A friend of mine said he finds fresh fenugreek leaves up by Jean-Talon and Parc Ex in Montreal, where there’s a whole host of Southeast Asian grocers and restaurants. There are two much closer to my house in the southwest of the city, but I’ve never seen fenugreek there.
The greens are hard to come by but are supposedly a important ingredient in Indian cooking. They are often just replaced with spinach leaves but having never tried them fresh, I’ve always wondered what the big deal was. So I went to the farmers market that took place at the SAT about a month ago. It was a one time only kind of pop-up farmers market that was overrun by hipsters. They had a bar with available natural wine and a great restaurant upstairs run by some of my favourite Montreal chefs, Michelle Marek and Seth Gabrielse (I’m still swooning from her simple strawberries in sugar a summer and a half ago. Not such a complicated thing, but great food is about sourcing great products). But people are cheap, so there wasn’t a big crowd upstairs or at the bar sipping expensive (but hip!) wine. Lots of people, instead, were walking around with plastic cups of beer, wandering from free sample of honey (from Santropol, UQAM and other local rooftop gardens) to raw ravioli (Crudessence), to a few bloggers and bakers. Some things were tasty. Most were just fine. It was a grab and go type operation that required pushing through the crowds.
And I didn’t meet a single available young farmers market hipster. I mean, come on, I couldn’t turn around in there without bumping into someone with a handful of short seasoned but overrated garlic scapes and somehow I managed to wind my way through the crowd about 5 times without casually bumping into someone attractive with hands capable of making me a dinner of sustainable wild Arctic char with vanilla-cauliflower mash and roasted cauliflower and apples. Seriously, it’s not that hard. And I’m not that demanding. Clearly.
Anyway, among all those bloggers grilling eggplant and the lovely treats from Sweet Lee’s Bakery for sale, I found a few farm stands. It was supposedly a farmers market after all. And one of those stalls was selling fresh fenugreek leaves. Now I didn’t know see them originally, not knowing what they looked like, but someone else said the name and I perked up and veered toward the leaves.
“How much?” I asked.
“$1.50 a bunch,” the vendor replied.
Whoa! So cheap!
“You make your own sprouts?” he asked.
Oh! Right! People use these for sprouts! But, no, I told him, I wanted them for curries.
I knew I’d seen tons of recipes in my favourite Indian cookbooks (a selection from Madhur Jaffrey, Naomi Duguid and and Hari Nayak) that called for fresh fenugreek leaves and now was my chance!
But then after looking through all my books (after buying the leaves from the confused farmer – apparently curry is not such a normal thing for a young woman to get excited about a farmers market. Perhaps this is why I was unsuccessful at bumping into someone with mutual interests. Perhaps.) I found that not so many recipes called for the fresh leaves.
And that’s when I turned to google. Apparently the fresh leaves are pretty neutral – a bit like spinach, and most recipes just call for the easier to find spinach instead. The dried leaves, however, are significantly more pungent and add a unique flavour to dishes. Well, it just so happens I already had a bag of dried fenugreek leaves in my spice cupboard. So there was no point drying these fresh ones. Instead, I just tossed them into this curry recipe from “Mangoes and Curry Leaves.” It was alright. Nothing to write home about (and yet here I am, mom), but that might also be because I used fresh tomatoes instead of canned, thus reducing the salt and concentration of the tomato flavour. It wasn’t bad, anyway. The chicken was tender because I slow-cooked it, but that also meant that less of the water boiled off since the slow-cooker was completely covered with a lid. So it could have been worse. And that was also my motto for my (significant) other-hunting at the farmers market – could have been worse. I mean, I could have dropped an expensive glass of natural wine on someone with a tattoo saying “I love cauliflower.” That would have been worse.
Chicken Curry with Fresh Fenugreek Leaves (or Spinach) – Slow-cooked or not
adapted from “Mangoes and Curry Leaves”
I just wrote out this recipe and then my computer ate it. So it will come later when I have the heart to write it again. Forgive me.
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