When Life Hand You Lemon Grass

If you really want to hear about it, I suppose it all started several years ago, when I took some cold medicine because I thought I was coming down with something, fell asleep on the train to Berlin and ended up in Hanover. It was raining, and the train back to Berlin wasn’t due for a couple of hours, and the last thing I felt like doing, to be honest, was sitting around a damp German Bahnhof, staring at a bunch of drab businessmen holding wet fedoras in their laps and nervously tapping their fingers on the wooden benches. So I thought maybe I’d just hang out at a restaurant for an hour or so and have a bowl of soup. This was in April, which is only important because springtime in Germany is like National Spargel Season or something. Spargel is what the Germans call asparagus, and there isn’t a restaurant in the whole country that doesn’t make a big deal out of Spargel during the spring. They serve it with hollandaise, they stuff it into chicken breasts, they make soup out of it--you name it.

I found a restaurant near the train station called Sawaddi, which turned out to be Thai. I can get by with my German when I have to, but I wasn’t having much luck with the waiter, whose grasp of the language seemed even worse than mine. “Spargel? Suppe?” He became agitated and pointed to a green chalkboard across the room, so I said, “Sure, that would be fine.”

What I ended up getting was the night’s special, which was a big four-course meal. Everything was made with lemon grass. Lemon grass soup, lemon grass asparagus, lemon grass chicken. Even the dessert was made with lemon grass. But the best thing was the asparagus. They took lemon grass leaves, tied them into knots and steamed them with the white Spargel, serving it with lemon grass butter. Between the cold medicine and a couple glasses of wine, I guess you could say I went a little crazy. I ended up ordering three more plates of asparagus with lemon grass. I think the waiter was starting to worry about me--while I was eating the last plateful, he stood next to another waiter, and the two of them stared at me as if I might eat the napkin or steal the silverware.

I don’t want to use that experience as an excuse, but it’s probably why I was driving slowly through Westminster in the middle of the night three months later, covertly looking for lemon grass, and why I ended up leaving my shovel behind in an unknown flower bed when a dog started barking and several lights came on in a pink stucco house. I decided I probably ought to get out of there before the dog got me or the cops showed up. Technically, I wasn’t a thief. Before the dog started yapping and before I’d even started trying to dig up a little clump of lemon grass from the front yard, I’d left $20 tucked inside a bank deposit envelope beneath a little stone Buddha on the porch.

These days, you can walk into almost any supermarket and buy all the lemon grass you want, but there was a time when it wasn’t so easy to get. Back then, I’d get a craving and drive to Orange County’s Little Saigon just to buy lemon grass at the 99 Ranch Market. During these trips I noticed that a lot of people in the neighborhood grew the stuff in their yards, which is how I came up with the idea of “borrowing” a clump or two.

Shortly after, I found a nursery 50 miles east of Fresno that sold the herb in three-inch pots. “There are fields and fields of the stuff all along the highway from Fresno to our nursery,” said V.J. Billings, the owner of Mountain Valley Growers, when I told her how thankful I was to locate her because I couldn’t find any lemon grass in Southern California. “It’s like a weed here.”

I said I’d heard that it has been used in South America for centuries. I read once that native cultures of the Amazon use it as a contraceptive. She thought that Southeast Asian refugees, many of whom settled around Fresno in the early ‘70s, introduced it to California.

Like a nervous new father, I called her the day my two seedlings arrived to ask what I was supposed to do with them. Some people might be annoyed by such questions, but Billings, who sells more than 300 herbs, loves weird plants the way some people love old cars. Lemon grass thrives in fertile soil and, like all grasses, needs a lot of water, particularly during the growing season.

“It’ll grow fast,” Billings warned, “but don’t start to harvest it until it gets several feet tall and starts to put out new pups.” Then what do you do with it? “Cut the woody outer leaves off until you get just the bulb--like the white part of a scallion. That’s the good stuff.”

I planted a bulb in a weedy bed behind our backyard fence and another in a 15-inch clay pot that sat next to a potted Mexican lime tree on our brick patio. The lemon grass behind the house did just fine until someone dug it up without leaving any money or a shovel or anything, which just shows you how some people are. The one in the clay pot quickly wrapped its roots around the bottom of the pot and lifted itself up, drying out and dying while we were on vacation. When I told Billings what had happened, she said, “Yeah, they’re weird that way.” She explained that I should use half a whiskey barrel next time. But my wife doesn’t like the look of whiskey barrels as planters, so I thought I’d try growing it in a south-facing bed on the side of the house, this time with larger plants. I didn’t get around to planting until this summer, when a friend in San Diego, Su-Mei Yu, mentioned that she grows lemon grass, along with French lavender, in a bed in her front yard. She likes the smell of lemon grass, which is lighter, tangier and more aromatic than lemons, and uses it in her cooking. She said I could have a clump of it, but I’d have to drive down to get it. I told Yu, author of the Thai cookbook “Cracking the Coconut” and owner of the Thai restaurant Saffron in San Diego, about eating three plates of lemon grass asparagus in Germany and how the waiters looked at me. Did she think I was a little crazy?

“Maybe because you were sick, your body was not in balance,” she said. “To the Thai people, lemon grass is used as medicine as well as for cooking. It has a ‘hot’ property.” In Thailand, she explained, they use it for upset stomachs, urinary tract problems and excess perspiration.

After giving me a great recipe for a lemon grass dressing, Yu suggested I call her friend Karen Caplan, the president of Frieda’s, a Los Alamitos-based produce wholesale marketer and distributor. “Karen knows everything about lemon grass.”

Frieda’s is a family-owned business known best for taking a little-known fruit from New Zealand called the Chinese gooseberry, renaming it Kiwifruit, and persuading American growers to plant and market it back in the early ‘60s.

“There was a woman from Bakersfield--I think her name was Sherry,” Caplan said a few days later, when I asked how she first heard of lemon grass. “She and her husband had a little farm there, and she started bringing us lemon grass around 1978, ’79. But we didn’t know what to do with the stuff.”

It took Frieda’s two years to figure it out and start selling the herb to grocery stores. “It was tough,” said Caplan. “We had to convince produce managers that just because it was yellow and a stick, it was still fresh. Now every young hot chef in Southern California uses it in one dish or another.”

Since then I’ve asked several cooks whether they’ve ever had lemon grass steamed with asparagus, once prompting a conversation about the equal rarity of Kaffir limes. They, along with lemon grass, are what give hot-and-sour Thai soup its aromatic smell. But Kaffir lime trees are almost impossible to find.

My lemon grass grows tall in a raised bed on the side of the house, away from the street. My wife once grew iceberg roses there, but, like I told her, roses will grow anywhere. The Kaffir lime tree, which I bought online from Four Winds Growers, is a year old and growing in a clay pot on the patio. As for the asparagus, I have my eye on the bed where my wife grows arugula from seeds she brought back from Italy. I haven’t told her yet, but I’m sure she’ll be fine with my taking out the arugula. I mean, if we’re going to grow our own lemon grass and Kaffir limes, we might as well plant asparagus, right?