Bitter Flowers

My sister recently traveled to the south of Bhutan for work and came back with low-land treats including lots of bananas and some of the flowers you see on the left.  Yes, the flowers are to eat! In Dzongkha we call them bashika. I am not  sure of what they would be called in English but the scientific name for the shrub that these flowers grow on is Adhatoda vasica. The flowers are collected from the wild and was were fact among the many plants documented in a survey of  wild and edible plants in Bhutan. Bhutanese believe that the bitter  flowers have medicinal properties.

The same plant is in fact part of the range of plants used in traditional Indian medicine but instead of the flowers they use the  leaves which are either brewed into a tea or ground into a paste.



According to the survey of wild and edible plants there are several ways in which the flowers can be prepared including with meat, stir-fried or made into a datshi with chili and cheese. Our house-keeper, Yeshi made a datshi out of the flowers for lunch yesterday.

She began by boiling the flowers on our gas stove, she explained that this would  clean the flowers as well as  remove some of the bitterness. Below is the pot of flowers after they were boiled. Yeshi points out how brown the water has become.

 Next the flowers were drained and placed in a bowl with fresh water. Yeshi then scooped out the flowers and pressed out the water by hand.

 This is what the boiled, drained and hand strained flowers looked like.

Then Yeshi had to painstakingly clean the flowers by hand, removing any remaining dirt  as well as a large green, very boiled caterpillar. ( Poor guy!)

Afterwards she added the typical ingredients for a datshi. Chili, salt , a little bit of vegetable oil and water. The cheese is added after the dish is almost cooked. In this case we were out of Bhutanese cheese, so Yeshi used the processed Indian cheese that is becoming the standard in many Bhutanese kitchens.

And here we have the finished product, ready to eat.The texture of the flowers was a little slimy but not unpleasant and the taste was less bitter than I remember. Its possible that they were boiled a little too zealously removing too much bitterness.

For more on survey of wild and edible Bhutanese plants: 

Kinlay Tshering ( 2012 “ Edible and Wild Plants of Bhutan  and their contribution to food and nutritionsecurity”  Horticulture Division, Department of Agriculture Ministry of Agriculture & Forests, Royal Government of Bhutan

Reading Notes: The Matsutake Mushroom Festival

My job keeps me tied down to Thimphu for large chunks of the year ( thought admittedly for now I get a lovely long winter break) so I am always grateful to be able to read about other people's travels. All year I have followed this blog by an Australian teacher living in Bumthang with her family. She recently wrote about traveling eastward to attend the Matsutake Mushroom Festival in Ura.  Bhutanese collect Matsutake or Sangay Shamu ( Buddha Mushroom) to sell on the lucrative Japanese market where this particular mushroom apparently heralds seasonal change.  Her post on the festival is delightfully rambling ( its a little like listening to a work friend talk about their weekend over Monday morning coffee) so not all of the post is focused on mushrooms but  its worth a look for the absolutely wonderful photos of the festival in general and the mushrooms in particular.

Reading Notes: Collections of Honey.

In another life I worked for many years in a museum, backstage where all the artifacts were stored and cataloged and cared for. So understandable I have a soft spot for collections which is why I adored this recent blog post by  anthropologist Sarah Weber looking at what collections of honey in Palawan, Philippines could teach her about the flow of wild honey from forest to market to home. The answer? A lot! Particularly interesting was the way in which this museum-y approach allowed her to explore question about value and authenticity. What the post reminded me were the photos I sometimes see on social media-- particularly facebook- that people take of food that they purchased from various CSA ( Community Supported Agriculture) that they belong to and all the claims of value, purity and even perhaps a gentle moralizing implied in the photos ( often in the captioning of them).

Fruits of the Forest: Nakay

One of the greatest pleasures of coming back to Bhutan during the monsoon months is the availability of nakay or  wild ferns. In fact this year when I flew home in August, my family, well aware of my fondness for nakay, stopped on the way home from the airport to purchase nakay from some of the roadside stalls between Paro and Thimphu.



Nakay is one of the most widely known and collected edible wild plants in Bhutan. According to a joint Japanese- Bhutanese survey of edible wild plants, Bhutanese know about and collect 190 species of wild plants, eating not only the fruits, nuts and tubers but in some cases also the flowers, stem, shoots and leaves. Nakay was found to be the best known of these wild plants and the term " Nakay" in fact is used to refer to three different species of fern. Its amazing how rich Bhutanese forests continue to be and that despite the introduction of all sort of foreign and processed foods that Bhutanese continue to collect and enjoy  these wild plants, many of which are said to have particular medicinal properties. For example according to the survey, nakay is believed to stimulate the brain.Saddly my family and I are not collectors and we eat only the wild plants that get sold in the local market.

Nakay comes covered in a brown fur, my mother always takes great pains to wash each stack in vinegar and water so that this fur comes off completely. Its easy enough to do by hand, just gently brushing off the fur.

She then cuts up the stalks to remove any parts that aren't tender enough . Below you see a batch of tender-est parts of each stalk.

Most often we make nakay datshi with chilli and cheese. Each family makes datshi, a standard way to cook vegetables a little differently, we tend to boil the vegetables with a little chopped onions, garlic, chilli and salt, adding butter when the water bubbles and cheese when the vegetable is almost cooked. Delicious!  

 *Here is a reference if you are interested in learning more about the survey of edible wild plants in Bhutan.

Ken-ichi Matsushima, Mineon Minami and Kazuhiro Nemoto ( 2012) " Use and Conservation of Edible Plants in Bhutan" from the Journal of the Faculty of Agriculture, Shinshu University Vol. 48, no.1