After a tasty Indian lunch last weekend, we popped over to the Indian market conveniently located next door. I didn't know exactly what to expect, having never been to one before. We went in search of prepared/frozen Indian vegetable dishes, on recommendation from the parental units. But what else would I see? Fresh goat meat? Curry in bulk?
As soon as I walked in, I was in an Indian market half frenzy/half trance. It was awesome. Big barrels with new and interesting dry beans and grains. Indiscernible flavors of cookies with adorable smiling Indian children on the box. Exotic soda flavors. A huge display of incense (that I embarrassingly mistook for candy. brightly colored boxes!) And my personal playground: the produce section. I loved walking up and down the aisles examining all of these edible plants that I had never seen before. The shapes and colors were fantastic. Roots, legumes, leaves, and fruits... I had no idea how any of them tasted. How are they prepared? Had I ever eaten it before without knowing what it looked like in it's raw, whole form? I was so curious.
I selected a vegetable medley that spoke to me. The ones with most interesting skins and textures and colors. There were literally dozens I wanted to try... every single one! But I reined myself in, leaving with a harvest of six: toori, karela, tindori, white muli, parval and chayot.
The next day, I googled each one. All are technically fruit, save for the white muli which is a root. (though chayot and toori are "gourds" which still falls into the fruit classification.)
Clockwise from top center: white muli, karela, chayot, parval, tindori, toori.
Toori. Also known as the ridged gourd, this fruit is popular in African, Arabic, and Asian lands, and looks a lot like the offspring of a zucchini and a starfruit. The skin was very thick and rough, and so I used a peeler to take off the most rigid part: the ridges themselves. I left the balance of the skin on. Raw, it tasted like a mealy zucchini.
Karela. Also known as bitter melon. This was the most interesting to examine, as it looked like a warted up pod or freeze-dried sea creature. My google research yielded two interesting factoids: 1. It's touted in ayurvedic cooking/medicine and supposedly works wonders for controlling blood sugar for diabetics, is known to balance various skin ailments such as acne and psoriasis, as well as being regarded as an antiviral, anticancer, antimalarial, and even antiscabies. What can't this plant do?! 2. I also learned that if you cut into a karela and eat the red seeds, this is anecdotally linked "Brain Fever", which is Victorian-era speak for meningitis or other viral infections that affect the brain. These two factoids contradict each other, I know. I cut my karela open and found... red seeds indeed. Oh well. Brain fever here I come. Raw, this thing tasted like ass. Bitter ass. Nothing melon-y about it.
White Muli. This big guy is the parsnip's secret twin, in terms of looks. Would it taste like one too? Nope. It's the Danny Devito of twins, tasting like a biting and spicy radish over a verdant and earthy parsnip.
Chayot. It looked a little like a mango or other tropically delcious fruit. It's bright chartreuse hue was appealing, but it's form odd. At the bottom there was a navel that looked like a toothless old man pursing a big lip-less mouth. Inside, there was one large seed, and I found the cut form to be much more aesthetically pleasing than the whole. Raw, it tasted incredibly bland. Just the general flavor of plant.
I sliced, diced and chopped each one and then sprinkled with salt. I then sauteed with olive oil, salt, pepper, a little chili powder, red pepper, and turmeric. Basic spices to enhance flavor, but not overpower.
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| Cooked veggies, nom nom |
Results: Cooked, the chayote was the tastiest of the group, now having a fresh and easy flavor. White muli retained it's radish-like flavor and now was just cooked radish. Parval, toori and tindori were still bad zucchinis, with parval as a slight favorite due to it's crisp texture. Karela was just as unpalatable cooked as it was raw, and I spit it out each time I tried to consume it. It was great fun to experiment with these foreign fruits and vegetables, and to imagine how second-nature the preparation of these items are to so many millions of women in the world. And to me, they are an exotic kitchen adventure. Perhaps our most banal of produce staples, like mushrooms or celery or carrots, are alien plants to many peoples of the world? They eat these dirty, odorous fungi that is grown in horse manure! And these weird green stalks that taste kind of bitter, with chewy strings inside! And then there are these beautifully orange spikes...
Status: SUCCESS!
