Recipes: Bean Sprout Stir Fry

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Common in our part of the world, mung bean sprouts are grown by sprouting mung beans and are extensively cultivated and consumed in East and Southeast Asia. I make this recipe quite often for S and the children and it’s a very healthy and easy recipe. Today, however, I am going to share the not healthy version of it. I’ll give the healthy version at the end.

Bean Sprout Stir Fry

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups sprouted moong beans
  • 1 large carrot
  • 1 large potato
  • 1 medium sized sweet potato (optional)
  • 1 tbsp garlic paste
  • 1 tbsp oil
  • Sunflower oil to deep fry
  • 1 large onion, sliced finely
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • A dash of lemon juice (optional)

Method:

  • Peel the carrots, potato and sweet potato if using and chop them into thinnish sticks of about 1 inch length.
  • In a large pan, heat the oil and when the oil becomes hot enough, deep fry the carrot, potato and sweet potato sticks until they turn crisp. Remove and keep aside.
  • In another pan, heat the 1 tbsp oil and when the oil warms up, add the garlic paste and stir.
  • Add the onions and saute till the onions turn translucent.
  • Add the salt and pepper to taste
  • Now add the fried vegetables and stir well
  • When the vegetables and the onions are mixed well, add the bean sprouts and toss well. Let it cook for a few minutes and be careful not to overcook the bean sprouts.
  • Check for seasoning, switch off the gas and drizzle some lemon juice if using.
  • Serve hot.

To make the healthy version, you only need to use carrots and green bell peppers, not potatoes, they will take too long to cook. After the onions become translucent, add in the carrot and bell pepper sticks and saute on a medium to high flame until the vegetables get cooked. Add the salt and pepper and then the bean sprouts. Continue sauteing on a medium to high flame for a few more minutes until the vegetables and the bean sprouts are cooked. Serve hot.

In My Hands Today…

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The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World – Lizzie Collingham

In The Taste of Empire, acclaimed historian Lizzie Collingham tells the story of how the British Empire’s quest for food shaped the modern world.

Told through twenty meals over the course of 450 years, from the Far East to the New World, Collingham explains how Africans taught Americans how to grow rice, how the East India Company turned opium into tea, and how Americans became the best-fed people in the world.

In The Taste of Empire, Collingham masterfully shows that only by examining the history of Great Britain’s global food system, from sixteenth-century Newfoundland fisheries to our present-day eating habits, can we fully understand our capitalist economy and its role in making our modern diets.

International Civil Aviation Day

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Like most toddlers, BB was fascinated by planes, but unlike most boys, this fascination has carried on as he grew up and has propelled him to his area of study and where he is today. But today, with the airline industry in shambles due to the ongoing pandemic, I wonder if he will continue in this field or will make a pivot, but that’s a topic for another day. So, when I heard about this day devoted to civil aviation, I knew I had to find out more.

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Tomorrow is the International Civil Aviation Day which has been celebrated on 07 December each year since 1994 by the International Civil Aviation Organisation or ICAO. The ICAO is an autonomous UN Body accountable for keeping up with the safety standards of international aviation. The date was chosen because December 07 1994 was the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Convention on International Civil Aviation. The Convention on International Civil Aviation, also known more popularly as the Chicago Convention, was signed by delegates from 54 countries. This defining international agreement has since permitted the global civil aviation system to develop peacefully and in a manner benefitting all peoples and nations of the world. The purpose of the day is to recognise the importance of aviation, especially international air travel, to the social and economic development of the world and the day is intended is to help generate and reinforce worldwide awareness of the importance of international civil aviation to the social and economic development of countries, and of the unique role of ICAO in helping countries to cooperate and realise a global rapid transit network at the service of all mankind. The importance of aviation as an engine of global connectivity has never been more relevant to look to international flight as a fundamental enabler of global peace and prosperity.

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Seventy-five years after ICAO’s foundation, the International Civil Aviation network carries over four billion passengers annually. The global Air Transport sector supports 65.5 million jobs and USD 2.7 trillion in global economic activity, with over 10 million women and men working within the industry to ensure 120,000 flights and 12 million passengers a day are carried safely to their destinations. The wider supply chain, flow-on impacts and jobs in tourism made possible by air transport show that at least 65.5 million jobs and 3.6 per cent of global economic activity are supported by the aviation industry according to research by the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG).

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Civil aviation, which includes all non-military aviation, both private and commercial plays a key role in human affairs. It lets us discover our world’s wondrous geographic and cultural diversity, enables us to learn about and benefit from each other and connects societies through global travel and trade, advancing access to food, education and healthcare. Today COVID-19 has severed international connections by air, cut off businesses from clients, kept tourists from destinations and disproportionately affected the vulnerable, it has also disrupted the operations and finances of airlines and airports worldwide, threatening their capacity to assure the global supply of medicines, vaccines, humanitarian aid and other vital goods. Aviation is also an energy-guzzling industry with emissions from the industry accounting for more than 2% of the global total, ranking it in the top ten emitters, so this time can be spent in thinking of ways to make the industry greener.

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Every five years, coinciding with ICAO anniversaries, the ICAO council establishes a special anniversary theme for International Civil Aviation Day. Between these anniversary years, Council representatives select a single theme for the full four-year intervening period. The theme until 2023 is Advancing Innovation for Global Aviation Development. Aviation is an important engine of our world and will be playing a critical role in lifting the world to recovery from COVID-19. It connects us and allows us to meet family and friends and also broaden our horizons and our minds. To everyone in this industry, especially in these trying times, here’s hoping that times change for the better and the skies are once again filled with planes transporting people and goods across the seas and land.

2021 Week 48 Update

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We are in the last weeks of 2021 and Covid is still not done with us. The newest variety Omicron which has come in just as people are planning their year-end holiday and travel has put a pause or in some cases, a full stop to many travel plans.

The variant has been detected in more than 38 countries, though there are no deaths as yet attributed to this variant. Many countries, including Singapore and India, have increased testing on incoming travellers and have stopped flights to the southern part of Africa. Other countries including Israel, Japan have already started closing their borders to all foreigners, with others probably following suit should the variant prove to be more severe or dangerous. At this point, we can only wait and see how things pan out. I am planning a trip to see my parents in early 2022 and hope things settle down by then.

In other news, the world just got a new country this week. After 396 years of rule by the British, Barbados has gained its independence with Dame Sandra Mason sworn in as president, replacing the British Queen as head of state.

Today’s quote is a very easy one to internalise. Nothing is impossible, because the word impossible itself has the word possible in it, so everything is possible, you just have to do it! This quote is attributed to the gorgeously talented Audrey Hepburn.

GG had her review with her endocrinologist this week and though her numbers are still much better, they are still a way to go before she reaches normal levels. She has another review after six weeks, so I am hoping the numbers get better by then.

That’s all from me this week. Stay safe, stay masked, and get vaccinated!

In My Hands Today…

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The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories – Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar

Nation-states often shape the boundaries of historical enquiry, and thus silence the very histories that have sutured nations to territorial states. “India” and “Pakistan” were drawn onto maps in the midst of Partition’s genocidal violence and one of the largest displacements of people in the twentieth century. Yet this historical specificity of decolonization on the very making of a nationalized cartography of modern South Asia has largely gone unexamined.

In this remarkable study based on more than two years of ethnographic and archival research, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar argues that the combined interventions of the two postcolonial states were enormously important in shaping these massive displacements. She examines the long, contentious, and ambivalent process of drawing political boundaries and making distinct nation-states in the midst of this historic chaos.

Zamindar crosses political and conceptual boundaries to bring together oral histories with north Indian Muslim families divided between the two cities of Delhi and Karachi with extensive archival research in previously unexamined Urdu newspapers and government records of India and Pakistan. She juxtaposes the experiences of ordinary people against the bureaucratic interventions of both postcolonial states to manage and control refugees and administer refugee property. As a result, she reveals the surprising history of the making of the western Indo-Pak border, one of the most highly surveillanced in the world, which came to be instituted in response to this refugee crisis, in order to construct national difference where it was the most blurred.

In particular, Zamindar examines the “Muslim question” at the heart of Partition. From the margins and silences of national histories, she draws out the resistance, bewilderment, and marginalization of north Indian Muslims as they came to be pushed out and divided by both emergent nation-states. It is here that Zamindar asks us to stretch our understanding of “Partition violence” to include this long, and in some sense ongoing, bureaucratic violence of postcolonial nationhood, and to place Partition at the heart of a twentieth century of border-making and nation-state formation.