Naga Dish | Pork with Turmeric Flower

We are definite that most of our readers here at R&L (including us) have not yet tried even a fraction of the food available in this world – that are actually edible. And so, it really excites us to explore and share our recipes because of the many possibilities – to cook something up using the same ingredients and oh! how differently right? For example ,we have Idli from the South, Sel Roti from the east and Ma-su-yem (Sticky rice roti in Ao, Naga) from further north east (Nagaland) and all of these are made of one common ingredient “Rice”. Isn’t it amazing?

So the recipe for today has an adventure story from last week. After a long day at work, we went to this place in the outskirts of Kohima town , because one of our aunts wanted to pick a ‘flower that was edible’. She said ‘it has huge health benefits with a taste and texture like that of a mushroom’. It took us about an hour’s ride to get to the place (hillside) and in 30 minutes, we filled about 3 medium sized shopping bags with the beautiful fragrant turmeric flowers. After returning home, we followed up on this plant from a book on ‘Medicinal Plants from Nagaland’ and to our utmost surprise it turned out to be the flowering part of the most common spice -Turmeric (Haldi in hindi). Here we call it Jamsunaro (Ao-Changki Naga) , Chiecie (Angami Naga) and Hetu (Chakhesang Naga).

So without further ado, let us share the recipe we are really excited about – because even for us, its our first time to learn that turmeric flowers are also edible. Yes! definitely a must-try recipe.

Ingredients:

1/2 kilogram of Pork (or 5-8 of dried salted whole fish)
12 Turmeric flower
6 Green Chilly
4 table spoon of Bamboo shoot shreds
500ml of water
Salt to Taste

Preparation:

Wash the turmeric flower a number of times because the petals holds a lot of dirt.

The fragrance of this flower comes off very strong so incase you want a milder flavour, put the required quantity of flowers in a pot, add water and heat it for about 5 mins – just enough time for the flavors to be released. Do not bring it to boil such that it gets cooked. Then drain the water out.

Repeat the process to the amount of fragrance you want to add to the dish. For this recipe, we drained the flowers only once.

Directions:

Mix all the ingredients in a saucepan and cook until the meat is almost cooked (For this recipe we used pork). Do not add the flowers now.
Add the Turmeric flower and let it simmer for about 15 mins.

Serve hot with rice.