I've had some questions about how to use amaranth in cooking. Here follows not a recipe, but some notes about the delicious dinner we had tonight: Red Tampala Amaranth/Callalo and Curried Potatoes. I was thinking "potato roti" the whole time I put this together, which I used to eat in a little Trinidadian family shop in West Palm Beach, FL when I lived there a few months in the late 1980's. The term "callaloo" both refers to a cooked dish found in many of the Caribbean islands as well as in parts of Africa and in a few other parts of the world. As a prepared food, it is made of cooked, stewed, braised or pureed greens. However, the plant called "callaloo" is different in different places. In Jamacia, Trinidad and Tobago, Gyana and the Phillipines it is amaranth. In most other areas, it is the leaves of the taro plant. In either case, these are plants of the African diaspora, arriving in the Caribbean and US along with the African slave trade.
We had some Red Tampala Amaranth (at right) to slice into ribbons and cook. I braised these with some chopped yellow shallots -- also called "mulitiplier onions" or "potato onions" -- a bit of coconut milk, a splash of water, cider vinegar, and a pinch of salt. The mixture was a fun green and purple!
In the meantime, I cooked up an approximately equal amount of those potatoes we dug a over the past couple of weeks (I boiled the first batch, got distracted and boiled the pot dry... I microwaved the second bath hoping the chickens will eat the burnt ones!). I roughly mashed them with a little more coconut milk, some garam masala, turmeric, a splash of lemon, and a pinch of salt.I heated two large whole wheat tortillas in the micro for 10 seconds, and then I spread first the potatoes down the center of each wrapper, and then the amaranth. Rolled them up, and took them outside to each while we watched the chickens eat their dinner, and they watched us eat ours.
