Lemony's lemongrass relatives in the Batam View Herb Garden

I'm back! we went to this wonderful Batam View resort in Batam, an Indonesian island about 1 hr ferry ride away from Singapore. They have a nice little herb garden with lemon grass and all sorts of other useful plants in it!



I took lots of snaps, will be posting them here slowly in the next few days, but first things first...



The caption says:
"Lemon grass features in Indonesian, Malaysian, Sri Lankan and Indian cooking and is widely used in savoury dishes and meat, poultry, seafood and vegetable curries. It harmonizes well with coconut milk, especially with chicken or seafood, and there are countless Thai and Sri Lankan recipes exploiting this combination. The stems are also used in teas or used in pickles and in flavouring marinades."

And look just how big they can grow!! Maybe they should be called lemonbush, heehehe... . I wonder how they are harvested. Do you need to wait for a new sprig to grow and then pull it out? That would take my Lemony some time... heehee.



deejay pointed out to me that they use a lot of lemon grass in Thailand, especially for Tom Yam Goong. I love Thai food!!! Batam View has this nice cozy place called the Kelong Restaurant, and they serve the most wonderful dish with lemon grass ever!!! I forgot what it's called, but basically it's crispy, lightly-breaded fried king prawns with finely-cut lemongrass and basil leaves. Yummmmm....... I should've taken a photo of it; we came back there for dinner the following night just to have the same dish again. :D