Chichindo, or snake gourd

another cooking first for me

For me, choosing vegetables or fruit is nearly always a spontaneous act. With the exception of staples like tomatoes, onions and the like, I rarely plan what to buy. It’s more often Oh that looks like a particularly perfect cauliflower, or in the spirit of my recent experimentation, Now there’s something I’ve never tried cooking before.

Once home—if it’s one of the unknowns—it tends to sit for a while, taunting me as I pass the counter or open the fridge—until I decide to do something about it. And in the case of at least one specific bit of produce, I learned that even a day in the fridge is not ideal.

Because of this, I am worrying about the snake gourd, or chichindo as it’s known locally, that I impulse bought the day before yesterday after seeing the bundle above hanging outside one of my favorite veggie shops.

It is a hole-in-the-wall: when she is inside the small space, the proprietress is literally a few steps below ground. Generally, it’s open in the morning and again sometime in the afternoon/evening. If you were to walk by anytime in the middle of the day, the door will be shut and bolted, with no sign—literal or otherwise—to even indicate that it is a place of business. It took me a while to understand that I was never going to know quite when she was open, that I couldn’t really plan to shop there. This does suit my impetuous vegetable tendencies, though, so if I’m walking past and it’s open, I often go check out the rows of bags and occasional baskets neatly arranged both inside and around the door. Everything fresh and bright looking, and almost always something unexpected to be found.

This time, I passed over the fresh green lapsi and plumped for a snake gourd, simply because it was on display and I’ve not, to my knowledge, ever eaten it. The to my knowledge caveat seems necessary because when you consider how many mixed veg curries I’ve had over the years, who knows what I may or may not have eaten?

My purchase was snapped in half in order to fit in a bag; when I asked her how to prepare it, the shopkeeper told me to peel it, miming a peeling motion when I clearly didn’t understand the word she used, and told me to cook it with potatoes, which I did understand. So, a curry of sorts.

But sometimes I’d like to do something else with my experimental vegetables: both because I want to understand what they actually taste like, and also because, if I want a good curry, I know where to get one and it’s not at my house.

Isn’t that why you started this project, I hear you saying.

So I pulled out my Nepali cookbooks, only to find no recipes for chichindo, not even in the new, pocket size one I recently picked up—the succinctly named Nepalese Cook Book, which despite its diminutive size and photography that would give a 70s cookbook a run for its money, is actually pretty thorough.

I did find a YouTube video for stuffed snake gourd, which I very much enjoyed watching but am not quite up for this time around, and this article with some stunning photographs of snake gourd blossoms, should that be as interesting to you as it was to me. From the latter I also learned:

“The fruits can easily reach 1.5 m in length and in 2010 someone in Oman claimed to have grown the longest snake gourd ever at 1.88 m.”

Did I measure my own? Oh yes, you bet I did after reading that, though it pales in comparison at a mere three feet—a little over 90 centimeters or 36 inches.

But at a certain point you have to stop researching your chichindo and actually get in the kitchen and do something with it.

I emulate the cook in the video and go for a sharp knife instead of a peeler, which seems a better option since there’s not that much flesh at all and you don’t want to lose that much to a peeler.

Once peeled and chopped—with only a little loss at the ends due to fridge-sogginess—I am left with a pile of little rings, and now it’s easy to see how, if left to grow to their full potential, they could become tough and, as referenced in that article, be made into didgeridoos (really). The smell is very vegetal, for want of a better word, like the greenest green healthy smoothie imaginable.

The taste, after a bit of frying, is… very vegetal, but pleasant; so far I’ve added only oil and salt. But it is clearly not fully cooked, and I see now why the YouTube cook boiled hers prior to stuffing and frying. In goes a splash of water and on goes a lid; by the time the water has gone, the pieces are properly cooked, and now taste rather more squash-like. I’m eating a piece, way too hot, as I glance up at the mid-kitchen window just in time to see a lone cattle egret passing over the house. Their usual evening flight path means I mostly only see them off in the distance, so it’s a pleasant surprise, close enough that the identifying yellow breast is clearly visible.

Back to vegetables: chichindo—isn’t that a great word?—are really quite tasty, and I keep going back to the pan for more, trying as I do to find a better description for the flavor than vegetal and squash-like. Trying without success, I might add.

I would not use the word bland, like the author of the above-mentioned article, but as they later admit to having never actually tasted it, I suppose they get a pass. Bland, in my mind, is reserved for, say, ishkush (chayote), which really I find not just bland but completely tasteless. (This opinion once caused indignation in a friend of mine, who claimed it is one of his family’s favorite vegetables that he cooks for them all the time; I was equally surprised that it was common enough in the European country where they live to be on regular menu rotation in their household, since I’d not been familiar with it before coming to Nepal. And as far as it being tasteless, well, I stand by it.)

After eating more from the pan than I expected, I’m using a cheat: the end of a curry, a delicious favorite that I’ll write about before long, I’m sure. It’s nearly all gravy, but it goes into the chichindo, along with some steamed broccoli and cauliflower I had leftover in my fridge. Eaten over rice, it was as delicious as it was unphotogenic.

Anybody out there a snake gourd aficionado? Let me know how you enjoy it, because this is one I will be cooking again.