{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Sri Lanka Podcast: Island Stories","title":"Sri Lanka’s Secret Spices","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1004,"description":"Many of Sri Lanka’s indigenous spices are barely known outside the island; indeed, so far as Tesco, Walmart or Carrefour go, they remain inscrutable, ingredients of electrifying mystery. But collectively, they may well have been what Virginia Woolf had in mind when, as she sat for dinner with her husband, Leonard, the assistant government agent for the District of Hambantota - “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.\"  Sri Lanka’s lesser-known indigenous spices lend dishes a distinctively captivating flavour. The first of these reticent herbals is moringa, a short-lived, fast-growing, ten-metre-high tree, indigenous to India and Sri Lanka. It matures with good-tempered ease, demanding merely tropical temperatures, water, and good drainage. Barely known outside Asia and Africa, it is a spice to covet. Every part of the plant is edible. Its leaves can be used in salads or boiled like spinach. Its flowers make an excellent tea, and its seed pods, when young, are a rare alternative to asparagus. Its taste is grassy, a little bitter with an agreeable horseradish-like heat and flavour, which explains why it is also known as the horseradish tree. According to several authoritative scientific studies of the plant, it is ridiculously healthy as well. Its dried leaves offer seven times the Vitamin C of oranges, nine times the protein of yoghurt, ten times the Vitamin A of carrots, and fifteen times the potassium of bananas. It is widely used in Indian Ayurvedic medicine to mitigate heart disease and as an anti-inflammatory, anti-cholesterol, antidepressant, and antioxidant. It may also help you see better and grow more luxurious hair. The ancient Greeks used it in perfume. The Egyptian pharaohs depended on it for their complex death rituals. Warriors consumed it before battle. And with far less drama, it is widely used in Sri Lankan cooking and in many of the rice and curries made here on The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It is a favourite...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/7CUca6C9EALNbLyQZMPMNrpo1fyKq_MC2tHuUC5ZiGs/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85MWIx/NzY5MWZhY2Q4NmM5/ZTAzZTc1YjE4ZTZh/ZGY3Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}