Basket, Jan. 28, 2010 – edible chrysanthemum

Sarah picking "tang oh" greens from the canal-side annual beds.

There’s a new friend in your basket this week: the edible chrysanthemum, or Chrysanthemum coronarium (tiger ear variety). It’s known in Thai (borrowed from Tieochiu Chinese) as tang oh. Enjoy it, but don’t get too friendly with it, for it won’t be around for long. The edible chrysanthemum likes cool weather, and we’ve had all we’re going to get of that for a long time to come.

This week:

• Edible chrysanthemum
• Malabar spinach
• Rat-tail radish
• Red rice
• Bananas
• Sun-dried roselle

On the plus side for the edible chrysanthemum, the local bugs don’t seem to be too familiar with it; its leaves are hardly chewed on at all, whereas the leaf mustard in the next bed is more hole than leaf. Sarah recommends blanching the edible chrysanthemum in boiling water flavored with a little chicken broth, salt, cooking oil, and some egg. She made that for dinner tonight and it had a rich taste and texture. Myself, I also like it in a fresh salad with some vinaigrette dressing. Our baby goslings, Sun and Moon, are quite happy to snack on it raw from our fingers.

The edible or garland chrysanthemum compares nutritionally quite favorably with spinach in terms of vitamin C, protein, iron and dietary fiber. It falls far behind in the vitamin A department, but so do most things. You’ll still need to eat your sweet potato or chicken liver. Another plant in your basket that is compared with spinach is the falsely named Malabar spinach, which is actually a member of a completely different family, Basellaceae. We grow two species of this plant, the green-stemmed Basella alba and the red-stemmed Basella ruba. The stuff in the basket is the former. It is said to be low in calories by volume, but high in protein per calorie. So you can eat heaps of it. And Malabar spinach is high in iron, vitamins A and C, and calcium. It’s not so high in nutrients as its Western namesake, but you can grow it in the northern Thai lowlands. And unlike the edible chrysanthemum and many other types of plants (watermelon, snow peas), it can really handle heat and rain, so we can grow it all year. Some people don’t take to the okra-like “mucilaginous texture” of Malabar spinach, but this “succulent mucilage” is a particularly rich source of soluble fiber, and thought to remove mucus and toxins from the body. Among many other possibilities, Malabar spinach may be used to thicken soups or stir-fries with garlic and chili peppers.

A rainbow appears over the farm during a brief but welcome rain shower in late January.

The rice this week is some of our fresh-milled red rose jasmine. A guerrilla forester friend, Ricky, wrote me about two old revolutionaries he stayed with in Vietnam. The husband and former Danang governor was still riding his bicycle around town at the age of 91. “And what kept him going?” Ricky asked. “Red rice, his staple meal!” So enjoy your bowl of immortality. There’s a lot more red rice where that came from. If you haven’t seen it, please have a look at Dan’s picture spread from our rice harvest fun.

The sun-dried roselle calex are ready to boil up for tea. They were discussed in a recent blog. Boil some up, strain it, flavor a bit with raw sugar, stevia or honey, and enjoy. The bananas are from Ai Chuan, a local politico and owner of the neighborhood dry-good shop, known as “SeVEN eleVEN.”

No duck eggs this week, unfortunately, but we should be back in business pretty quickly. They went on a bit of a strike at first when we locked them up last week to keep them out of the neighbor’s paddy. But we’ve been letting the ducks back into our own flooded paddy the last few days, to make use of their “duck tractor”

The ducks do their chores in the flooded rice paddy: eating weeds and snails, stirring up the mud, fertilizing. Good ducks!

function (weeding, plowing, pooping). Now they are becoming familiar with their new home. When they panic and rush for safety, they don’t head toward the big pond, but rather back into their enclosure. That makes it pretty easy to round them up every evening. Anyway, they’ve been going crazy in the paddy, nosing around and grazing all day long. According to the local wisdom, all that good protein will have them laying again in no time. Look for news on that next week.