[Sca-cooks] Peeling and Stringing...
lilinah at earthlink.net
lilinah at earthlink.net
Tue Dec 30 13:56:30 PST 2003
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
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