Friday, November 28, 2008

CUCUMBER TO REDUCE COUGH AND SORE THROAT


Asians believe that the humble cucumber is good to reduce cough and sore throat.

My dad had planted a cucumber plant in his garden, and had invited his office staff to take some since there were quite a lot to harvest. Before you can say stop, ALL the organic cucumbers were snapped off.

Now, we never expected cucumbers to be very popular, especially with some of the young, 20-something bachelors. Some of these guys profess not to even like vegetables. Plus there were lots of other lpvely organic vegetables growing in the garden for their taking. There were lots of long beans, spinach, sayur manis, chillis, cekur, ulam raja, kang kung (also called water spinach, swamp cabbage, water convolvulus or water morning-glory).

Yup, dad has a huge garden, and a great part time gardener.

Anyways, back to those cucumbers, apparently, the whole office was down with a bacterial infection. People were coughing, lots of lozenges were passed around. The Malay staff believe cucumbers would help soothe their sore throats. The Chinese meanwhile believe that cucumbers have "cooling" properties.

Good to know.

I asked the guys how they eat them, and most of them just chop up the cukes into small chunks and eat them raw, just like that with rice and sambal and curry. Others like to juice it (I recommend adding a bit of raw honey for flavor and sweetness if you are not used to having raw cucumber juice. Alternatively add a pinch of sea salt and omit the honey).

Anyways, it's been two weeks since those guys harvested them cukes, and the plant has died on us. Dad said those termites are destroying his plants.

That's terrible. Now everyone has to buy them from the nearby supermarket.

Jasmin
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