Posts Tagged ‘Favourite Ingredients’

25.02.2010

Aloe Vera gel & juice: a favourite ingredient

Hello, dear, dear readers! If you’re seeing this sentence, that means you are still checking here for posts, and I thank you sincerely for that. I have been AWOL again, and I don’t even have a good excuse. I still think about and plan blog posts often, but have been having difficulty transforming those plans into actual, written entries.

In the past few weeks I’ve done a lot of reading, quite a bit of cooking, gone ice-skating twice, and drank a lot of tea. C & I spent Valentine’s Day in the Emergency room at the hospital (we are fine, just couldn’t get into a clinic!) which was interesting, but certainly not fun. We are not vegan (or even vegetarian) but we have been eating lots of vegan & vegetarian meals lately. Out of sheer laziness, we’ve also been eating out a few times a week. Since it has been raining and/or snowing all week here, I haven’t been buying as many groceries as I usually might. Consequently, we’ve just been using up the contents of our cupboards and fridge.

Various aloes: far left is a gel for topical use. The others are edible and delicious.

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04.02.2010

Fresh turmeric tea

Hello lovelies! Today is a wonderful, sunny day where I am. It’s still very cold and very… umm… February, but it is always so nice to see the sun! It does wonders for my mood. I am now reading The Great Gatsby for the first time, and actually finding it much more engrossing than I’d expected, despite the occasional deterioration of the narrative into sexist, racist, and classist comments. I am finding Fitzgerald’s sporadic lack of understanding for these issues surprising, since he is so obviously insightful at other times. Perhaps I’m blaming the words on the characters on Fitzgerald, which isn’t really fair…
Anyway, I guess one becomes bothered by these things most especially when one has just finished reading a book of cultural criticism by bell hooks, who certainly has no tolerance for the intolerance of others. It is still a good read. On to tea!

A few days ago we made a big pot of turmeric-ginger tea. I’ve made turmeric tea before, using powdered, dried turmeric, and even wrote about the tea and it’s health benefits here in this post. This time we used fresh turmeric and fresh ginger, and it was much better than using the dried powder. Using fresh turmeric also means that more of the potent anti-inflammatory properties of the root are preserved, making it even healthier. It’s not difficult to make, either, as long as you are able to find fresh turmeric. It looks much like fresh ginger root, except it has a smaller diameter and is bright orange (especially when cut open).
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19.12.2009

Goya: more bitter than sweet

Though it is a fruit, there is nothing sweet about goya–also known as bitter melon or bitter gourd, it resembles a very bumpy cucumber and is in the same family as pumpkins, squash and gourds. It is traditionally eaten in Japan, China, Vietnam, India and other South and Southeast Asian countries.

this is the Vietnamese variety of bitter gourd

this is the Vietnamese variety of bitter gourd

C. says that while he was in Okinawa (where goya is very popular) people said the reason Okinawans live so long is because they eat lots of pork and lots of goya! I can’t verify this, but it sounds reasonable enough, I suppose. One dish that is very popular there is goya champuru which is a stir-fried dish that features goya and often pork, eggs, onion or garlic and other seasonings.
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