A couple of weeks back, I got proud of myself that I’d managed to do weekly updates, what, twice in a row.  Lo, said I, how productive and consistent!  Be this the new routine?  Then my head swelled an unseemly amount and I preened for a while.

Hence, when I was then unable to post for a while, I was forcibly reminded of the whole ‘pride comes before a fall’ thing.  But no matter!  Today I shall flip through the dictionary and bring forth a new word to delight myself and you with.  Without further ado…

tamarind (noun)

Woohoo?  I mean, it’s not even those cool little monkeys.  The addition of one stupid letter at the end and all the years I spent watching David Attenborough documentaries building up for this moment… wasted.

Wait, I have to share something before I go on.  It’s not a tamarind or a tamarin, but it is an animal and therefore I can eke out the slightest connection.

Marcus, please, there are people watching.

It’s a photo of couple of African Painted Dogs I saw at the zoo last year.  One was so clumsy and flopping around everywhere, and his friend was just like, “What are you doing?”  Silly Dog was trying to scratch himself or something (unsuccessfully), while the rest of the pack snoozed.

Anyway, back to the actual word of the day.

So tamarinds are both trees and the fruit thereof. The dictionary states that it’s, “The fruit of a large tropical tree, Tamarindus indica,a pod containing seeds enclosed in a juicy acid pulp that is used in food and beverages.”  Apparently the tree itself is also useful and nice for its shade, wood and fragrant flowers.

Tamarinds look like this, in case you were wondering and didn’t want to google it yourself for fear of alerting the government of your interest in this plant. (Understandable.)

Now, this is something really special that I want to tell you – an age old recipe for tamarinds handed down through generations in my family and made up by me a few seconds ago.

Step 1: Get some food, anything you’d like to use as a base. Bread, avocado, bubblegum. Go wild.
Step 2: Add one to two tamarind pods, shells still intact, on top of your food.
Step 3: Walk away and let someone else who knows what they’re doing into the kitchen.

And there you have it!