GOYA

No, not that Goya, the big-G Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, the renowned Spaniard who painted such works as The Third of May 1808 or Saturn Devouring His Son and who sadly never in life tasted the small-g goya that is this ramble's subject, also called the bitter melon, which originated somewhere in the tropics, has long been enjoyed throughout Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and could, I don't see why not, also be grown and enjoyed in the USA but isn't yet, as far as I know.

Now that we're past that bizarre but subjectively necessary opening sentence I can get right to the topic at hand, the wondrous goya. I first tasted that crisp and uniquely astringent fruit (the bitterest on the planet, Wiki says) on Okinawa in the early 1960s. After leaving Okinawa I didn't have goya again for decades, since it was then unknown and ungrown in the USA. Even when I came back to Japan, the wonderful veg was unavailable in central Japanese supermarkets until a few years ago, but by then I was growing my own. It's one of those produce items that has to grow from low-class food to high cuisine.

The reason I'm rambling about this now is because on Saturday, after two non-gardening days spent in the big city where little grows, I found that those many little tiny baby cucumber-sized goya had, in the two rainless days since, grown to include 4 full-sized gourds hanging there in hefty beauty. Goya don't fool around when it comes to growth and prolificity, they don't sometimes curl up to hide behind leaves and try to avoid being seen, like cucumbers do, they just hang there on their strong vines, heavy and straight down, saying Here! Here I am! I'm ready, pick me! Went out again this morning and among the 2 dozen or so small to midsizers yet on their way to maturity, 4 more had grown to size overnight! For just a few seeds and a high vine-climbable surface with southern exposure, you can have them all! Fresh! And tasty! And property/action rich!

Because I put up the high net fence (ca 3 meters) (and thereby tripled my growing area!) I began to grow climbers there-- cucumbers, pumpkins, climbing squashes, runner beans -- cukes love getting up so high, waving their tendrils around to bring their bright yellow blossoms even higher, but the goya has a special wild viney quality about it, it grows left and right and up and down, covering the whole surface. This year I planted just two plants, about two meters apart, at the foot of the northern wall, and those two alone cover the entire wall and beyond (one vine reached out and got into the chestnut tree!) with palm-sized translucent jade green leaves, here and there a butter-yellow blossom that more often than not turns into a tiny greening gourd that grows like blazes; this morning I harvested four of the biggest ones (well over a foot long; they biggen fast, the biggerer the bitterer). Now there are about two dozen of all sizes remaining, with about 6 weeks of growing time left to go!

The bitter melon is also a beautiful plant. Hardy as well, once it gets going. And the gourds. Crunchy, nice bitterness, they don't dissolve into a mush, great in salads, stir fries, tempura etc. I bet Western chefs are about to come out with some great new goya discoveries. As for the health aspects, the bitter melon is pretty miraculous; Dr. Wiel praises goya too, it is a wondrous health veg full of salubrious goodies yet to be detailed, or even discovered!

Here's some recipes from Todd, an organic farmer in Wakayama.

Todd also provides a link to lots of good-looking recipes

at the National Bitter Melon Council's (who knew?) website

And some goya recipes from Okinawa (Beware sudden music)

 

FROM PYRAMID TO PLATE

With a wedge of purple protein... Looks like about 2000+ calories... This is not the old US food pyramid, it's the new US food plate! Filled to the brim with a red fruit wedge, a green veg wedge, a beige grains wedge and a ... purple ... protein wedge. Name me a purple protein. No knife, spoon, napkin or drink... unless the Dairy disc is a glass of blue milk... Could be blue yogurt, blue ice cream or ... bleu cheese?

Looks like the dairy lobby still has some clout, though it's no longer in the inner circle... The meat lobby lost out big time on this one, merged into not a RED MEAT wedge (that would anyway conflict with the red fruit wedge) but a mysteriously purple protein wedge... (eggplant?), which would include legumes, nuts, eggs etc., plus purple meat (for all you manly guys afraid of soybeans and tofu)... But purple protein on a blue (or chartreuse?) placemat?

As for me, I try to avoid government restaurants...

COUPLE DOZEN THOUSAND MORE REASONS TO GROW YOUR OWN

Pesticide Residues in Food and Feed

Veterinary Drug Residues in Food

via: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyLI8UVdTzQ   

(5 min)

(Love the way they gave it a Latin name resonant with "nutritional expertise")

and it's international!

+

FOOD INC.

(Entire documentary)
(Effectively removes any remnant wool from eyes)

＋


GM Soy in animal food - Greetings from Monsanto

Short and to the point.

via: reddit

THE RECURRING SURPRISE OF NO DESSERT

I've been living in Japan for quite a while now and have gotten so used to the Japanese style of eating, and to the absence of any form of what even long-term expat Americans like myself at the end of their meals would honestly refer to as "dessert," and to the absence of any form of dessert-focused foodstands along the roadways of this well-driven land, like the Carvels etc. of my early years in America and the Ben & Jerry's and Cheesecake Factories of today, that I'd come to consider myself free of those calorific chains.

The early years in Japan were pretty frustrating, though, to a native pie-and-ice-creamist - if I wanted any dessert in 1972 Japan, I had a choice between a small dish of canned fruit or a golfball of ice cream (i.e. vanilla; hasn't changed much since). A request for chocolate was like asking if they had any moon fragments on the premises.

As a result of protracted denial in extremis, the Japanese approach slowly became my way of life, and over the decades I stopped associating the meal terminus with a sweet explosion. Indeed, dessert seems repellent to me from here, though when I go back to the states I usually have to try my teeth on pie a la mode at least once after an American-sized meal (enough to make it across the continent in a wagon train), to see if I can still believe I used to do that every day. Each trip, it gets harder to believe.

Generally speaking (when speaking of dessert, always leave a loophole), dessert now strikes me not so much like a chocolate creme pie in the face as somewhat of a death-defying practice, to top off an adequate meal (80% full stomach) with a calorific time bomb, and every time I go back to America I behold in the flesh the results of the great national dessert experiment. So I would have thought that by now the hefty finale would be fully alien to me, well erased from my way of being, but as I found out from within not long ago, I remain American at the core.

It happened not long ago, when the family went to a local restaurant that's part of a Japanese countryside food chain whose menu we enjoy when we're on the road-- all kinds of fish and vegetables cooked in all kinds of country ways, just good plain food. It's the kind of setup where you select your own dishes from the simple, tastefully prepared choices on offer in the bright, roomy place, you go along the counter and take the dishes you like, request rice and miso shiru and can heat up whichever of your selected dishes in a microwave if you so desire...

But this day, as I was cruising along and had reached the end of the offerings - the point at which only the water/hot tea selection remained - I was filled with a vestigial yearning, but I didn't know what for, as I stood there holding my small tray, in that kind of trance like when you reach the top of the stairs and stand there wondering what you came upstairs for... then it hit me like a ton of cellulite: there were no desserts!

There were no pies, no cakes, no cupcakes, no cookies even, no key lime pie, no brownies, no pecan pie, no fudge, no tubs of ice cream, no banana splits - no sundaes at all - no Devil's Food, no mousse, no banana cream pie, no New York cheesecake - my mind went automatically down the long list that I merely high-point here - no lemon/raspberry/chocolate syrup or whipped cream to heap atop any or all the aforegoing, no hard or soft candies even, no chocolate milkshakes or ice-cream sandwiches, not even a frozen Mars bar-- about the closest thing to all that arterial delight was a dish of fried sweet potato slices, and for a surreal moment I felt lost in that dessertless place, a foreigner in a strange land… I shook my head to clear it of empty-caloried visions, lamented the absence of ginger ale and got some water.

While working to enjoy my simple meal with nothing at the end of it, my old American appetite and I observed the many Japanese customers go through the line; not one of them, not even the kids, looked lost at the water. They were born here.

THE COWS AGREE

THE BARON PREFERS ORGANIC

In a post a couple of days ago concerning the fact that I had been robbed blind in the night by a wild ruminant with major horn action, aka The Baron, I was amazed that the stag had eaten all my tomato leaves, when it had been my impression that nothing ate tomato leaves, excepting perhaps a species or two of seriously misguided insects who didn't yet realize what they were eating, or were simply insane.

Then this morning I read a headline that led to an article saying that a ten-year study - already being attacked by other scientists (perhaps Monsanto-funded, judging by my scientific snide index) - alleging that organic tomatoes have much more of certain important flavonoids, specifically quercetin and kaempferol, names that do not as yet rock the world.

To the weight of that study can now be added the expert opinion of The Baron, creature of great repute and renowned connoisseur of vegetation, who relished every single leaf on my tomato plants, because of course my tomatoes are – I mean were - 100% organic.

I would have enjoyed the tomatoes, too, but royalty takes precedence in certain areas.