[Sca-cooks] Peeling and Stringing...

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

I've caught up to the thread about stringing celery and peeling 
various fruits and vegetables and folks wondering why?

Well, for some vegetables, if grown in a region that uses "night 
soil", the eater is safer, gastroenterologically, peeling those 
items. Night soil, in case anyone doesn't know, is human excrement. 
While it works as a fertilizer, it's also a great way to spread 
diseases.

Back on the home front, my mother dislikes skin on almost anything 
edible (including cooked fowl). She not only peels apples, she peels, 
among other things, tomatoes whether cooked or raw, and bell peppers. 
And she doesn't use sharp knives, either - all her knives have 
serrated edges - which makes the process more difficult, in my 
opinion. Sawing through carrots, etc. is rather frustrating and time 
consuming for me when i try to cook at her house. But she won't chop, 
she insists on sawing. I don't understand why.

For some cuisines - such as modern Moroccan - things like tomatoes 
and bell peppers are peeled. For tomatoes a quick dip of some seconds 
into boiling water and they generally slip out of their skins. In 
Morocco, bell peppers are generally put on a grill over hot charcoal 
and rotated so they cook evenly. After the skin is all black and 
bubbly, the peppers are taken off the grill, and the skin peels off 
easily. Since i don't have a charcoal grill in my kitchen at home, i 
put them on a sheet under the broiler, and rotate them until they're 
done. Then peel and rinse off the skins. I don't generally care for 
bell peppers but a number of the modern Moroccan recipes i've cooked 
have been fabulous.

Many North African recipes call for preparing eggplants similarly - i 
use small eggplants - Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Philippine (i 
generally avoid those gigantic globe eggplants unless i were making 
some Italian or Greek dish that calls for large slabs of eggplant 
flesh). I roast them in the oven since they need to be all soft and 
tender inside. Roast until they collapse and the skin is beginning to 
blacken, then scrape the meat out of the inside. By dealing with 
eggplants using "traditional" methods, i've found that many people 
who say they "hate" eggplant have not only eaten the dishes i've made 
but gone back for more.

Celery - me, i prefer to string it if i'm eating stalks of it. I like 
raw celery stalks stuffed with cream cheese, blue cheese, and such 
like - not so crazy about peanut butter, but i will eat it... But i 
wouldn't bother if i'm chopping it or cooking it. The inner stalks 
tend to have more tender strings, but the strings in outer stalks are 
often very tough.

Cucumbers - i prefer to peel them, because the skin usually tastes 
unpleasantly bitter to me. But i'm not much of cucumber fan. I prefer 
them prepared in ways used in the Levant, modern Turkey, India, and 
Southeast Asia. I pick too thickly cut rounds out of my Western style 
salads. I also think that organically grown cucumbers are less bitter 
than "conventionally" grown cucumbers, but i haven't done a 
scientific study...

Anahita