Wild Rice and Asparagus Salad

Wild rice, whether cultivated or actually harvested from the wild, has a vigorous, earthy taste, and in a salad it would be well matched with thin stalks of wild asparagus. Lacking that, here is a recipe using cultivated asparagus. This particular rice salad is seasoned with both light and dark sesame oil, orange peel, and ginger; the asparagus stalks are cut into small rounds and dispersed among the grains of rice.

Rice salads are best when the dressing is mixed with warm grains; t