Kalabasa or pumpkin is a favorite vegetable of mine. I like to cook them in coconut milk with shrimp and a little bit of curry powder. It’s so delicious especially with ginger and lemon grass as added flavoring.
It is easy to grow. When it starts to flower, you can gather the flowers too for cooking. The seeds are also good to eat.
It has nutrients like beta-carotene which is good for the eyes.
Papayas are very common here in Hawaii but most of them are for eating as fruits. Meanwhile we use the green papaya as vegetable. It is a different variety of papaya not like the “Solo” or “Sunrise”. This type is more elongated in shape and actually bigger than the Hawaiian variety. Just like the Thai…
Jicama or singkamas is one of the favorite snacks during the summer season together with watermelon, cantaloupe and pineapple not to mention mango. In our province in Zambales, there is a town called San Marcelino which is the main producer of this succulent, crispy and sweet jicama. Lots of buses and cars stop in the…
I have been gathering Swiss Chard in my garden for months now and it seems endless. I love Swiss chard. You can use them in salads when young and saute’ or stir fry those big leaves. The one variety I have is called Bright Lights because of the different colors of the stem. The leaves…
This is arugula seedlings after a few days of sowing them in the garden bed. They grow faster than lettuce. I like them in salads with different kinds of lettuce to add zing and interest to the palate. It has that distinct peppery flavor almost like radish or wasabi that makes the salad greens more…
Caribbean hot peppers also known as Scotch Bonnet (because of their shape) is found mainly in the Caribbean Islands but widely used in West African dishes. The peppers are scaled at 445,000 Scoville units and a cousin of habanero peppers. Its name was derived from the city of Cuba called La Habana, or Havana in…
Patola is what we call the luffa gourd. There are two types of this gourd but I am only familiar with the one that has angles or ridges on the skin. This is the specie called Luffa Acutangula. The other specie must have been introduced in the Philippines at a later date. We call it…