Text 28203, 132 rader
Skriven 2009-09-02 22:48:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av RUTH HANSCHKA
Ärende: bad spaghetti sauces
============================
-=> Quoting Ruth Hanschka to Jim Weller <=-

 
 RH> I just donated a Swedish (allegedly) cook book to the local senior
 RH> center.  I figure if I haven't used it in a decade it can leave.

I have about half the Time-Life Cuisines of the World series, picked
up at a yard sale a long time ago for a buck a piece. I value all of
them, including the Scandinavian one. It has some great ideas in it.

 ->  -> German/quarter cup of sugar/nicely seasoned sauce

 RH> It sounds like Chef Boy-ar-di or something equally canned.

Not really. Thing of a really nice and very spicy red sauce plus
brown sugar.

 ->       8 md fresh curry leaves

 RH> Or would if I could get those

I can get them dried here, fresh in Edmonton.

Commoner leaves. I conned Kevin into trying this last month. He
lived. So now I shall try it.

MMMMM-----Meal-Master - formatted by MMCONV  2.10

     Title: Cooking With Tomato Leaves 
Categories: vegetables, info
  Servings: 1

           tomato leaves 

GO AHEAD AND PICKLE.

An alkaloid in green tomatoes seems to do people no harm. I think
tomato leaves are worth adding to our roster of kitchen herbs.

There are reasons to be wary of the tomato plant. It belongs to the
disreputable nightshade family. Unfortunately there's no
authoritative roster of poisonous plants to consult for definitive
advice about edibility. The Food and Drug Administration maintains
an online poisonous plant database, but with the disclaimer that it
has "no official status" because the information it includes is
unconfirmed and constantly changing. So out-of-date and erroneous
materials persist. Toxicity is an inexact quality in any case,
because it depends on dosage and other variables. But there's scant
evidence for tomato toxicity in the medical and veterinary
literature. A controlled study in Israel in 1996 showed no ill
effects when cattle ate tomato vines for 42 days. And it's a
chemical gaffe to attribute tomato toxicity to solanine. Tomatoes
contain tomatine. Solanine is a potato alkaloid. There are
significant quantities of tomatine in green tomato fruits, which
people have long eaten fried and pickled. And tomatine appears to be
a relatively benign alkaloid.

In 2000, Dr. Friedman and colleagues reported that when lab animals
ingest tomatine, essentially all of it passes through the animal
unabsorbed. The alkaloid apparently binds to cholesterol in the
digestive system, and the combination is excreted :  ridding the
body of both alkaloid and cholesterol. The researchers found that
both tomatine-rich green tomatoes and purified tomatine lowered the
levels of undesirable LDL cholesterol in animals.

Dr. Friedman has also found that an extract of green tomato lowers
the incidence of cancer in animals, and last month he reported that
both this extract and purified tomatine inhibit the growth of
various human cancer cells. Other studies have found that purified
tomatine seems to stimulate the immune system in desirable ways. 

According to "Toxic Plants of North America" (Iowa State University
Press, 2001), by George E. Burrows and Ronald J. Tyrl, a toxic dose
of tomatine for an adult human would appear to require at least a
pound of tomato leaves. These authors conclude that "the hazard in
most situations is low."

If tomato leaves don't deserve their toxic reputation, then what can
I do with them? Years ago Paul Bertolli, a chef and salumi maker in
Berkeley, Calif. set aside the received wisdom and called for tomato
greens in his book "Cooking by Hand". "I started using the tomato
leaves to punch up the flavor of my quick tomato sauces at Chez
Panisse around 1987.I found them very effective in offering up that
just-picked, viney, tomato taste."

Apart from Mr. Bertolli's excellent leaf-enhanced sauce, I've found
only a handful of obscure uses for tomato leaves, all of them from
Asia. Exploring the East Indies in the 17th century, the Dutch
botanist G. E. Rumpf noted that the people of Ambon Island, now part
of Indonesia, ate the tender leaves raw with fish and with fermented
shellfish, a precursor of Indonesian belacan and relative of Asian
fish sauces. Later, the botanist J. K. Hasskarl found the young
leaves eaten along with rice.

More recently, on an episode of the original Japanese "Iron Chef" in
2000, the chef Hiroyuki Sakai served raw fish in a sauce that
included dried tomato leaves. And there's now a Japanese patent
pending for a process that dries tomato plants and grinds them into
an antioxidant-rich food powder.

With these examples in mind, I tried combining finely shredded
tomato leaves and just a hint of fish sauce, and found that they
made a savory garnish for both rice and pan-cooked halibut. Then I
gently fried whole leaves for a few seconds on each side, and they
came out crisp and beautifully translucent, delicious sprinkled with
a few grains of salt. Dried, they taste like tea. Blanched and
pureed, a few spoonfuls of tomato leaf added deep green flavor and
color to a pesto. No side effects noted.

We've come to eat what we eat based on long but limited experience,
and scant understanding. As we learn more, maybe tomato leaves will
become a mainstream ingredient. Or maybe not.

Francesco Tonelli for The New York Times


  From: Slashfood                       
 
MMMMM-------------------------------------------------



Cheers

YK Jim


... Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian.

___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.20 [NR]
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5
 * Origin: Doc's Place BBS Fido Since 1991 docsplace.tzo.com (1:123/140)