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Eat bayam and enjoy the prince of vegetables
I don't know whether Popeye the Sailor still exists in today children's world
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I
don't know whether Popeye the Sailor still exists in today children's world. In my time, he was a constant foe. He was portrayed as a hero who regained his strength by eating bayam, a spinach variety. Back then, my mother often forced her children to eat bayam too.
My frustration about bayam remained until my teenage days. It got worse when I found a white caterpillar was also our bayam dish. The cook did not spot it while she was washing the vegetables.
Bayam, a variety of spinach, is an honorable vegetable and even the 12th century Arab writer Ibn -al Awam consumed and liked it, calling it the prince of vegetables as he described spinach.
Its origin was Persia and some inedible variations still grow (Alan Davidson: The Oxford Companion to Food). The plant has traveled east to China via Nepal by the 7th century, but only much later reached Europe, when the Arabs who invaded Spain brought the vegetable with them.
The name spinach is from the old Persian name aspanakh. By the 16th century, in regions with four seasons, the spinach became also famous as a Lenten food, because winter sown seeds produce plants just right to consume.
A famous dish liked by Catherine de Medici, Queen consort of France, was a dish cooked a la Florentine. In France, that description almost always refers to a dish containing spinach of which she was very fond. In Florence it was not named the same.
Moreover, in France, a dish of spinach is called "viroflay". It is named after a suburb in Paris where spinach was grown in many varieties before the suburb was roofed over with cement (Food Waverley Root).
Here, bayam is easy to find and is next to kangkung and tauge (water convolvulus and mung bean sprouts), a daily vegetable in many Indonesian kitchens. Even in small villages, the bayam, a lowland plant, is available. It is nutritious and has an attractive variation of green and red, giving more color to a creative cook's dishes.
In many places in the country, crisp crackers are important in everyday meals. People in in southern areas of Central Java dip bayam leaves into a batter of diluted rice flour spiced with coriander, garlic and salt.
Then, they are fried crispy in sufficient oil. The bayam cracker can be an alternative light meal. Just make your favorite batter or use ready-mixed tempura batter and fry your own keripik bayam.
As more health conscious cooks today often use bayam, the popularity of bayam has increased. Bayam contains a considerable amount of nutrients such as vitamin A, B and C. In traditional medicine, bayam is used to treat dizziness and hypertension and can be used in soup by immersing the leaves in boiling water for three minutes and then eating with a teaspoonful of sesame oil (Henry Lu).
A 100-gram edible portion of local green leafed bayam contains carbohydrates, 267 milligrams of calcium, 67 milligrams of phosphor and 3.6 of iron. Red bayam variety has more protein, calcium and phosphor.
If you are a hobby gardener and like to plant the nutritious bayam, the vegetable can be picked just 25 days after planting or after 60 until 90 days when the seeds are needed for further use.
Seeds usually obtained from the golden yellow flowering plants, which are put on a bamboo tray in many bayam varieties, are found in various regions in Indonesia. The most widespread is the the bayam putih and the bayam kakap (Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan) because of the pleasing flavor when made into traditional dishes, say foodies.
The bayam putih has round leaves and the bayam kakap has pointed ones. The leaves are thinly structured. In Jakarta, the bayam putih is mostly sold at traditional wet markets. A new variety is the so-called bayam Meksiko. This variety has more seeds than the already existing varieties.
To add to the variety of spinach, there is also an abundance of bayam spinasi in supermarkets. It's a Dutch variety, often made into a spinach pie or stup bayam Dutch style with sliced shallots, pepper, salt and a pinch of sugar. Milk is added when cooking, making the stup bayam spinasi taste like the Dutch hutspot.
Bayam is also an excellent vegetable for stir frying and requires a minimum amount of fat, just about 2 tablespoons. The stir frying method is a Chinese cooking technique and is very popular indeed.
Should you like to snack between meals and you crave for ssomething filling but nutritious with your cup of tea in the afternoon, then here is an excellent recipe of a bayam snack, called kroket bayam.
Bring 150 milliliters water to boil, and add 150 grams of bayam for a while and put into a sieve. Pour cold water onto it, and cut the bayam finely. Don't throw away the boiling water. Chop 150 grams of onion, 2 cloves of garlic, and 2 red chilies (discard the seeds). Mix 2 tablespoons of milk powder with 2 tablespoons of flour and dilute with above mentioned water. Heat 1 tablespoon margarine and stir fry the onion and garlic until aromatic, add the chilies and stir fry for 1-2 minutes. Put in the bayam, and season with * teaspoon of nutmeg and * teaspoon salt or to your liking, then pour in 2 tablespoons of milk powder. Mix well. Take 1 tablespoon of the mixture and form into a kroket shape (croquette). Dip the kroket in the beaten egg and roll in 50 grams of bread flour. Fry in sufficient oil until golden and done. Makes 14 pieces.
