This year, my jackfruit season began in July, in Vancouver, when the most delicious fresh, ripe jackfruit turned up in some local stores. It was so sweet and flavourful, it didn’t even seem necessary to indulge in a round of kulae puttu. Of course I saved the seeds to cook in various ways including adding them to sambar and making chekké kuru pajji.

Tender unripe jackfruit is available here in frozen and canned form throughout the year. This is cooked as a vegetable, and the famously “meaty” texture of the fruit in this stage is a wonderful medium for experimenting with cooking and spicing that would typically overwhelm more delicate vegetables.

I’d like to share a couple of recipes, one using the seeds and the other, tender unripe jackfruit.

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The large arrowhead shaped leaves of Taro plants (Colocasia esculenta) are a familiar sight by the paddy fields or near stream beds and marshy lands in Coorg.

The plants love moisture, and in the powerful winds and relentless rains of the monsoon, they thrive defiantly. If you have the opportunity, stand by a clump of Taro when it’s raining. You’ll be treated to a beautiful sound and water display, as the rain hammers down on and slides off the slopes of the giant leaves. Not quite as dramatic, perhaps, as a dive bomber attack on a battleship, but it does get pretty loud!

Possibly native to the Indo-Malayan region, Taro has made its way around the world. In Hawaiian culture, where the plants played an significant role in the early years of the Polynesian settlement of the islands, it is considered sacred.

Known as Kaymbu in the Kodava language, it is one of the most useful food plants, with its edible corms (kaymbu kandé) stems and leaves.There are several types of  Kaymbu that are commonly eaten. The two main ones are the green stemmed and red stemmed (chonde kaymbu) varieties. There is another thicker leafed variety, known as mara (tree) kaymbu, that grows on the sheltered branches of large trees.

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