Springtime... when a young girl's fancy turns to... vegetables.
Well -- *blushes* -- his name is Spinach, and he's full of iron, and according to Wikipedia also contains 450% of my daily Vitamin K. And he's totally hot.
All kidding aside, I have fallen in love with this vegetable. I can't get enough of it. I spent all weekend adding it to things: dal, rice, dal rice, lime pickle...
Though it seems that my favorite combination is the one I created myself, using spinach, chickpeas, tomatoes, and various spices (that would be mustard seed, oregano, garlic, and ground chilies, for those of you keeping track -- and today I threw in some asefoetida as well, for it's... um... digestive properties).
It's fascinating how vegetables taste when put together. And how I can almost feel all the vitamins and nutrients rushing into my bloodstream. ^__^
The other thing about spinach is that it seems to be the conduit for exuding smell. That is, when I eat a meal with a lot of spinach, I can smell all the spices and things hovering around my skin afterwards, but when I don't, then I don't. Strange. (Anyone else notice this?)
Perhaps it's all the Vitamin K.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
For Love of Spinach (the Unnamed Dish)
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5 comments:
Blue,
adding asafoetida to dishes containg onion/garlic is counterproductive, because they both have similar "digestive" properties - and the smells sometimes clash and don't play well together...at least IMO. But I use the hing that looks like a bar of pears soap, it is more intense than the powdered version and most of the S.Indian cooking I do doesn't involve onions or garlic, so hing is our digestive of choice here.
As for your theory about spinach being a conduit for spices - might that be because spinach itself doesn't have much flavour left when cooked?
Regards,
Bitterlemons
Bitterlemons -- I read in the appendix to World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking that asefoetida prevents gas/farting. (Which was written, of course, in much more tasteful and elegant language when Ms. Jaffrey explained it.) And... maybe it's the placebo effect, but it seems to be true. At least for me. ^__^
So... with spinach *and* chickpeas, maybe not a bad choice?
Blue,
Yes, that is what I was told about the use of hing, back when I learnt to cook (as a kid) - and that sauteed onions/garlic helped to move things along the digestive tract, and one of their unfortunate side effects was gas. Apparently you cannot neutralise the gas-causing properties of onions with hing. But hey YMMV, and if it works for you, great! :-)
Bitterlemons
Ah, but that's the thing. I never cook with onions. I can't stand them. If someone serves me a dish with onions I will eat them, quite politely (or eat around them, very delicately), but I won't cook with them when I cook for myself.
This causes some problems with my curry sauces, obviously. But I have gotten by well enough by using garlic and then, in place of the onion paste, a small mixture of yogurt and chickpea flour. Just so the sauce isn't all garlic, of course.
I know, I know -- how will a person who doesn't care to eat onions survive in India. Maybe I'll finally learn to like them there. ^__^
Blue,
Sorry, I didn't catch the part about no onions in your spinach dish - so yes, Hing makes perfect sense...:-)
Will you be eating out a lot in India? Food without Onion/Garlic *is* available fairly widely - I think you said you were going to Hyderabad, a city I am only marginally familar with (visited a couple of times as a tourist), so I can't speak to that city in particular, but in many places, "Jain Food" is the euphemism for food made without onions/garlic. Jain Food is made without either, but if you care only about the onions, you can simply ask. People may assume you are very orthodox (Orthodox hindus don't eat either vegetable, the very Orthodox (like some Jains) don't eat root vegetables and some "modern" vegetables either. In Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, places that serve "Brahmin food" (some of them are advertised as Brahmin messes, or Iyengar messes) will also provide food without onion/garlic.
Casual, everyday street food tends to be onion-heavy IME.
Regards,
Bitterlemons
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