Our local farmer’s market is a brilliant display of ethnic diversity in food. There’s East Asian, West Asian, Middle Eastern, African, South American, Pacific Islander stalls. I can buy fresh bamboo shoots, banana flowers, yams, red eggplants, cassava, abika, kang kong. It’s where I found fish mint, a little pot of it for a dollar, from someone who spoke so little English that all I got was that it was…
My Burundi neighbour introduced me to bitter leaf. It’s a well-known, widely cultivated culinary and medicinal plant in Africa. She uses it for her diabetes, and when I started looking I found quite a lot of research supporting its folk medicine reputation, especially as an antidiabetic.
Give ginger the right conditions and it thrives so well that it’s not hard to keep a year round supply sufficient for making curries from scratch, adding to stir fries or tea, making pickled ginger for rice paper rolls and sushi, taking in a care package for pregnant friends, and crystallising for seasickness lollies or treats.
One of our Coffs Harbour Davidson’s Plum trees has bourne its first harvest. Davidson’s Plums are full of good stuff but the big claim to medicinal fame is a compound called ‘anthocyanin’. Anthocyanins do a number of generally healthy things but the one that really interested me was the way they improve gut microbiota.
My usual use for lemon myrtle is as a treatment for coughs, colds, runny nose, stuffy sinus, hayfever. The essential oil in lemon myrtle is 90% citral, the same essential oil that gives lemon grass its lemon scent. Citral is antimicrobial – antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral – and it’s also anti-allergic and anti-inflammatory.
It was a very nice outcome from this bit of research that aloe vera actually does work to repair sun damage “stimulating hyaluronic acid and collagen production” – which is what the labels on expensive little bottles of cosmetic serums say too. I think I need to plant more.
I put turmeric in my tea every morning. Just a half a thumb sized piece of fresh turmeric, sliced fine, tea poured over it. Add a little grating of black pepper because the piperine in the pepper makes the curcumin in the turmeric useable, and I have my tea with milk. It sounds odd but it tastes really good – a little chai slant on ordinary black tea. And I…