BBG Herb Garden weekend, Aug 14 – 15, 2010
It was quite a pleasant surprise to get an email from Kate Blumm of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, to invite Purple Yam to provide some small treats for the weekend celebration of the Herb Garden on Aug 14 – 15. She had come to PY and loved the food and the little corner of flowers, herbs and ferns we have in our back patio. My post about the gumamela thriving in its new Ditmas Park home was the clincher. I told her that Romy had been tending the little plots of earth and trees in front of our building on Cortelyou Rd starting last year while we were waiting for the seemingly endless construction and bureaucratic nightmare that the City imposes on any one who dares open a restaurant in this city.
After reading the history of this 17,000 sq ft Herb Garden that took 3 years to build in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, there was no way we could pass up this opportunity. How wonderful that the planners of this Garden looked at the communities that live in Brooklyn and sought to represent all these cultures and cuisines that use the herbs (and some vegetables) in their cooking. Southeast Asians use a lot of herbs in their cooking: basils, lemongrass, mint, oregano, thyme, bay leaves, etc.
One bit of irony is that Filipinos are not heavy users of herbs the way the Thais and Vietnamese do. Lemongrass is used in the Visayas and is mainly used for stuffing roast pigs. In Ilocos in the northern part of Luzon, the Ilocanos use pasotes (epazote) that the Mexican galleons brought over during a 250-year period of shipping goods, people and food between Manila and Acapulco when the Philippines was a colony of Spain. In Bicol, they have herba buena (mint) and mountain oregano which they put in the Catanduanes tilmok and the Sorsogon kinagang – tamales like concoctions of young coconut, fermented tiny crabs (talangka), scallions, garlic, herba buena and/or oregano wrapped in either banana leaves or hagikhik leaves (if you really want to be authentic).
One of the most common flavoring agents Filipinos use is the bay leaf which is used in adobos and tomato-based Spanish-Mexican stews like apritada, kalderetta or asado.
I suppose a 50 year period of American colonization that followed Spanish rule did not improve our taste for herbs as the Americans institutionalized the use of processed American food in the Philippine diet. Our native rice and fish were deemed inferior in providing the Filipinos with enough proteins and nutrients to achieve good health and well being, so we were taught to eat hamburgers, french fries, ice cream, donuts, cakes and candy.
So it is a wonderful way to circle back into August 2010 to have Filipinos help celebrate the BBG Herb Garden. Herbs are nature’s best flavoring agents — so easy to grow, so accessible, so delicate and refreshing to the palate. We will be serving vegetarian and beef empanaditas laced with herbs, veggie leaves or roots that the BBG can give us. Kate gave me a list that were possible to use: Thai basil, cinnamon basil, Malabar spinach, leaf amaranth, chard, kale and beets. In the Philippines, Malabar spinach is called alugbati which is usually blanched and made into a salad with sliced red onions dressed with a vinegar-water-sugar-black peppercorn mixture OR added as a leafy green to munggo (mung bean soup) that is a much beloved dish in the Philippines.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting to know how alugbati is called elsewhere. There was a time (I cant remember exactly when) when they said alugbati had no value nutritionally……
Nowadays anything grown naturally without any chemicals or toxic stuff on it is definitely more nutritious than anything!