Wednesday 9 January 2008

One word, many worlds

When Chili commented that she had grown up near Mexico and never heard of epazote used in Mexican cooking I thought I would do a google search of the word epazote.
So with in seconds I discovered an amazing amount of blogs mentioning this plant.
The plant is also called Skunkweed, Mexican Tea, Wormseed, Sweet Pigweed, Hedge mustard, Jerusalem Parsley, Pazote, Paico and West Indian goosefoot.
Too much of it is poisonous and it can spread like a weed so I best save the seed or grow it in a pot.
It has a strong flavour, some say it smells like kerosene, but it is just a strong flavour and is claimed to give a distinctive Mexican or Peruvian flavour to cooked dishes.
Just as with Indian Hing (asafoetida) or fresh curry leaves, one only needs a very small amount to give a subtle flavour to cooked dishes.
So here are some of the wonderful blogs I discovered and whether you are inside because it is freezing or too hot to be in your garden like me we can enjoy spending time learning from each other.

Gourmet Sleuth
Mexico Cook's
Viva Veracruz
The Serendipitous Chef
Holy Shallot (Holy Shallot is a fantastic way to learn about ingredients & cooking. Ingredients, flavors, styles of cooking and not least emotional aspects of food are investigated.)

3 comments:

Scarecrow said...

Hi Folks
Thanks for your visits Maggie and Chook (and the post) ;)

I'm glad you wrote this up about Epazote, I grew it one year, it grew very well but we didn't like the smell of it. After hearing of it's weediness I chopped it back before it flowered and gave it to the chooks (I think they ate it??)

Yes it's way too hot in my garden again!! or is that still!

Cheers
Scarecrow up in the HOT Mid North SA

Maggie said...

We have just had our 1st epazote flavoured bowl of borlotti beans cooked in a garlic, oregano, tomato,zucchini, spring onion sauce with just some epazote sprigs added as the sauce cooked. We liked it very much it had an earthy rich flavour. Yum! And all the ingredients except for the beans were freshly picked from our garden.

Maggie said...

Nickolas had an epazote plant for sale at the rare fruit society last Tues and Pattie said an article on epazote is in the current Organic gardening magazine she gets.