B. Vegetables
Asian Vegetables
- Greens
- Okra
Okra, also known as gumbo or ladies’ fingers, is a warm-season vegetable. It is a good source of minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and fiber. It contains a sticky juice that people use to thicken sauces. It is an essential crop in many countries due to its high nutritional value. Also, people can use many parts of the plant, including the fresh leaves, buds, flowers, pods, stems, and seeds. Okra has a mild taste and a unique texture, with a peach-like fuzz on the outside. Inside the pod are small, edible seeds.
- Dudhi
Dudhi belongs to the gourd family and is a vine grown for its fruit. It has various names incuding bottle gourd, white-flowered gourd, long melon, New Guinea bean and Tasmania bean. It can be either harvested young to be consumed as a vegetable, or harvested mature to be dried and used as a utensil. When it is fresh, the fruit has a light green smooth skin and white flesh. Calabash fruits have a variety of shapes: they can be huge and rounded, small and bottle-shaped, or slim and serpentine, and they can grow to be over a metre long.
- Tindori
Coccinia grandis, the ivy gourd, also known as scarlet gourd, tindora and kowai fruit, is a tropical vine. It grows primarily in tropical climates and is commonly found in the southern Indian states, where it forms a part of the local cuisine. Coccinia grandis is cooked as a vegetable. In Southeast Asia, it is grown for its edible young shoots and edible fruits
- Turia
Turia is cultivated and eaten as a vegetable, but must be harvested at a young stage of development to be edible. The vegetable is popular in India, China and Vietnam. When the fruit is fully ripened, it is very fibrous. The fully developed fruit is the source of the loofah scrubbing sponge which is used in bathrooms and kitchens.
- Green beans
French beans are smaller than common green beans and have a soft, velvety pod. Quite fleshy for their size, only tiny seeds inhabit their delicate pods. French beans are tender, sweet and crispy. They generally grow twelve to twenty inches tall depending on the variety. There are some varieties that grow up to seven feet tall and are similar to runner beans.
- Bok choy
Bok choy is a type of Chinese cabbage. Chinensis varieties do not form heads and have green leaf blades with lighter bulbous bottoms instead, forming a cluster reminiscent of mustard greens. Chinensis varieties are popular in southern China and Southeast Asia. Being winter-hardy, they are increasingly grown in Northern Europe. Now considered a subspecies of Brassica rapa, this group was originally classified as its own species under the name Brassica chinensis by Carl Linnaeus. They are a member of the family of Brassicaceae or Cruciferae, also commonly known as the mustards, the crucifers, or the cabbage family.
- Roots
- Radish White
Radishes are grown and consumed throughout the world, being mostly eaten raw as a crunchy salad vegetable with a pungent flavor. There are numerous varieties, varying in size, flavor, color, and length of time they take to mature. Radishes owe their sharp flavor to the various chemical compounds produced by the plants, including glucosinolate, myrosinase, and isothiocyanate. They are sometimes grown as companion plants and suffer from few pests and diseases. They germinate quickly and grow rapidly, common smaller varieties being ready for consumption within a month, while larger daikon varieties take several months. Being easy to grow and quick to harvest, radishes are often planted by novice gardeners. Another use of radish is as a cover or catch crop in winter, or as a forage crop. Some radishes are grown for their seeds; others, such as daikon, may be grown for oil production. Others are used for sprouting.
- Others
- Snow Peas
Snow peas, along with sugar snap peas and unlike field and garden peas, are notable for having edible pods that lack inedible fiber (in the form of “parchment”, a fibrous layer found in the inner pod rich in lignin) in the pod walls. Snow peas have the thinner walls of the two edible pod variants. Two recessive genes known as p and v are responsible for this trait. p is responsible for reducing the schlerenchymatous membrane on the inner pod wall, while v reduces pod wall thickness (n is a gene that thickens pod walls in snap peas).The stems and leaves of the immature plant are used as a vegetable in Chinese cooking, stir-fried with garlic and sometimes combined with crab or other shellfish.
- Chillies
Chili pepper, any of several species and cultivars of very hot, pungent peppers in the nightshade family. Chili peppers can be eaten fresh or dried and are used to make chili powder and to flavour barbecue, hot curry, and other spicy sauces.