegetable, but since the 1930’s Koo Wee Rup’s main claim to fame is that it is the centre of Victoria’s and Australia’s asparagus growing industry, that thrive in the rich soils of this former swampland.

My hairdresser may have been a wild at heart, but she came from good Italian stock and we always talked about food and during the asparagus season she would tell me how to prepare asparagus and all the ways she and her family ate this wonderful shoot.

Asparagus is a member of the lily family and as such is related to onions, garlic, leeks and turnips. The part we eat is the young shoot that is sent up from the crown (bulb) each year in early spring, which, when eventually left alone, will form feathery fronds, properly known as phylloclades, that is, delicate branches without leaves.

At the time we were talking about asparagus, the usual method of preparation was to peel back a bit of the tough outer skin from the base and boil it. To this end there were special asparagus pots, tall and narrow in diameter to accommodate it. What my hairdresser told me was that her family simply grabbed a stem at both ends and simply bent it until it snapped. What you were left with was two halves, one to be discarded and the other perfectly tender its whole length. They then liked to fry the stems in butter or olive oil, which at the time was a revelation as it concentrated the flavour, not leaching it out into cooking water.

Nowadays, all television chefs will show you how to bend and snap asparagus, but think about it for a moment. Why would asparagus snap at exactly the point where tender meets tough? If you pick up the stalk to be discarded and eat a little of it from where the break is, you will discover that it’s not so tough, especially if it breaks about half way. The really tough part of the stem occurs near where the stem changes colour from green to white.

Imagine for a minute that you work on an asparagus farm. All day long you have had a bent back as you harvested the vegetable and the last thing you want to do is muck around peeling it. After all, you do have tons of the stuff, so a little bit wasted is of no concern.

If on the other hand you are buying asparagus, you want to get all the value possible from it and really these days with water issues and such like, who wants to waste anything? You might like to try this. Lay all the stalks on your chopping board and with a sharp knife cut through the stalks into the green part just above the white. Then get a trusty vegetable peeler and peel back the skin for 5 cm from where you cut. What you might find is that suddenly a little bit of asparagus goes a whole lot further.

Our favourite way to cook asparagus is simple and delicious. Take the prepared stems and coat them with olive oil and a little salt. Heat a ridged grill pan till smoking hot, place the asparagus on it and turn when the grill marks appear and darken. Repeat on the other side and serve.