Finding Asian Herbs and Vegetables for Your Garden

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June 05, 2013Finding Asian Herbs and Vegetables for Your Garden

My father loves to garden and my mother loves to cook. I enjoyboth as they pretty much go hand in hand. However, I have to admit that Ipretty much neglected my garden for most of last year. We hired a nice mannamed Ricardo to help us keep things tidy but his construction skills wereunderutilized by the simple tasks that we asked of him: weeding, trimming, andspreading mulch. He went on vacation, promising to check in with us when hereturned. Alas, he never called. We got the message. Ricardo let us go asclients.

That said, my husband and I realized that we needed toreclaim our yard ourselves, like we used to back in ... 2011! We spent a coupleof weekends filling our greencycle bin and then I attacked my little vegetablegarden. It’s nothing fancy, just about 4 feet by 8 feet wide and constructed asa raised bed when we redid our backyard. Every year I plant Asian herbs and afew summer vegetables. After preparing the bed, I went shopping for plants. Isn’tshopping the reward for lots of hard work?

Finding starters for Vietnamese herbs and other Asianaromatics is not as difficult as it used to be. Over the years, I developed alist of places that I hit to source plants. This time of year, you never knowwhat you’ll find at:

Local nurseries andhome improvement centers – I’ve found the darnest plants at ourindependent, local nurseries as well as places like Home Depot and Lowes. Withthe large big box stores, it helps to shop at one located in an area with a sizeableAsian community. I bought a Thai Kaffir (Makrut) lime tree at Home Depot twelveyears ago. The Chinese garlic chives purchased 8 years before continues to be astalwart, volunteering in various places.

People who garden love to tinker and try new plants and thisyear, I was rewarded by lots of chile plants. They seem to be hot these days. (Ha.)I basically shop by name – like Thai Dragon and Super Chile, then I read thefine print to see whether or not they’re actually hot. Some, despite theirAsian provenance, lack spicy heat. This year, I planted 5 kinds of chiles justto see what would happen. We lack consistent hot temps in coastal NorthernCalifornia so my back up is buying chiles from the Hmong farmers and freezingthem for the long haul.

Note that common herbs such as mint and even sorrel are employedin Asian cooking. Those seedlings may be available at mainstream nurseries andgarden supply shops.

Farmers’ markets –Small nurseries sell starter plants at our farmers’ markets, and I mine theirstalls for interesting plants. In Santa Cruz, for example, Upstarts Organic Seedlingsalways has new varieties to explore.

Last weekend, I chat with Sarah, theowner, about growing Southeast Asian long chiles and she suggested trying Joe’sLong Cayenne. She also had starters for rau ram (Vietnamese coriander), Thaipurple basil (rau hung que) and Mrs. Burns basil, which she said seems to beeasier to grow in our climate than Thai lime basil. I’ve had problems with Thailime basil so I’m switching to Mrs. Burns. I’ll keep checking back with Sarahbecause later on this season, she’ll have Thai holy basil.

Asian Markets –One of my favorite places to source Vietnamese herbs is a tiny market in SanJose called Thien Thanh. The man who tends to the makeshift nursery speakslittle but his plants are always healthy.

My Vietnamese balm (rau kinh gioi) didn’t reseed this yearso I started with a new plant. I always need a new purple perilla (rau tia to,an earthier kin of Japanese shiso). He promised me that the black chile plantwas spicy hot so I bought one. The fourth plant I purchased from him was a ricepaddy herb (rau om), that I have to keepin a plastic bag where things will sweat to mimic super humid growingconditions. Prices are not marked but I was charged about $4 or $5 for each. Whata deal. What a steal!

Indian grocery stores are also a great source of plants.Five years ago, I bought a curry leaf plant for [gulp] $35 from Bharat Bazaar, asomewhat sad Indian market in Santa Clara that happened to sell the plant. TheIndian customers asked me why I was buying it because the market sold theleaves by the bags for about $2. I was curious, I said, and want a super freshsupply at my home. The $35 investment was a baby, no taller than 12 inches, butlook at it now – a bona fide little tree on my patio.

Berkeley’s Tokyo FishMarket is an excellent source for Japanese seedlings, as well as seafoodand groceries. The market displays the plants right outside the doorway.Eggplant, shishito peppers, various kinds of shiso, are among the seedlings I’veseen there. They often sell Asian seed packets too.

You don’t need much space to cultivate a few herbs toenhance your cooking. Yes, you can buy the stuff but growing even a tiny bit ofyour own food is immensely rewarding and tasty to boot.

Related information:

If you can’t source Asian herbs and seedlings in person, tryone of these onlineseed sources.Need a refresher or introduction to Vietnamese herbs? Checkout the VietnameseHerb Primer. Posted in Asian Ingredients, Gardening | Permalink

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Comments Finding Asian Herbs and Vegetables for Your Garden

My father loves to garden and my mother loves to cook. I enjoyboth as they pretty much go hand in hand. However, I have to admit that Ipretty much neglected my garden for most of last year. We hired a nice mannamed Ricardo to help us keep things tidy but his construction skills wereunderutilized by the simple tasks that we asked of him: weeding, trimming, andspreading mulch. He went on vacation, promising to check in with us when hereturned. Alas, he never called. We got the message. Ricardo let us go asclients.

That said, my husband and I realized that we needed toreclaim our yard ourselves, like we used to back in ... 2011! We spent a coupleof weekends filling our greencycle bin and then I attacked my little vegetablegarden. It’s nothing fancy, just about 4 feet by 8 feet wide and constructed asa raised bed when we redid our backyard. Every year I plant Asian herbs and afew summer vegetables. After preparing the bed, I went shopping for plants. Isn’tshopping the reward for lots of hard work?

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Japanese Cooking 101, Lesson 4, Part 2: Prepping Vegetables For Sunomono

Now that we know how to make the vinegar sauces for sunomono, let’s turn our attention to the prepping of the vegetables. The key to good sunomono, and all aemono (mixed-vegetable dishes), is to use vegetables that have had the excess moisture removed. The way to do this is to either drain them well, salt them lightly to draw out the moisture, or to blanch them briefly.

Here are some ways to prep vegetables for sunomono. The recipes for the the vinegar sauces (—su or —zu) mentioned are in Part 1.

Wakame is one of the easiest sea vegetables or seaweed to work with. I’ve been trying to eat more wakame recently since it is packed with minerals, so I’m just going to include it in all the sunomono variations below. It can also be used in miso soup, as I showed in Lesson 1a.

Wakame comes either in dehydrated form or ‘raw’ and preserved in salt. If you have the latter kind, simply rinse it well in running water, then soak for a few minutes in a bowl of fresh water. If you have the dehydrated kind, soak in plenty of water to cover until it’s rehydrated. Either way, it should look like this after a while.

The dehydrated kind usually comes pre-cut into pieces but the salted kind comes in long pieces like so.

Just cut it up into small, bitesize pieces.

Here’s about 1/2 cup of ready to go wakame, which can be used in sunomono, soups, salads and so forth.

Cucumber is one of the most versatile vegetables for sunomono. It’s available year-round (although its real season is summer), and its crunchy-crisp texture lends itself well to vinegar sauce. Japanese cucumbers are quite small and narrow, but just about impossible to get outside of Japan, so I usually use the type of cucumber that’s called an English cucumber - long, and sometimes sold individually shrinkwrapped. Since cucumbers have a high water content we need to remove some of that.

Cut the cucumber in half lengthwise, and rub the surface with a little salt. This adds salt flavor, draws out excess moisture, and also makes the dark green skin really pop in color. Plus, if you have very fresh cucumbers with sharp little thorns, the salt will rub those off.

Scoop out the seeds with a spoon.

Be sure to be thorough and remove all the seeds, like so. (Tip: Don’t throw away the seeds and pulp! Chill it in the refrigerator, then use it to give yourself a cool cucumber-skin treatment; apply it over your face, lie down for about 30 minutes, and wash off. Your skin will feel super-smooth and refreshed.)

Cut up the cucumber into fairly thin slices. Sometimes I like to slice it paper-thin, and sometimes I slice it a bit thicker as I have here. Massage the cucumber to distribute the salt, then squeeze out as much excess moisture as you can.

Cucumber sunomono lends itself to any kind of awase-zu, but I especially like it with the citrusy flavor of ponzu. I used the Ultra Simple version of ponzu here and it was great. Use 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons of sauce per cup of vegetables, or to taste.

Not all turnips are suitable for using uncooked like this, but small turnips work very well. These little white turnips are perfect.

If you can get turnips with their green tops still on, cut the greens off to leave a little bit on the root. (Use the greens for making homemade furikake.) Carefully peel the turnips so you leave that little green topknot intact.

Tip: The outer part of some kinds of turnips (like these white ones) is rather tough and fibrous, so you should peel them rather thickly. I know it seems wasteful, but the turnips will be a lot more edible.

Then slice the turnips lengthwise, so you have a bit of that green with each slice (except for the sides). Sprinkle the slices with a tiny bit of salt, massage as with the cucumber, and squeeze out tightly to express any extra moisture.

The sweetness of sanbai-zu brings out the sweetness in the turnips. This is just as good without the wakame. Use 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons of sauce per cup of vegetables, or to taste.

Tip: cutting the turnips with the green tops on makes the slices very attractive in miso soup too.

This is a very frugal dish, making use of a part of broccoli that most people just throw away. To prep the broccoli stems, cut off the florets (to use for another dish). Peel the tough green outer parts of the stems, and cut them into bitesize pieces. Blanch the pieces in boiling water for about 2-3 minutes until crisp-tender, drain and cool. The umami-rich flavor of tosa-zu goes very well with broccoli and wakame. You can add one broccoli floret as a green accent, or use another green accent like the snap pea piece I’ve used here. Use 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons of sauce per cup of vegetables, or to taste.

Many vegetables work as sunomono. As I wrote above, you just need to make sure that you get rid of any excess moisture. For instance:

Daikon radish: Slice thinly, salt and squeeze out.Radishes: Slice thinly or into halves or quarters, salt and squeeze out.Cabbage: Cut up roughly, salt and squeeze out.Tomatoes: De-seed and get rid of the pulp. Drain in a sieve to let any excess moisture run off. Lettuce: Make sure to pat away any water on the leaves. Rip up the leaves with your hands to avoid the browninng you get when you cut lettuce with a steel knife, or use a stainless steel or ceramic knife to chop up the leaves. Serve immediately after mixing with the vinegar sauce. (Lettuce and wakame with nihai-zu works very well, as does ponzu.) Celery: Peel off the tough outer fibers of the stalks. Slice very thinly, and sprinkle with a tiny of salt and squeeze out. Celery works well with sanbai-zu or ama-zu. Mizuna: Blanch in plenty of boiling water, cool in cold water and squeeze out tightly. Cut into short lengths. Mizuna goes well with any of the sauces, but I like it best with simple nihai-zu or ponzu.Edible chrysanthemum flowers: Blanch briefly in boiling water and drain. This is used most often together with other vegetables, such as daikon radish, and is really pretty.

A few vegetables may not be so suited to vinegar flavor (brussel sprouts come to mind for one) but that’s really a matter of taste. I hope you’ll try out your favorite vegetables as sunomono and see how they turn out.

Boiled seafood such as boiled shrimp, octopus and squid are often used in sunomono. Boiled shrimp is easy to do at home. If you want to try octopus, buy a piece of sashimi-ready octopus at a Japanese grocery store. (Raw octopus needs to be massaged and beaten up to make it tender enough before boiling.) Poached chicken also works well, especially with nanban-su.

You can find dehydrated seaweed salad mixes at Japanese or Korean grocery stores. To use these just soak in water as for the wakame until they are rehydrated and pliable. Use any of the vinegar sauces - for a Korean twist, add a bit of sesame oil and grated garlic.

Harusame is a noodle made from potato starch that is used in sunomono. It requires special treatment so I’ll post a separate recipe with it at a later date.

If you think about it, sunomono sauces are rather like oil-free dressings, so they can be used with any number of salad-like combinations. The oil-free dressings sold in Japan are actually just variations on sunomono sauces.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip through sourness. In the next lesson we’ll finally get to the main protein dish of a Japanese meal.

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Spring vegetables article in the Japan Times

I seem to have vegetables on my mind a lot these days - it is springtime after all. This month’s article for the Japan Times is all about spring vegetables that are more or less unique to Japan. You may know about takenoko or bamboo shoots, but do you know fuki, and warabi, and udo? And did you know that the young leaves of the wasabi plant are a great delicacy, only available in the spring? Well…read and find out!

If you are in Japan, you can get these vegetables is to just go to your local well-stocked supermarket or department stall food hall. Unfortunately, as far as I know most of these vegetables are not available outside of Japan, unless you grow them yourself or are very lucky and find them at a Japanese grocery store or something like that. (But most readers of the Japan Times live in Japan so I can get away with writing about only-in-Japan things a bit more there ^_^;.) I don’t even know if you can get the seeds for them. You can get the roots of some things, such as fuki (butterbur) or wasabi and try your luck. My mother used to grow a ton of fuki in her garden on Long Island, NY. It even became a bit invasive. So if you can get some roots, give it a go!

I have to admit that as a kid, I used to hate all of these wild vegetables, especially fuki and fuki no tou, because of their bitterness. Now I crave them. Modern hybridized vegetables seem so uniformly bland, that it’s rather nice to have a zing of extra sharpness or bitterness from varieties that have not had all the bite bred out of them.

Here are some more spring vegetables sold at the Nishiki market in Kyoto and Tsukiji Jougai (outdoors) market in Tokyo these past couple of weeks. (I’ve written about the Nishiki Market here, but not about the Tsukiji Market. And I should, because all in all I prefer the more raucous Tokyo market. I’ll get to it soon.)

So, this is from Nishiki Market. If you can read hiragana, see how many unfamiliar vegetable labels you can make out. ^_^ For instance, I have no idea how “aloe shoots” (aroe no me) are supposed to be eaten, or that they were eaten at all.

Another from the Nishiki Market. On the right are some gorgeous looking mitsuba - you should be able to get mitsuba at least at well stocked Japanese grocery stores. On the left are bunches of flowering wasabi. I’ve never had these but I imagine you prepare them the same way as wasabi leaves (called wasabi-na in the eastern part of Japan, ha-wasabi in the west).

This display is from the Tsukiji outdoors market. (Outdoors or jougai means it’s outside of the wholesale area, where the famous fish auctions take place. Tons of little shops line the streets and are worth a trip even if you can’t get into the wholesale area.) The main thing on show here is kogomi, a mountain vegetable similar to warabi. You can also see gyouja ninniku in the back right - these are sort of like bärlauch or wild garlic.

And finally, some pretty nice looking wasabi roots for sale at Tsukiji, in case you’ve never seen the real thing.

The Japan Time article has a recipe for tempura using some of these spring vegetables. Another way to enjoy them is to simply blanch them (some vegetables need special de-bittering treatment, which is described in the article) and serve with a dressing. Here’s a little dish of blanched nanohana with the thinly sliced raw mountain udo core. Udo is a bit like parsnip; the outer part is a bit tough, and the core is tender and nice eaten raw in a salad. The sauce here is sumiso, a mixture of white miso, vinegar and a little sugar.

As I say in the Japan Times article you don’t want to eat a big amount of these vegetables, but in small quantities they are really wonderful, a sure sign of spring.

The very fact that these vegetables are even eaten at all (tree shoots? Fern sprouts?) shows how resourceful people used to be - or maybe how desperate they were for food. Kind of puts those people panic-buying cup noodles from convenience stores to shame. Anyway…eating these bitter vegetables is a reminder of our past, not only in terms of our food culture, but showing us what we are capable of.

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