Monkey see monkey do » food

Nasturtiums

Hil — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 15:21:07 +0000

Nasturtium leaves are very cool to mess around with. Pick a large nasturtium leaf, and try to catch some water in it. Something about the surface of the leaf resists the liquid completely, so that the water forms into beautiful round silvery drops that race around and off the leaf before you know it. They behave like mercury (have you ever broken a mercury thermometer?), but are not poisonous like mercury.

Catching the water is fun itself, but then you can try to see how big a drop your leaf can hold. Or see how many small drops its possible to accommodate on your leaf, since the moment two drops touch, they become one bigger drop. Or you can run races and see who can go furthest and fastest before your drop slips out of the leaf.

I know an elderly man who recalls riding to school on a horse, and stopping on the way to pick young nasturtium leaves to put between slices of bread for his lunch. The leaves have a really nice peppery taste, and are high in vitamin C. You do get more sophisticated nasturtium sandwich recipes, and there are numerous ways to use the flowers and leaves in cooking and medicine. The whole plant is edible and regarded as a herb. The seeds can be pickled and substituted for capers. And, of course, the flowers themselves are the most beautiful oranges, reds and yellows.

The easiest way to prepare and eat mangoes

Hil — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 14:36:06 +0000

This easy and fun way of preparing mangoes is sometimes called making mango porcupines. First you use a sharp knife to fillet each side of the mango, cutting off the ‘cheek’, and getting as close to the mango pip as you can. Then on each cheek make cuts in the mango about 2cm (1/2 in) apart in a criss-cross pattern, but don’t cut through the skin. Now if you push the skin from underneath it will pop the inside out, and the squares become mango cubes that are easy to spoon off or schloop up with your tongue. Then you can go back to peel and eat the small amount of mango left around the pip.

How to slice a banana inside its skin

Hil — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 21:55:35 +0000

A banana trick seems to be an appropriate way to start off this blog… This is a way to amaze the whole room by giving someone a banana that it has already been sliced inside!

You will need a banana that is ripe enough to already have some black spots on it, so that the tiny holes you will put in the skin won’t be noticeable. Then you need a very fine needle that is long enough to go from one side of the banana to the other, threaded with about 30cm (12 inches) of thread.

The idea is to put a loop around the banana, but inside the skin. You will notice that the banana has 5 or 6 or so ‘corners’. Push the needle into the banana at one corner, and run it under the skin through to the next corner, and out. Pull the thread through, but leave a tail of thread at the beginning. Now push the needle back into the hole it just came out of, and through to the next corner. This time leave a little loop at the corner where your needle went in. Continue in this way around the banana, until your needle comes out of the hole where you started. You now have a loop around the banana inside. Now you pull gently on both the ends of thread that are emerging from that one hole. The thread will slice the banana and get pulled out of the hole. Be careful when pulling the ends that you pull them in the directions in which they are already travelling, otherwise they can tear the hole.

Repeat this operation down the length of the banana, making however many slices you want. Then it only remains to give the banana to some unsuspecting person, and sit back and watch .