It's the asparagus season now and here in Belgium (and parts of Holland) they grow the white version: delicious! You need to peel them (unlike the green ones) and then virtually anything is possible.. You can boil them and eat them the Flemmish way (with boiled eggs, cooked ham, melted butter and chopped parsley), just with Hollandaise (or Mousseline) sauce and/or with (smoked) salmon (or most other fish):

Making a creamy soup of the white asparagus is also delicious!

Dad and I recently had them at Degustation (www.degustation-restaurant.be) where Kris Wijnen basically pan fried them raw with lemon grass and I think reduced port/balsamic vinegar - they had a real bite to them both in terms of texture and in flavour: yum! They came with pan fried sweetbread and a reduced port sauce. A very special combination with which we drank both white (Albarino) and red wine (Roda - lucky me!!!) to see which one went well with the dish. Oh....both did...!


Wines I would recommend to go with the asparagus (it totally depends of course on what you combine it with) but generally... Alsace whites like Pinot Blanc, Loire wines like Sancerre, Menetou-Salon, Quincy and new World Sauvignon Blancs go well with it. Also nice to think of more unusual wines (or perhaps in the meantime not so unusual anymore...) like Gruner Veltliner from Austria and Albarino from Spain.
One word of warning: if you do eat boiled eggs with your asparagus, most white wines will start to taste a bit 'metallic' as a result. Nothing you can do about it......keep drinking :-)!