imafan26
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Re: Favorite or go to dishes you make?

There are many taro varieties some are grown mainly for the roots, others only for the leaves or stems. Some are dual purpose and both the stems and leaves can be eaten. However, you usually have to choose. If you cut a lot of leaves, the root will not be large. Taro can be grown year round. Luau leaves usually come from taro that is grown in wetland (loi). Eleele roots are used to make poi and the leaves for making laulau or luau (usually chicken and taro leaves cooked in coconut milk. It doesn't look appetizing but tastes good). There is dry land taro that does not need to be in water, although they will grow larger in water. Samoan taro is grown usually for the root. I did have Samoan taro but mine only grew huge leaves. Someone told me the leaves were good to eat but the reason the root stayed small was because I have too much nitrogen and made leaves instead of roots. I have Tahitian taro that is called spinach taro that is grown mostly for the leaves, I have another taro someone gave me that grows over 8 ft and the pink stem is what I would eat. I have araimo, or Japanese taro. It is used in nishime for New Year and for Chinese pork and taro hot pot. I grow the taro in pots, since I had the Samoan and Bun Long (chinese taro) in the ground before and regretted it. They are very hard to dig out and kill once they get established. Araimo can be ready in 5-7 months. The larger taro take between 7-9 months to mature. When the taro is ready to harvest, the tops will start to yellow and die down. If I wait too long to harvest, the mother corm will start to rot and the energy will go to the keiki instead. To get larger taro later, the keiki will need to be transplanted to where they will not be so crowded. This is how I went from one pot of araimo to three.

It takes a lot of luau leaves to make anything and it requires 45-90 minutes cooking to get rid of the oxalic acid crystals, so it usually is not worth doing unless I do a lot. The leaves are usually sold in the market in large bags or from the farm in large burlap bags. It needs to be cooked down until it looks like overcooked spinach. If it is not cooked enough the oxalic crystals will make your throat itchy. It is also why some taro are only used for their roots and not the leaves. Some varieties have more oxalic acid then others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpXCY2i9-Jc

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tomf
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I have been going to Pintrest and so much of it is about food and recipes. I hope it is ok for me to share this here.

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digitS'
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Well, if you got away with it, Tom :wink: :

Many home cooks like to share their creative efforts. Some of them are professionally trained and just want to work at home in their own kitchens. Many parents feel the need to be at home for child care but do not want to cut themselves off from something they really care about, creatively preparing food. These people have blogs.

What about a search engine specifically for food blogs? You will see one I have used if you do a Google search for "food blog aggregator" - leave the parenthesis around those words. A page or two of results will give you a good guide or two. What's great about several of them is that you can be guided to a recipe first by the name of a dish or an ingredient then by a photo from the blog ... "Oh, that looks good!"

By the way ;), it seems to me that good cooks are often good photographers ;).

Steve

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I'm almost 100 % Coonass so my favorite, go-to dishes are what I grew up on. Gumbos of any sort, jambalaya, ettouffee', sauce piquants, pork fixed dozens of ways, seafood of all kinds from mollusks, shellfish, fresh and salt water varieties of game fish.

I could do this for days really. However, my cooking skills cover many different cuisines and my second favorite is Italian since N.O. has a very large Italian population and I find that food to be very rich and tasty. Meatballs, Italian sausage in a rich red gravy, lasagna, fettuccini, bruscialoni, etc. are all favorites. Something about pasta, rich cream sauces, red gravies, and the cheeses just make the mouth water thinking about it.

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rainbowgardener
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Well, I have to say I am back to dieting. That means my "go-to" dishes are now veggie salads and veggie stir fries, with just a little bit of olive oil. Also fruit salad, tofu, other forms of lean protein.

No more bread (have not had a slice of bread for two months), rice, pasta, potatoes .....

About to go make a tomato, white bean, and kale soup!!

HoneyBerry
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Not much time for cooking so I try to make things that are quick but healthy. I bought an InstantPot and love it. I make Near East brand boxed Spanish Rice and jazz it up with fresh tomatoes and onions and whatever else I can think of. It turns out pretty good.
The last time I made something with a real recipe was quite a while ago when I made an Indian dish that took forever but turned out fantastic. I wish I had more time to cook like that. Indian recipes are my favorite.

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applestar
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How do you NOT have carbohydrates in your diet? I don’t need processed white flour or grain, but I can’t go without whole grain something for more than 3 days. I crave it. Trying to keep going using white rice, bread or pasta isn’t enough. Same for potatoes but I think that might be something else... maybe vitamins, since I can eat fruits instead and am satisfied.

The “craving” could be interpreted as some kind of addiction, though. Is that how carbos are being interpreted?

I was out of brown rice for 2 weeks and when we finally replenished it and made some, the aroma of cooking brown rice alone made my mouth water. I ate brown rice for all three meals that day and finished the pot. haha

...don’t you need grains to balance the legumes, or are you getting plenty of protein from eggs now?

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KeyWee
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I agree with you, apple ~ carbs are a favorite of mine and I try to choose wisely (grains, beans, etc.). It's where I draw all my energy (I have plenty ~ only need one cup of coffee in the morning).
I really feel that dietary needs (and craving) are entirely singular and what works for one will not be the law for all. It all boils down to mindfulness ~ THINK about what you eat. Food is fuel, not an obsession. Of course, deliciousness is a wonderful thing. Fortunately for me, I will truly eat almost anything (in moderation).
My only BIG crave is grapes and more grapes ~ it's a wonder I don't explode.

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digitS'
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Cravings may also have to do with hunger, of course :wink: .

Broccoli is a fairly nutritionally rich vegetable. No one is suggesting that we try to live on it but let's say that all the vegetables in one's diet have about the same number of calories as broccoli.

Raw broccoli has 20 calories per cup and weighs 71 grams, or .28 calorie per gram.

Cooked broccoli has 54 calories per cup and weighs 156 grams, or .35 calorie per gram.

Adults eat about 1800 grams of food each day. That would be about

500 calories of raw veggies (broccoli standard :wink: )
630 calories of cooked veggies.

If we need 2000 calories each day to maintain our weight, we could double the amount that we eat and still lose weight ... and continue long enough ... starve ..!

Okay, that is all somewhat silly but it suggests the value of vegetables in our diets to maintain or lose weight. Required calories may vary by individuals but broccoli would mostly all be about the same.

digitS'

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BirdLover,

Since you noted that Indian recipe are your favorite, I thought that I'd chime in here and tell you how fast they can be to make! Friends who come over to eat Indian, Thai, and other Asian dishes at my house often make comments about how fast these things are to make from scratch, esp. when they look at many of the recipes, which often consist of 20 or more ingredients! Often I will put rice on to cook in the rice cooker, then start the rest, and we'll have to wait for the rice to finish the last few minutes.

With any cuisines, it is necessary to have all of the the ingredients, but organization is the main key to have them done quickly. With Indian, most of the seasonings are dry, with Chinese, much of it is liquid, paste, or fermented vegetables, and SE Asian, sort of a fusion, though closer to the Chinese. The dry spices are a little quicker to measure out, and organize for cooking. Here's one of the boxes I keep my main spices in; usually I don't need another from the other boxes, except maybe the one with the spice mixes.
ImageDSCF0841_zps475194ad by pepperhead212, on Flickr

Here's how I measure out the spices, to ready them for a dish. This is more than what is in most, as it is one of those spice mixes - sambar masala - which makes it easy to add all of this to a dish quickly! All of these spices are toasted, then ground up.
ImageIMG_20180823_203745058 by pepperhead212, on Flickr

Usually, I only have 3 or 4 of these cups for each recipe, often with more than one ingredient in them, as I combine all of the ingredients added at the same time in one cup. After a while you know which ones go together.

About 5 years ago I went on my "Indian Food kick" - something I have done with other cuisines, when wanting to learn all I could about them, and find the best brands and types of things, though with Indian, it's not so much brands, unless you are buying pre-made masalas, and similar things, which I don't recommend. The reason I never liked Indian food previously, was all of the untoasted spices used, giving a lot of the food a "raw cinnamon" flavor. I tested out all of the dals , and other legumes, and pretty much got off of white rice (I used to buy Jasmine rice in 25 lb bags, just for myself!), without thinking about it. while they do use a lot of white rice, I was mostly trying other things, and lost almost 50 lbs, without even trying! Now, I make a lot of Indian dishes, using various lentils, as well as whole grains - millet, quinoa, spelt, barley, and others. Not traditional, but it turns out good, and the Instant Pot makes those things quick to cook. Often they are started with an onion, and maybe some garlic, then the dal and grains added, with the water, plus maybe one of those spice mixes, cooked however long that takes, then the tadka is made, the term "tempering" is often used for this step - some mustard seeds fried in some oil, then cumin, sometimes some urad dal, and some other spices added, along with some whole chilis, and some curry leaves last, fried 'til crisp - all this takes less than a minute usually, again, with all of the ingredients lined up to add - then this is added to the dish, and simmered a few minutes. Took me longer to type this than a standard dish like this takes to cook!

A Thai curry is also something fast to make...as long as the curry paste is made in advance - something I always have frozen.

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rainbowgardener
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applestar wrote:How do you NOT have carbohydrates in your diet? I don’t need processed white flour or grain, but I can’t go without whole grain something for more than 3 days. I crave it. Trying to keep going using white rice, bread or pasta isn’t enough. Same for potatoes but I think that might be something else... maybe vitamins, since I can eat fruits instead and am satisfied.

The “craving” could be interpreted as some kind of addiction, though. Is that how carbos are being interpreted?

I was out of brown rice for 2 weeks and when we finally replenished it and made some, the aroma of cooking brown rice alone made my mouth water. I ate brown rice for all three meals that day and finished the pot. haha

...don’t you need grains to balance the legumes, or are you getting plenty of protein from eggs now?
I used to eat lots of 17 grain bread with all the nuts and seeds in it and I really miss my good bread. Bread and cheese, maybe with avocado, was my standard lunch/ snack when I couldn't think of anything else. It's comfort food for me. I do eat eggs, fat free cottage cheese and fat free yoghurt, and a little bit of cheese. I was eating a lot of cheese and I have cut that WAY down, but still eat a little (not fat free, because I don't think fat free cheese is worth eating!) I don't miss the rice and noodles as much and have gotten used to eating my veggies with tofu instead of rice or noodles. My garden will soon be giving me more potatoes and I love the garden fresh potatoes. I may have to sneak a little bit in. :)

Over all I feel good. The diet plan says "unlimited lean protein," for your meals, which makes it not hard to stick to, because not hungry. I am eating lots of fruits and veggies. I really think I have just been eating wrong all these years. Way too much carbs.

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Thanks Dave aka pepperhead212. You gave me such good ideas. I see that being organized ahead of time makes a big difference. I need to work on that. My pantry definately needs some help. I like the way you organize in boxes and little cups, so that everything is ready to go. I understand that white rice is full of carbs so it makes sense that cutting back would be a health benefit in terms of weight loss. I love lentil soup and dahl so I am going to be experimenting with recipes for these foods. I am lucky to have a nice health food store nearby with bulk foods that include a good variety of lentils and spices. There is a huge walk in cooler for the bulk items. Can you believe that? They are particular and everything is organic and very fresh. I like red lentils for their softness. I don't like it when lentils are undercooked. I have been collecting Indian recipes for when I start cooking more. I didn't have a stove at all for a while so I wasn't doing any cooking at all. I just bought the Instant Pot so now I can start cooking again. I did some research a while back on Indian cooking. The Indian people experimented for many years to come up with the perfect spice combinations for vegetarian food.
I used to often buy the best lentil soup and garlic naan at an Indian restaurant over by the college. I tell you, it was the best. The owner was super friendly, made customers feel so welcome. He passed away not to long ago and the restaurant closed.
So now I need to do my own Indian cooking. I hope to do more Indian cooking this Winter now that I have my Instant Pot. It is such a great tool. I think I don't even need to buy another big stove, so the kitchen has more space.
I will find the recipes that I have collected over the years and post some of them here.
Last edited by HoneyBerry on Sun Sep 16, 2018 12:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

HoneyBerry
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I have a few good looking Thai cookbooks that I picked up at garage sale. I want to try some of the curry recipes. Thai is another favorite of mine.

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BirdLover wrote:I have a few good looking Thai cookbooks that I picked up at garage sale. I want to try some of the curry recipes. Thai is another favorite of mine.
I have quite a few different cookbooks and my all-time favorite is one called "Talk About Good" that is chock full of Louisiana based cooking with many of the recipes coming from regular folks just cooking away in their home kitchens for family and friends. There are many Cajun/Creole recipes that are indigenous to our area and culture.

If you want to learn how to make a good gumbo, ettoufee', sauce piquant, jambalaya, etc., it may be worth looking into.

There are now 2 books "Talk About Good" and "Talk About Good 2".

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Yes, I would love to try making gumbo, cajun & creole. I have never had anything like that before.

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Gumbo and cajun were some of the earliest "unusual" cuisines I dabbled in, back in the 70s, when starting out my obsession with cooking. I have always leaned toward the spicy, and highly flavored foods!

What are those books you have, BirdLover? I got on my Thai food kick back in the 90s, and at that time, I had two friends still living in the area that also got hooked on it, and wanted to learn all they could about it. We tested all of the fish sauces, thick soy sauce, sweet soy sauce, shrimp pastes, and a few other bottled Thai ingredients we could get at the Asian market, and also learned, early on, that store-bought curry paste just didn't hold a candle to the home-made (as with many things). With the SE Asian ingredients, as well as Chinese ingredients, the flavor of the ingredients can vary greatly between brands; with Indian, not so much, as long as you are getting fresh spices. Do you have any Asian markets near you, or would you be buying many of the things online?

I'm a cookbook junkie, and have a bunch of Thai and SE Asian CBs. Here are some of my favorites:

Thai Cooking - Jennifer Brennen. My first Thai CB, and one of the first available.
True Thai - Victor Sodsook. Some of the best curry paste recipes I've found, and also a lot of other good recipes.
Real Thai and Real Vegetarian Thai - Nancie McDermott . Lots of good recipes in both, and the first one has a simplified version of Nam Prik Pao, which I simplified even more, and always have it in my fridge! Can't tell you how many batches I've made, or how many varieties of peppers I've tested in it! She has a much newer book out, and a reply to it said that it was a reprint of Real Thai, but I haven't seen it.
Thai Food - David Thompson. The Thai food bible, though it has a lot of unusual ingredients, even for a Thai CB!
Dancing Shrimp - Kasma Loha-unchit. Great CB, but only seafood.
Cracking the Coconut - Su-Mei Yu. Great CB, with a lot of basic Thai info, as well as the recipes.

Books of mixed SE Asian cuisines:

Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet - Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. Fantastic book about the foods of all the countries along the Mekong river. They also authored Mangoes and Curry Leaves, a book about Indian foods, and Seductions in Rice, from all over the world.
SE Asian Flavors - Rober Danhi. Great book, with recipes from Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, with a very good intro chapter, showing and describing the ingredients used in the regions.
Cradle of Flavor - Robert Oseland - Fantastic book, with great recipes from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Calls for some unusual ingredients, and this was the book that got me to start growing curry leaves, to use in the Malaysian food, not Indian.

Just think, these are just my favorites!

My fewer favorite Indian CBs I'll post tomorrow (actually, today!) - I have to get up for therapy early!

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Dave aka pepperhead212 wrote: What are those books you have, BirdLover?

One of my Thai cookbooks is on your last post: "Real Thai - The Best of Thailand's Regional Cooking" by Nancie McDermott. It is a paperbook. I have 2 more at home but I'm not at home right now so I will post the titles later. I love spicy just like you do. I bought some Thai chile oil and use it quite often, on almost everything. It sure kicks up the flavor. That is a compromise for when I don't have time to really cook Thai food.
I have an old hippie cookbook "The El Molino Cookbook". I have been looking at it lately, trying to decide if I should keep it or not. It has some good info in there. Did you know that wild rice is a seed rather than a true rice? I didn't know that until the other day. That must be why it tastes and cooks up differently than what I expect from rice.
Last edited by HoneyBerry on Mon Sep 17, 2018 11:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

HoneyBerry
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Dave wrote: "Do you have any Asian markets near you, or would you be buying many of the things online?"
I'm sure there are some Asian markets around but I haven't tried them out. I find my best ingredients at the health food store. They are particular and the produce is the best in the area, high quality and very fresh. I am particular about food quality so I fit in there. It seems like we have a food crisis going on with all the fast food and so many donuts and cookies at work etc. I long for home cooked healthy food.

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HoneyBerry,

Here's a site that may interest you - while I'm not vegetarian, many, if not most, of the Indian foods I make are vegetarian, and this site has a lot of great recipes. The blog is well set up, with cross indexing, showing things in collections, as you'll see in this link that I post, and you can get ideas for unusual ingredients, like I did, with those bottle gourds I grew.
https://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/recipes/collections/

Here are those favorite Indian CBs of mine, that I said that I'd post. A couple of the first few I got didn't do it for me (one by the best selling Indian CB author in the US at the time), as they called for simply store-bought garam masala, and other spice mixes, or mixing them with raw spices. The first two books have the spices toasted in most of the masalas, making these is when I started to like this food!

660 Curries - RaghavanIyer. If I had to pick a favorite, this is it. Some of my favorite masalas, and some of them use the method of coating the whole spices with a tsp or so of oil, then toasting them, which gives a different and delicious flavor than doing it dry. Good info on all of the ingredients, and a great chapter on the legumes. Another cookbook junkie friend showed me this, when I visited him on a vacation, and I had taken the next one to show him!

How To Cook Indian - Sanjeev Kapoor. Great CB, though some unusual ingredients in many recipes, even for Indian food! This is the first Indian CB I had seen that had masalas in which most of the spices were toasted, thus taking out that raw cinnamon and clove flavor. I can't stand it when Indian (or any other) dishes taste like somebody sprinkled pumpkin pie spice on them!

1,000 Indian Recipes - Neelan Batra. The same friend who showed me 660 Curries, told me about this one. I usually don't like those "1,000 .......Recipes" books, but this one is really good! A lot of recipes from the southern regions, and she describes them well. A lot of recipes for fermented pickle dishes. Good recipes for the masalas, though I don't like the fact that she uses powdered spices in most of them - this can burn easily. I just sub whole ones, using a scale, so no big deal.

Something that I noticed when thinking about all of these books, the Thai and Indian, is that they either don't have any pictures, or just a few. Seems that my favorites have never been those books in which more than half of the pages are photos of the finished dishes

Something that you might want to look into, since you said that you like red lentils (masoor dal), is mung dal, which are split and hulled (usually hulled, though some are split, but still have the hulls) mung beans, which are small, yellow lentils. These cook up even faster, and softer than red lentils. So if you see a recipe for mung dal, you can also use red lentils in it - both cook up to a mush in 20-25 min. or so.

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You guys are making me so hungry.OOPs! I just stepped on my cat in the dark.
Since I am joining late. I don't mind a low carb diet too much. It has more flavor than calorie restricting or eating "diet" food. I don't miss pasta or potatoes because I don't eat that much of it anyway. I don't even miss rice that much. I do miss fruit though.
I found it hard on a low carb diet to make any kind of complex meal and keep the carbs down. Soups, stews, gravies all ticked up the carb count over my limit. In the end it was simpler to just eat more simply. I usually grill or bake my main protein and either eat a salad up to 4 cups a day, or 1/2 cup per serving of steamed, or nuked vegetable. Single veggie is much easier to calculate. Soups and gravies are kinda out. Since I don't like oil and vinegar dressings, I usually take a carb hit on the dressings. It is a lot easier this way than trying to calculate the carbs in a stew, braised dish, or casserole. It does get boring for me since I end up in a routine of bacon and eggs for breakfast, a salad for lunch and a protein and nuked vegetable for dinner. Once in a while I will go off this diet and indulge in carbs like some sweet bread which I really love and spaghetti which I miss, but a little fix is all I need to get over it and back on the keto diet again. Unfortunately,this means I never really get past stage 1.

As for Thai food. The first time I was introduced to it was from the Thai Kitchen. and my cookbook is Keo's Thai Cuisine. There was only one market in town to get the essential ingredients like kaffir lime leaves and kha. Kha can be replaced by regular ginger, even though the taste is a little different but the Kaffir lime leaves don't have good substitutes. I could only make two recipes in the book because of that. Then I started growing my own kaffir lime trees, chili pepper, basil, lemon grass, and ginger. I stocked coconut milk in the pantry and I did get thai curry paste both red and yellow (mainly because I did not have a mortar and pestle to make it and it was really too much work for the amount that I would be able to use. Then, I could have Thai food anytime and pick most of the herbs and basil from my yard. Now, basil limits me because of basil downy mildew.

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Taking lots of notes :()

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Imafan26, Have you considered growing basil and Thai basil indoors? I assume that you have AC on almost all the time there (I would! lol), and I figure that would keep the mildew off. Plus, I only need one plant each in the off season, they grow so vigorously in a small, DW hydro system. I often have to trim them back, and throw it away, when I don't need it, they grow so fast. If you grew it 365 days indoors, it slows after 6 months - one time I left them in just to see, and eventually removed them after 8 months. Maybe root some new ones at about 5 months. Amazing how long they grow without bolting, using this method!

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pepperhead212: I can't seem to find the other 2 Thai recipe books. I am remodeling, so sometimes I can't find things that I don't use daily. They are hardback books, good ones. I will post the titles as soon as I find them.

Lately, I have been wanting to try some Persian recipes. My coworker with a Persian family brought in some cake that his wife made. It was really good. It was made using semolina flour and had rose petals sprinkled on top. It wasn't too sweet, just right, and had a dense texture like pound cake. I enjoyed it so much. She liked my compliments and gave me a package of rose petals. I am thinking about making some rose petal tea. I have never had that before, so it will be fun. I have been looking at Persian recipes online and am excited about trying some of them. Some of the recipes have that expensive spice saffron. I did a little research on saffron and learned that it is expensive because it is harvested tediously by hand. So growing this spice at home is not a bad idea. It would be fun to try growing saffron sometime.

HoneyBerry
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All the links and recommendations are much appreciated. I am going to do some browsing. I think I will try out the mung dal first. All this discussion got me going and I ended up making some lentil soup on Sunday in my Instant Pot using brown lentils that were in my pantry. It turned out pretty good.
The health food store that I shop at has a good variety of lentils. I usually buy the red ones when they are on sale. I think that they do have the yellow ones too. I just haven't tried them yet.

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HoneyBerry, Saffron is a delicious spice - a delicate flavor, so putting it in a curry powder, which I have seen done, is a waste, IMO. I bought an ounce of it many years ago, at about half the price it was everywhere else, and most of it is still in my freezer. I just take a small amount (maybe a tb) out at a time, and refill the small jar when I need to.

There are 3 kinds of yellow lentils - moong dal, toor dal, and channa dal - plus the yellow split peas, which used to be (when I was growing up, and lentils were unheard of!) a pea that totally dissolved when cooked up. However, now some supermarket yellow split peas are actually channa dal, and say so right on the package. And, if you like your lentils soft, and broken down in a dish, you don't want those channa dal. However, I use them all the time in salads - even when cooked for 45 min., they remain intact, and firm up even more when chilled. They are actually a type of chickpea, which is the reason they remain firm for so long. Many years ago, before I knew there were so many lentils, I found a recipe for a lentil salad that I make many times every summer, but I had to be careful cooking the lentils, an start testing them at about 16 min., to get firm ones. About that time a Pakistani fellow opened a store on my route, and when I saw all of those lentils in there I asked him if there were any that would stay firm, telling him about the salad. He went right to the channa dal, saying "This is what you want!" He showed me all of the other lentils, and told me how they cook up, and what they are used for, and that was my start with lentils! He had a lot of spices and such in there, but that was before I got into the Indian food.

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You sure were lucky to meet that guy about the lentils. Lentils are such a perfect food.
Actually, I do like firm lentils too. It's just that some of the to-go dishes that I used to buy at the deli were inconsistent. Lentil patties with a tasty sauce. They were excellent when the lentils were cooked right. But sometimes the lentils were undercooked and I would be disappointed. I stopped buying them altogether because I couldn't tell ahead of time what I was getting.
I often do choose the bulk red lentils but I also like to try new things so if, for example, I haven't tried the brown lentils with the cool sounding name that are on sale I will choose those. If I do the cooking myself I am comfortable with any lentil because I can control the doneness. My last lentil purchase was brown lentils and they had a cool sounding name but I don't recall what it was. Tomorrow I will check out the yellow varieties and see what my choices are.
Thank you for everything. You have helped me alot. I made some lentil soup today with brown lentils but no spices. It's more like veggie soup with lentils. I am going to get my spices better organised and try some new recipes, Indian to start with.

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rainbowgardener
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re: It would be fun to try growing saffron sometime.

Saffron is the little stamens from certain crocus flowers. You can grow them (I think applestar has grown and harvested some), but each flower has three little strands, so you have to have pretty many flowers ....

I agree that you wouldn't want to waste saffron in a dish with lots of other flavors that will drown it out. Sometimes I think saffron was used more for color, but if you want that use some turmeric instead.

I still have my copy of "Vegetarian Epicure" cook book from 1972 (!) and I still love it. It has a recipe for a version of gulab jamun, a well known Indian sweet. They are little cakes that you soak in a sugar syrup flavored with rosewater, cardamom, and saffron. The syrup is heavenly... The same cookbook has a whole section on curried vegetables. It is excellent. You will not find any curry powder in it. Authentic curries are made with a whole combination of spices -- coriander, cardamom, turmeric, ginger, etc that can't be replicated by throwing in curry powder. So curried veggies, served with lots of condiments , with the gulab jamuns for desert is one of my go-to company dinners.

imafan26
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I can grow holy basil or tulsi, I have vana, kaphrao, and another basil that I cannot remember the name of. Holy basil and african basils do not get downy mildew, so I can grow them. Their flavor is much hotter. Downy mildew is a type of water mold and not really a true fungus and the spores are in the air. I have grown basil in the shade house and it lasts a little longer, but eventually it will get downy mildew there as well. I live in a wet part of the island and basil has a better chance of staying healthy in a drier environment. I can use holy basil and I can get some good leaves from Siam queen basil longer since the disease takes a little longer to progress. African Blue fil actually has a pleasant vanilla aftertaste. Kaphrao is hot basil and a bit more spicy, but is actually the type Thai's prefer.

The weather here is usually nice most of the time. I live at a higher elevation so I am 5-9 degrees cooler than at sea level. It does rain here more than on the Leeward side of the island so the humidity is higher anywhere from a low of 69% all the way up to 100% when it is raining. I am used to 78-80 degrees as long as the trade winds are blowing. It is only uncomfortable when the temperature is above 88 and we have Kona weather where the winds come from the south bringing the vog and no trade winds. Our houses are designed to leak. I have a lot of jealousie windows which provide 100% ventilation and with the front bank of windows, the side windows and the patio door open with the ceiling fan going and pulling in air from the front windows and exiting out the back door, it is very comfortable on most days. I also have tile floors and area rugs so the floor is also cool. In fact in the cooler months the tiles can be downright cold and I wear socks then. I do have a couple of air conditioners, but I rarely use them. The electric bill is prohibitive. The air conditioners are older and not energy efficient. I have not turned one of them on for over 10 years. I turned the smaller one on a couple of months ago. It is a younger air con that replaced the 24 year old frigidaire I had. It is maybe 6-8 years old. The older one is from 1992 so I would be very surprised if it still works. If the temperature goes below 70, I am actually quite cold and I will actually pile on another comforter, sweats, and sleep with a heating pad. On the hottest days, I usually go to the mall or the movies during the hottest part of the day. I can't go swimming anymore because I have a bad rotator cuff.

I don't grow any plants indoors. I don't really know about these cats, but my previous cat would dig out a plant kept in the house overnight, so I just don't bring plants any farther than the lanai.

I tried not growing basil for a couple of years to see if the spore count would diminish. As soon as the basil at Walmart less than a mile away starts getting sick, within a couple of weeks, I have to throw out my basil because of downy mildew. Most of the problem seems to be with the leaf shape. Most of the breeding has been to try to change the shape of the leaf, but the flavor also changes. Eleanor was a cross between thai basil and sweet basil. it is not immune to downy and it does not taste very good. Most of the breeding is traditional not GMO so it will be a long wait for a resistant basil that does not change the taste. It has already been over 10 years. The only other way to control the disease is planting in the drier months and regular sprays. Most of the products registered for basil is not even available to homeowners and much be applied regularly. People continue to buy the sick plants not knowing they are infected and spread the spores around.

HoneyBerry
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Gulab jamun sounds good and certainly would be fun to make. Myself, I prefer bittter and tart flavors over sweet. I sometimes wonder why people are divided in this way. I got in trouble when I was a kid for not wanting any of the sweet candies that were offered to me. My Dad thought that it was rude to refuse them. I really didn't get it at the time. I just thought that adults were weird and that was the real reason why I got yelled at. I didn't even want raspberries and ice cream if the raspberries had sugar on them. I prefer fruit without added sugar. It seems that more people prefer sweet tastes, especially kids, so I guess I am the odd one. I was thrilled to learn later that Chinese medicine doctors divide people this way and that there are others like me. I am a bitter-tart type rather than a sweet type.
I actually did try saffron once. I found it to be rather mild and it didn't seem to be worth the money that I paid for it. I love the color. I guess that I can live without saffron but I would probably use it for fun if it wasn't so expensive.

HoneyBerry
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pepperhead-Dave (are you still following this?)
Listed below are the lentil and dal options that I have at the local health food store. Moong Dal and Chana Dal are more expensive than the bulk lentils. I have tried the Spanish Pardina Brown Lentils and the Red Lentils. Both are good choices. I bought some red lentils today because they are on sale.
I am going to wait for the Moong Dal and Chana Dal to go on sale and then try them.
Today I bought some fresh tumeric. I still need to stock up on spices. One step at a time.
I want to research "zero-tannin" to see what that's about.

BULK:
organic mung bean california grown $2.89/pound
sunrise red zero-tannin lentils $2.05/pound
spanish pardina brown lentils $1.99/pound
organic red lentils split $2.65/pound regular price $2.09/ pound sale price

PACKAGED:
moong dal trikona $7.69 24 ounce package ($5.13/ pound)
chana dal trikona $7.19 24 ounce package ($4.79/ pound)

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applestar
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Are you going to try growing the turmeric? Or did you mean powdered? (Sorry about jumping in OT )

HoneyBerry
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It is fresh tumeric. For now, I'm just going to experiment with it in recipes. I might try to grow it sometime. I need to first do some research. It is a good one, up there with ginger, in my opinion.

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applestar
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HoneyBerry
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Thank you for the link Applestar. A great thread on growing tumeric. I think I would need a greenhouse to grow tumeric or ginger. They are so tropical.
I might build a small greenhouse. I've been considering that for a while.

pepperhead212
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Yes, still following HoneyBerry!

Those packaged lentils are expensive! Some of the others aren't too bad, for a health food store. The ones I get in Indian stores are about half that price, but that is buying 8 lb bags, and they aren't organic.

Those "zero-tannin" lentils, from what I remember, are bred to get a thinner seed coat, as well as one that stores better - some of the compounds that get rancid are not there. When you read some of the info about it, it sounds like GMO food, but it's not - they are just trying to breed certain recessive genes into them, so that they will stay. Here is one link you may find helpful; though it eventually gets complicated, in the beginning it tells the general reasoning behind it all:
https://hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceed ... 2-279.html

I gave up trying to grow turmeric and galangal. The season is just way too long, thus it has to be done in a pot, , and I still didn't get enough to make it worth it; I can get it locally now, so I grow other things I use more. Malaysian cooking uses a lot of fresh turmeric, and this was the cuisine that got me growing curry leaves! It was only later, that I started up on Indian, figuring that I had so much of those leaves, I had to do something with them! lol

Your mention of your preference for sour and bitter made me remember when I was first dabbling in the Indian cooking, and was surprised at all of the dishes that were sour or bitter, with little sweet. In Chinese, and SE Asian, there was always a generous amount of sweet, to balance it, but it wasn't really missed here - maybe it was something to do with the spices. And there are a number of sour ingredients - amchur (powdered green mango), kokum, dried pomegranate seeds, and tamarind. I have never been a fan of a strong vinegar flavor in dishes - the reason that I am not crazy about the hot cuisine of the Philippines. I have often used tamarind to increase the sour in something, to avoid adding more vinegar.

Today I did something that I always do about when fall gets here - I re-stocked my ground spices, since this is the time of year I use them more, and many haven't been touched for months. Most of my spices are whole, but I always have a few ground ones, though I only keep a smaller amount of most of them. Cinnamon, cloves, ginger, allspice, and countless peppers and paprikas. Most I have in vacuum packs in a box in the freezer, which I took out last night, to come to room temp., and I just refill the small jars, and re-seal the bags, with the Foodsaver. The spices keep forever this way, and it's amazing how much more aromatic they are, when I refill them! I also dumped out the last tsp or so of several masalas, and made new batches - the ones I use all the time, and have made recently, are still there, but the rest were either replaced, or I won't be making them again.

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rainbowgardener
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HoneyBerry wrote:Thank you for the link Applestar. A great thread on growing tumeric. I think I would need a greenhouse to grow tumeric or ginger. They are so tropical.
I might build a small greenhouse. I've been considering that for a while.
Alternatively, you can just bring them in for the winter.

HoneyBerry
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Thank you Rainbow. That is a good idea.

There is an Indian store not too far away from where I live. I used to go there to buy Vicco toothepaste. They have a variety of boxed Indian convenience meals. The spices are all ready to go, you just add a few things. I was tempted to try them but I haven't because I can't read the instructions on the packages. I prefer cooking from scratch anyway. The store owner wears a turban and speaks with a strong Indian accent. He talked me into buying some tumeric face cream and some incense. He said that tumeric is very good for the skin. Anti-inflammatory tumeric is healthy in many ways.
Yesterday I bought a jar of Mesa de Vida Creole cooking sauce at the health food store. I will use it to make gumbo or jambalaya sometime. Ingredients: onions, green bell pepper, tomato paste, vinegar, celery, garlic, parsley, lemon juice, spices. The spices are not listed individually.

HoneyBerry
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pepperhead212 wrote:
"Most of my spices are whole, but I always have a few ground ones, though I only keep a smaller amount of most of them. Cinnamon, cloves, ginger, allspice, and countless peppers and paprikas. Most I have in vacuum packs in a box in the freezer, which I took out last night, to come to room temp., and I just refill the small jars, and re-seal the bags, with the Foodsaver."

I like this idea. I have a small freezer that I use alot. I don't have a Foodsaver. I have a mortar & pestel somewhere, for whole spices. That's about as fresh as you can get with spices.

That word fresh reminded me of this woman that I know. She runs the smoothie stand at the farmer's market.
Sometimes she sets up her smoothie table outside right in the middle of a garden. I got a kick out of that. Not sure how she washes the produces. Hose perhaps.



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