Saving the world, one nangka seed at a time
WALKING into the kitchen this morning, I found my better half finishing his breakfast, a pile of jackfruit (nangka) seeds neatly piled in the plastic container they came in. Usually this goes into the bin.
Our wasteful ways have been weighing on me lately so I decided to start the weekend right by putting some effort into recycling.
After peeling off the seed jacket, I put them to boil in a small saucepan. I peeled off the last layer of thin brown skin covering the seeds after cooking but it is not really necessary. I ate a couple and put away the rest for the salad bowl later.
The boiled seeds taste nutty and sweet, like a cross between a baked potato and roasted chestnut. And sometimes, you get a faint whiff of something funky – a little fart comes to mind! That thought will pass, don’t worry, as you bite into it and it gives a crumbly, floury sensation before melting away in a slurry, its savoury-sweet taste leaving a little wonderment in the mouth.
Why we throw away nangka seeds I don’t know, but that is generally what we do almost instinctively. I guess eating is a learned behaviour and we didn’t learn to eat nangka seeds – in our home while growing up, we discarded the seeds. So we don’t have a memory, or habit, of eating nangka seeds although they are perfectly edible.
The idea for eating nangka seeds came to me from eating chempedak seeds. You know when you buy deep-dried chempedak fritters from a stall, they come with the seeds still inside the flesh. When you accidentally bite into one you realise that the seed actually tastes good! In fact, I thought the seed tasted better than the flesh.
But with chempedak fritters, it is not always possible to eat the seeds as they are often not cooked enough to be eaten alongside the flesh. So finding a chempedak fritter with an edible seed is a bit like striking the lottery – a rare treat.
And here we are, throwing away nangka seeds. Admittedly, it takes some 20 minutes to process the fistful of seeds; 15 minutes to boil and cook them through and a few more minutes to peel away the inedible bits. It seems almost too much effort for too few seeds.
What I sometimes do is to collect the seeds over a week before cooking them. If you happen to be cooking a curry or sayur lodeh, they can be tossed into the pot. Putting them in the rice cooker during the last 15 minutes of cooking rice is a brilliant solution as this has no downtime. They can also be roasted in the oven if you are baking something.
Finding more tasty uses for nangka seeds is an idea – and story – for another day. This morning’s crusade is on saving the environment, and another fruit sitting on the kitchen counter needs saving from the community dump.
We buy fresh food in the hope of making a home-cooked meal but work sometimes puts paid to those good intentions. I am still working on buying just enough to get us through the week .... The Sarawak pineapple has been ripening on the kitchen counter the last four days and there now is some urgency to cut it before rot set in.
I am reminded of why it’s in the kitchen in the first place: We were buying ready-peeled pineapples from the supermarket until the plastic containers they come in started to pile up. At the rate of one pineapple a week, that’s sending 52 plastic containers to the municipal dump a year. So we stopped buying pineapples in plastic containers and started buying the whole, unpeeled fruit.
(As for the jackfruit, I don’t see us buying a whole jackfruit anytime soon so we will have to go on buying it in plastic containers or avoid eating it altogether. I would love to see a supermarket take the initiative to encourage shoppers to bring their own receptacles for such items.)
If you’ve never cut a pineapple, I can tell you that it takes a good 20 minutes to peel, remove the many “eyes”, and slice it up. The fibrous pineapple core used to go into the bin but these days, I cut it into batons that I pack carefully for a colleague who loves chewing on them – this takes another minute or two but makes me – and Adie – happy.
By now, I am facing a pile of fruit waste. That’s when I wished I had a compost bin. Living in an apartment, and usually cooking for only two people, I consider that I don’t generate enough kitchen waste to warrant investing in a composter. And not being privy to a garden, what am I going to do with the soil generated by the composter? I am sure I am not alone in this predicament.
The solution is obviously for all condominiums and housing estates to have a communal composting facility. This should be in the new building checklist and a certificate of fitness should only be issued to future developments that check this box.
Residents can always initiate their own composting facility, of course. In this respect, I am happy to say that in the condo where I live, we have started a community herb garden – that’s another thing that I feel all condominiums should have but that’s another story for another day – and the next step for us is to start a compost heap that will put kitchen waste to good use, reduce the amount of waste going to the dump site, and produce compost to fertilise the herb garden.
It takes time to process food down to a zero waste level. Can we afford the time? Perhaps in the future more countries will practise four-day work weeks like in the Netherlands so we can make this quality lifestyle switch. Do we have a choice here? If you ask yourself all the hard questions and look at the statistics of the waste we are generating, I’m afraid not.
So where does this leave us? There are no superheroes on the horizon coming to our rescue; we just have to knuckle down and do our bit, the way we make time to do the important things in life.
Do something today, however small. If you just start by deciding to say no to plastic bags when you go shopping or take away food from stalls, that’s already a good step. Touche is a monthly column in which team Star2 shares its thoughts.