Here goes another diet-nerd post...
Since our budget has pretty much halved since the end of last year and fruit and vegetable prices have gone up by around 10%, I've all but stopped buying veges and fruit. When mangoes are in season I'll probably make an exception, but our weekly vegetable buy these days pretty much consists of onions, garlic and a couple of capsicums. $2 or more for a bunch of bok choy seems a bit rich, and spinach and silverbeet are also quite expensive.
Gam isn't exactly a rampaging vege-beast, but I require greens in my diet, so I've made up this shortfall with my 'discovery' of a vegetable that's been thriving in our tiny balcony-garden for the past couple of years: sweet potato leaves.
I first checked up on the fact that they aren't poisonous to eat when Porkie first started eating them, but I never thought to eat them myself. People are weird when it comes to food, and I think it's natural to have very fixed ideas about what constitutes food and what doesn't. Sweet potatoes I considered acceptable, but sweet potato leaves? After reading a bit more about them, including a post on a rather interesting blog, I decided to give them a go in some Indonesian-style fried rice.
The kecap-manis and sambal I ate with the rice drowned out the natural flavour of the sweet potato leaves, and I've since given them a go in a few other dishes, including having them steamed with baked beans on toast (it was actually very good!). They have a very mild flavour and don't have the kind of astringency that is found in some green vegetables (silverbeet, for example). Around 30 seconds in the microwave is enough to steam them, and retain nearly all the nutrients; the leaves are a good source of vitamins A and K (For more information, go here and type in 'sweet potato leaves').
I haven't tried eating them raw yet, so I can't say how they'd go in a salad or on a sandwich, but I can say that any idiot can grow a sweet potato in brisbane, and these things seem unkillable- insects will eat them, but not fast enough to keep pace with the growth of the plant! Even I can't seem to eat enough to stop it from attempting to launch an invasion of the neighbour's balcony, especially since the possum hasn't come by to clip back the shoots in a while.
8 comments:
Wow, I never would have guessed! That's fascinating, because I believe regular potato leaves are chock-full of incredible powerful alkaloid poisons. I would have (stupidly) naturally assumed sweets were the same.
Even though our apartment is groundfloor, our courtyard gets literally zero light, so the only veges I could grow would be mushrooms.
That saddens me to hear about your vege-less diet, Sarah, even if Gam is celebrating. I would give up meat any day of the week over fruit and vege!
hippy. you can grow a sweetpotato vine bloody anywhere though. believe me, they're very difficult to kill. if you've got enough light to see you can probably grow a bloody sweetpotato.
i've also converted part of the back planter into the porkie memorial veggie garden so hopefully we'll get some rocket and spinach out of there...
Fantastic.
In your lab at uni can you get the nutritional breakdown of any given food? There are so many odd things (not necessarily foods in the traditional sense) I'd love to know the composition of and nutritional content, etc.
The best bet for determining the different values for particular nutrients is looking it up somewhere!
From my experience in the lab this semester, determining the amount of fat in one thing, protein in another, vitamin C in another... I can tell you in nearly every case each nutrient has to be determined separately and it takes an incredibly long time.
There is a book of the American Organisation of Analytical Chemists' Official Methods for the determination of all these sorts of things, and it's about half a foot thick... definitely I would prefer to look up a US database or the Composition of Foods ( (Australia) for that kind of information. On the other hand, Composition of Foods might not contain relatively 'exotic' foods like sweet potato leaves, and certain values (level of different minerals, for example) tend to differ between countries and even between regions.
What kind of 'odd things' did you have in mind?
Ahhh uni food. I remember the days of scrimping and saving to afford to eat.
Way to bulk out with nature's goodness!
Growing your own food does turn out to be more convenient, and the vegies turn out better.... I have been pouring over the diggers club catalogue working out what will be ready for planting when i get back to queensland... Now I have to add sweet potato to it, because I'd love to try using the leaves in things!
Came here from a google search after consuming sweet potato leaves by accident. How, you might ask? There were bunches of them on the kitchen counter and I thought they were watercress. I'm relieved that they are not poisonous.
However, to answer your question about what they taste like raw, they taste rather like watercress. And they go very well with pepperoni on crackers.
You should really try stir frying them with some oil and crushed garlic. Sooo delicious!
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