Glimpses of some of the stalls at the Mega Goa World Expo from Dec2-4, 2021: A glimpse into the exciting bounty of produce from Arunachal Pradesh (white tea, kiwi fruit, black cardamom, walnuts, ginger/apple/kiwi wine); Manipur (black and red rice, ghost chillies, turmeric, ginger), Uttarakhand, Chattisgarh (rice varieties), Waigaon turmeric from Wardha district, also Spice Board spices, snacks from Gujarat and flavoured banana chips from Kerala and much more. The wonder of eco-friendly choir, and agar agar choices! The Coffee Board was offering the best coffee in the world for tasting and there were premium Khadi garments, towels, honey, much else to see, taste and buy. You don’t know what you missed if you didn’t visit!
By Tara Narayan
SOME experiences will always be memorably precious. Like at the Arunachal Pradesh stalls at the Goa Tourism’s so called-Mega Goa World Expo last week, at the Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Indoor Stadium from Dec 2-4, 2021, I found myself tasting a real for goodness sake mandarin orange all the way from an orange orchard in Arunachal Pradesh so far away…the thin-skinned orange was so delicious I didn’t want to throw away orange skin and seeds, came home and put the skins out to dry in the sun so that I could powder and use it as orange aromatic bathing scrub (not that winter is the time to go scrubbing your skin so much)!
Most of the stuff on display at the Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur stalls invited oohs and aaahs, some amazingly desirable since most of it is cultivated and sourced from organic farms. I looked at walnuts in shell, all kinds of teas (including the most expensive tea of the world – silvery white long strand tea which I still have to drink!), several varieties of the large dark big cardamoms, boxes of kiwi fruit and the brilliantly orange Mandarin oranges, also huge knobs of ginger and turmeric, bottles of kiwi wine, apple wine, ginger wine (these were for sale). I bought a set of the wines and the generous guys here offered me freebies of some ginger, cardamoms, walnuts, packet of cinnamon, two mandarins.
Some of it was for sale, some samples to give away to whoever they liked you, I guess they must have liked me. I went back again last day thinking I’ll catch up with some talking with the amiable smiling Tage Tatung (director, Horticulture, government of Arunachal Pradesh) or was it Anong Lego (director of agriculture Naharlagun, Arunachal Pradesh) but it was not to be. Post lunch some of the stalls had packed up and gone to catch the flight or train back home I suppose. So now must go to Arunachal Pradesh some day before I’m gone with the wind!
OTHER appealing stalls: The Manipur stall next door had these much raved about exquisite “ghost chillies” (also king chilli, U-morok, ghosg pepper, ghost chilli, naga jolokia, bhoot jolokia) which are said to be one of hottest chilli in the world with Scoville Heat Unit (SHUS) reported to be 20,41,427 – they have a higher content of capsaicin (3-5%) compared to other chillies (incidentally, eating such hot peppers if you can is said to give relief from asthma, sinuses, flue, hay fever, etc). I’ll stay with south India’s black pepper, thank you! Black rice is a such a big think out in the north-east states and out in Meghalaya I recall chakhao or black rice pudding or kheer to live for. An intriguing crunchy snack one of the Nagaland girls here made me taste out of a packet was roasted black rice. There were some other snacks to buy but I got carried away by the Arunachal Pradesh stalls next door!
COFFEE BOARD
AFTER years I had some long forgotten genuine traditional hot filter coffee at the Coffee Board’s stall (where a variety of coffee seeds were on exhibit). Further up there were the Café Gud Morning Shraddha Enterprises vending machines offering a taste of flavoured teas of cardamom, jaggery, lemon, lemon grass ginger and more – some visitors to the expo were buying up hundreds of sachets at nominal pricing (GST didn’t apply)!
By way of education I learned coffee is good for liver, Parkinston’s patients and for diabetics (read the Coffee Board leaflets). Of course if one is travelling down south India there’s no question of drinking tea, I will look for precious Mysore filter coffee any day and every time! I wasn’t supposed to do shopping but I bought some excellent cardamom-flavored jaggery power from here. In my old Bombay days I would go to the Matunga-Bombay marketplace to buy these “cafee jaggery” cubes, they are the perfect traditional sweeteners for filter coffee.
From Dantewada, Chhatisgarh were these organic varieties of riced with names like javaphul, sugandha, lokati machi, khamang, dubraj…also brown rice, parboiled rice, red-cum-brown rice, red rice, brown poha, popped rice, kodo millet, finger millet, little millet, barnyard millet…millets are one of the new super food grains of the health-conscious world. The Uttarakhand stall too made one realize that it is well worth going organic and Uttarakhand must surely have the best model to copy.
Uttarakhand is almost fully organic cultivation state now and we know farming reverts to organic the old nutrients in soil also return making it rich and fertile – so the crops are naturally nourishing, we are as good or as bad as what we put in our mouth. I don’t think Goa has anything like the Uttarakhand Organic Commodity Board which lists a fact file of some 2,000 clusters of farms certified for organic cultivation in 1,200 villages of the state; a hundred thousand farmers are trained in different aspects of organic farming…and much more. Hey, prosperity is being delivered through agriculture in Uttarakhand (they have a Dehradun-based Uttarakhand Organic Commodity Board).
AND then come to the amazing Choir Board products of choir bricks, choir “bhusa” (wonderful base for growing microgreens at home), planter pots and a range of containers made of fine coconut choir strands, ideal for planting microgreens in small spaces. Coconut coir is organic manure and is well used in composting soil for planting. More familiar to us are choir mats, floor mats, ropes, strings, etc.
So you see the coconut tree is really a kalpravriksha or wish-fulfilling tree! It offers so many eco-friendly ideas if only we had the will to take them up — if only as a country we would boycott plastics mercilessly. Rescue our land and oceans from turning into killer reservoirs of micro plastics! Think about it and don’t just think, do something towards this end personally, collectively, community-wise.
Elsewhere there were yummy Ayurveda candies, herbals for the usual ailments of seasonal change; the Spice Board was there too with samples of spices but none to give away! Most participants seemed to me to be from south India, Kerala, Karnataka, Tamilnadu. A Punjab stall was also there with bag full of wheat and rice and flours to sell.
A Kerala-based Dr Jackfruit India company has become adventurous with banana wafers were the boys were going around making everyone taste just salted, peri peri, salt and black pepper and if you please sour cream, onion and parsley banana wafers. Irresistible, banana wafers in the original Kerala-style – ultra thin and clean flavors. I don’t think these are deep fried in coconut oil though, I prefer coconut fries if I have to eat any fries. Still I would consider banana wafers as a “superior snacking experience” vis-à-vis familiar potato wafer crunching! The problem with fryums which we love so much is the use of the deadly hydrogenated veggie mixed oils or mixed fats with palmolein oil – it’s bad news for arteries and the heart, so don’t over indulge, that’s all I can say.
Hey, amongst the Kerala companies an Adens Foods & Beverages is promoting the gifts of the jackfruit tree in a big way – jackfruit flour can go into making puttu, idli, dosa, idiyappam, chappathi and how about jackfruit upma powder, jackfruit pasta, raw jackfruit flour substituting for whole wheat flour? How about “dehydrated ripe jackfruit, banana, pineapple, papaya, mango”? One of these days Kerala will go the 100% Uttarakhand organic way!
MY last stop was at the Marine Hydrocolloids agar agar stall. Having lived in South East Asia for over 16 years I’ve always had a soft corner for these lovely crinkly white agar agar strands, call them bleached sea weed if you like. Agar agar can replace jelly crystals with far more superlative agreeability! Once upon a time I used to love making mildly sweet milk agar agar firm jellies, can garnish with nuts before serving. Agar agar makes for a superlative dessert treat, try doing agar agar in rose milk.
A Mr Binu G here told me that all their agar agar products begin with “wholly natural hydrocolloid carrageenan” – yes, carrageenan is a seaweed which they are cultivating in farms nowadays to arrive at carrageenan or “agar agar” products used widely in confectionary, bakery, dairy, cosmetics, plant tissue culture, microbiology, dental castings if you please, and pharmaceuticals too.
Primary agar agar makes for “water soluble polysaccarides extracted from certain species of red seaweed” although from the pictures one may see that natural carrageenan start out silkily green (before it is processed). Seaweeds are endlessly exciting and one of our super foods. Discover the recipes of carrageenan or agar agar –make flavoured jellies and milks, ice-creams, yogurts, fruit crushes, mocktails, vegan marshmallows and much more. There is something called spreadable agar agar “wondergel.” Cochin-based Marine Hydrocolloids is the country’s only company manufacturing and exporting agar agar powder and strips, and other associated products.
IT was time to go and on my way out I bought these soft Surti batasa savoury bites (all refined of course), but there were one or two stalls doing baked farsan too. Such expos are a good way to catch up with the times and find out where we’re headed as a country! The funnily named Mega Goa World Expos (as in the advertisements) from Dec2-4, 2021 was a Goa Tourism collaborative affair but I won’t say there was too much footfall — although there was a lot to see, learn and enjoy and worth promoting as way to go.
Third and final day when I was tempted to drop by again at least one participant complained to me that he was returning to Surat with 70% of his products unsold, “It’s okay because we came via an MSME government scheme, didn’t pay too much for the stall, but it was not the same for other stalls who’ve paid out in several lakh…second day there was a power failure from 12 noon onwards till 4pm, it was dark and hot, very bad. Such things must not happen!”
PLUM CAKE JOYS
Well, I’ve nothing to say to all that except third day afternoon many had packed up and left – latecomers to the expo were disappointed. It’s a good thing I’d gone for a quick dekho on the first day itself and discovered the Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Chattisgarh, Mysore stalls…a couple from Goa too. Before I call it a day here I will confess I bought my first early plum cake of the Xmas season coming in — from Chef Rodwin of Rodwin Boulangerie & Patisserie (Raia).
Chef Rodwin was here with plum cake (Rs500 per half kg, it’s very good), multigrain muffins, German stolen, Italian Panini and other sweet breads which we don’t see all the year around. I dare say this chef seems to be a health-conscious chef, more so than most – he says he only uses Nanu Farms’ palm sugar. No refined sugar sweeteners for him, thank-you!