Butterfly Pea KakiAge and Smurf Drink (Garden Gobble)

 This Thursday we are participating Garden Gobbles hosted by Veggiegobbler. I am always amazed on how creative Veggiegobbler at producing amazing vegetarian dishes from her garden for her family. The garden produce that is daily available to us is the Butterfly pea flowers and Surinam Spinach or also known as Javanese Ginseng. When I first came back, I seriously thought that Javanese Ginseng was a weed plant before I knew what it was. Well, it grows like weed even now in our garden, self-seeded readily and they thrive any kind of weather here in our garden without any care. But Javanese ginseng leaves have a lot of health benefit for the whole family. One of the benefit for children eating Javanese leaves is that it helps boost appetite. So I always sneakily add some Javanese leaves into the dishes for my underweight kids so they eat more. For example, whenever I cook pasta or fried rice/noodles, I will add some Javanese leaves. Our Rayyan who is 3 and a half years old is only 11 kilogram.

 Butterfly peas is good to harvest daily as the blooms only open per-day and it promotes the plants to produce more flowers too. I was thinking of another way to enjoy our butterfly pea harvest and got the idea to fry it like Japanese kakiage style. Kakiage are often set on top of a rice bowl or Japanese soup like dishes that contain udon or soba noodles. Kakiage is usually a mixtured of julliene carrot and onions mix together with tempura batter and fried deeply in hot vegetable oil until you get a crunchy texture. Basically, it is a very easy to prepare kakiage, you just need tempura flour, vegetable oil, veggies and water for the basic ingredients. I tried mixing with sweet basil leaves before too which is also ok.  However, we made a fusian dish, we enjoyed the crispy kakiage together with pasta which contain Ginseng Jawa leaves harvest from our own garden.

Butterfly Pea Flowers Kakiage ~ Butterfly pea blooms, carrots, onions, tempura flour, water, vegetable oil.

Butterfly pea kakiage lifted our from the hot wok.

 Do you know you can create magic show for your children with the smurf drink? The smurfy blue colour drink with lime/lemon juice added to it will slowly turn to purplish ~ pink depending on how much you add. Scientifically its like a pH indicator of acidic or alkaline of a way to explain to your student. To make the smurf drink is easy, just boil water together with the blue part of the flower only. Traditionally it is boil with pandan leaves (screwpine leaves) but if you don't have it don't worry it is not necessary. Add sugar according to your taste. We usually harvest more than 50 butterfly pea flowers which can get me more than 3 Litres of smurf drink. Don't worry if you don't have much butterfly pea flowers you can adjust the water volume bit by bits. The more flowers, the more bluish it is. After cooling the smurf drink you can squeeze some lemon/lime juice according to your taste.

Smurf drink ~ Butterfly pea flowers, pandan leaves (optional) , sugar, water and lemon/lime juice (optional) . 

 Due to the weather change each week with one hot weather than the week after thunderstorm, many people got sick near Klang Valley area. So do take care. I am still having a fever.