Santol Salad with Pumpkin Flowers!
Today, walking through my town’s street market area, I noticed a vegetable that I had never had before. It turned out to be the flowers and shoots from a Pumpkin; I was immediately curious enough to buy 2 bunches of the long droopy orange flowers attached to beautifully thick green stems.
I decided to try and make a new salad recipe using those pumpkin leaves and flowers, and this is what I came up with.
- Pumpkin flowers/leaves/soft ends of the stalks
- 1 Santol fruit
- a few stalks of Thai holy basil
- a few stalks of fresh Dill leaves
- 1 chunk of ginger
- handful of peanuts
- spoon of sesame seeds
- dash of black pepper
The Santol is a fruit native to South East Asia, and I think the name Santol comes from the Tagalog languages in The Philippines. If you don’t know of it, it has a soft peel on the outside, and has a taste that goes from extremely bitter, to slightly bitter and wonderfully sour, to slightly sweet, to very sweet, as you move from the more firm outer orange/pinkish rind into the soft white/pinkish center. After removing the outermost skin, mixing all its tastes together made this fruit an awesome partner to the pumpkin buds.
The vegetable seller recommended that I boil the pumpkin leaves and stems first (the flowers were already quite soft). I put them in my rice cooker, pushed down the button, (took about 10 minutes to reach a boil) and let them actually roll with the bubbles for about 30 seconds. Dump out the hot water, pour in cold water, and it seems I got lucky because the consistency was just about perfect!
I shredded the Santol, added the now-soft pumpkin leaves and flowers, tore up the Basil leaves, tore up the Dill leaves, shredded the small piece of ginger, and then just dumped the peanuts and sesame seeds on top. A few dashes of black pepper, an ingredient I use in every salad that I make, and it was time to taste test.
-A healthy tip I started in college: replace salad dressing with crushed up peanuts or pretzels, any fruit you have on hand (apples and oranges were the most common for me), and a few dashes of black pepper. In my opinion its not only healthier than any salad dressing I know, but it also just tastes better to me. It also means one less item that you would need a refrigerator to store, bringing us one step closer to the long-term goal of people not needing refrigerators at all).
So, this was a great salad, looked beautiful too, and it was all fresh. I am lucky to live in the countryside of Thailand in a small town, all 3 vegetables that I used in this were definitely picked this morning, but buying them from a Farmer’s market would be quite a similar situation.
I am sure that Pumpkin leaves and flowers are on at least one of the latest health-fad Must-Eat lists. They look so cool, and it was so awesome to eat a flower and find it to be hearty enough to taste! (not just some gentle petals that are shriveled and gone at the first touch of hot water)
Highly recommend this combo, and I would love to hear of another version. Or any other random attempt at a new salad that turned out surprisingly great!
*I also took out 5 or 6 mangosteens to put on the table just in case I needed their sweetness to get this salad into my stomach. I didn’t because this salad turned out to be awesome, but of course I ate the mangosteens in the end because they are wonderfully delicious little fruits as well.
