Family & Life Magazine Issue 11 | Page 29

100 Ways to Cook an Egg & More Fun Food Facts Food is such an important component of our everyday lives. Yet, you’ll be surprised at how little you actually know about food! We’ve whipped up some interesting facts about our Asian grub, with some help from YES Supermarket, which you can use to impress the family at the dinner table. There more #1an egg!areways to than 100 cook Did you know that, at one time in history, a chef’s hat was pleated 100 times to signify the 100 ways he knew how to prepare eggs? We kid you not; there really are more than 100 ways to prepare an egg although a lot of it involves combining with other ingredients to make custards, soufflé, etc. This is on top of the usual scrambled and over-easy variety! #2 Bananas are a man-made invention! The banana fruit is actually a manmade creation to replace another type of banana that went extinct due to disease! The typical yellow bananas you see hanging inside supermarkets is called the Cavendish banana from the Cavendish tree. The Cavendish trees are not allowed to reproduce normally and are instead, in a way, cloned in farms and laboratories. #3Strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are not berries! On the topic of bananas, our yellow fruity brethren, tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelons and avocados are considered berries! On the flipside, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are not considered berries. The botanical definition of a berry is a fleshy fruit that is produced from a single ovary. #4Honey is made from bee vomit! Technically speaking, honey is made from two ingredients – nectar and bee vomit! The industrious bees head out of their hives to extract the nectar from flowering plants before storing it in their stomach. Back at the hive, they regurgitate the nectar into another bee’s mouth and this goes back and forth until the partially digested nectar is deposited into a honeycomb. Finally, after the water from the nectar has evaporated, the bee seals the comb with a secretion of liquid from its abdomen. ketchup #5Tomato be medicine! used to The tomato ketchup sauce used to be marketed as patent medicine for diarrhoea and indigestion back in the 1800s! A physician named Dr John Cook Bennett declared that tomatoes were great for treating the aforementioned diseases and began publishing recipes on tomato ketchup. In fact, tomato ketchup originated from China and never had tomatoes in them until the 17th or 18th century, when it was introduced into the recipe by the English. was #6Chocolateform once used as a of money! Chocolate, or at least the cacao seeds used to make chocolate, were once used as currency by the Aztecs between the 1300s and 1500s! Interestingly, the cacao tree could not be grown in the dry highlands where the Aztecs lived, so they would trade with the Maya and other tribes so that they could receive a steady supply. The Aztecs even paid their taxes and tributes with cacao seeds! $ $ $ $ #7The kiwifruit isn’t from New Zealand! The kiwifruit, or Chinese gooseberry, is actually native to China and is so important to the Chinese that it is the country’s national frui HH