This is a fat-free, very low-carb and low calorie recipe, if the final topping of butter is omitted and I would only add the butter if serving the dish hot. Whether hot or cold, however, it would still be an excellent dish without butter.
This is not the first recipe in which I've mentioned a knob of butter among the ingredients. But I've never mentioned a knob of anything else. There's a cookery collocation if ever there was one. You don't say a knob of jam, cream cheese or even peanut butter. The knob seems to be a measurement strictly reserved for butter. And how much exactly is a knob of butter in grams or ounces? I don't have a clue. It's just the amount that sticks to the end of a knife. This is going to be a difficult recipe for me to categorise in my index pages; I guess it will go down as a starter for sure, but I don't know what other page it will fit onto. Maybe it could be classed as a side-dish and, as I mentioned, it's also good eaten cold, in which case it could reasonably be labelled a salad.
I first encountered this one of a selection of small dishes, served cold, as part of an in-flight vegetarian meal on a Cathay Pacific flight from Seoul to Hong Kong. It was possibly the best in-flight meal I have ever had.
Traditionally, asparagus is cooked in specially shaped asparagus pans: for boiling, there's a long narrow thing that lets you immerse the full length of the pieces in water without cutting them; for steaming you can get tall thin pots that contain a basket which keeps the tougher stems in the water while the tips are gently steamed. This recipe might present a small problem if you don't have such a utensil, since the cooking liquid - the juice from one orange - does not amount to much and placing the asparagus in a round pan big enough to take the length might mean the liquid doesn't cover the asparagus. It's not an insurmountable problem, however. I used thin, short asparagus which fitted into a very small pan. I diluted the orange juice slightly with water and I found that the asparagus did not need to be completely submersed to cook through evenly. I guess I used a mixture of steaming and boiling. It worked, though, and that's the main thing. If I had had longer pieces of asparagus, I might have been tempted to cut them in half.
Ingredients
150 g asparagus
1 large orange
(A knob of butter, if serving hot)
Salt
Wash the orange well then grate about half of the zest from the skin, using the finest grater. Keep the zest aside until you've cooked the asparagus. Cut the orange in half and squeeze the juice from it. If the asparagus is particularly tough, trim the cut ends to get rid of the worst parts (you can peel the skin at the thick end too, if it is really thick and tough). The small, thin, green asparagus stalks might not need any preparation at all.
Lay the asparagus in a pan and pour over the orange juice. Add a little water to bulk up the liquid and a pinch of salt. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer gently with a lid on the pan for two or three minutes. It's better if the asparagus is still crisp in the finished dish.
Arrange the asparagus in a serving dish, pour over the cooking liquid and, if serving immediately, add a knob of butter before topping with the orange zest.