Showing posts with label Blue Ternatea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blue Ternatea. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Homemade Blue Butterfly Pea Jelly

May 12, 2020 2 Comments

We have a few Blue Butterfly Pea plants (also known as Blue Ternate or Clitoria Ternatea) in our front yard and every day it blooms. We have a lot of flowers daily, so we make use of it by making blue ternate tea or juice.

We did an experiment and made a Homemade Blue Butterfly Pea Jelly. It is just so easy to make and here are the ingredients that we used:
  • Blue Butterfly Pea/Blue Ternate flowers
  • 1 sachet, White Gulaman or Jelly powder (Unflavored) (15g)
  • 1 pouch All-purpose cream
  • 1 can condense milk
  • 1 can kremdensada (it's an all-purpose cream and condense milk in one)
  • Sugar (white)
The first thing that I did is to wash the Blue Ternate flowers before boiling them for around 5-10 minutes or if the water turns dark blue. After boiling them, you can now sift and press the flowers to have their extracts.

In another pot or casserole, put 7 cups of water and sprinkle the jelly powder mix and sugar while stirring constantly. Heat until near boil with continuous stirring to dissolve the powder completely. Slowly add the blue ternate flower extract and stir well. Let it boil before turning off the flame. 

Let the jelly mixture set for a while before putting it in a molder or any container. After that, you can put it in the refrigerator and let it set. Once it is fully set, you can cut it into cubes or any shape you want.

To the milk mixture, I just mixed the all-purpose cream, condensed milk, and kremdensada in a large bowl and added the blue ternate jelly in it. Below is a photo of the blue ternate jelly mixture, once you're done, you can put it in the refrigerator and let it chill for a while before eating.


Here's the finished product of our Homemade Blue Butterfly Pea Jelly... It's delicious and so easy to make!  :)


If you're interested in Blue Butterfly Pea, you might want to check my old blog post about Growing Clitoria Ternatea and its Benefits. :)


Sunday, August 11, 2019

Growing Clitoria Ternatea and it's Benefits

August 11, 2019 0 Comments
Growing Clitoria Ternatea or Butterly Pea and it's Benefits

Clitoria Ternatea has a lot of names, it also called Blue Ternatea, Butterfly Pea, Asian Pigeon Wings, Blue Bell Vine, Blue Pea, Cordofan Pea, and Darwin pea. It is an edible herbal plant that has a lot of benefits to our body. I've searched online for the benefits of Butterfly Pea and I was really amazed how this perennial plant has numerous benefits like memory enhancer, brain booster, improves eyesight, diuretic, analgesic, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antipyretic, anti-diabetic, anti-asthmatic, anti-anxiety and depression. I think there are a lot more benefits and medicinal use if you do intensive research about the Clitoria Ternatea.

After knowing its benefits, I wanted to have my own Butterfly Pea plant. I am just lucky because my friend gave me some seeds last summer and I planted them in a big container. We made a DIY trellis made up of small water pipes and wires so the vines have more places to climb.

Growing Clitoria Ternatea plant is just easy, it doesn't require so much, just good soil and you're good to go. I planted them through seeds in our compost soil and in more than a week or two, there are already new sprouts. After almost two months, it started to have flowers already. Once it has started growing flowers, it will grow more every day. :)

I used organic fertilizer on my plants like:
  • Crushed eggshells - rich in calcium which helps plants grow healthy and strong. It also reduces the acidity of the soil.
  • Rabbit manure  - a great fertilizer that is rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, nutrients that plants need for healthy growth. 
  • Banana peels - rich in potassium, phosphorus, and calcium. It also keeps the aphids away.
  • Rice water - (yung pinaghugasan ng bigas bago iluto). I actually don't know what are the actual benefits of using rice water on plants but based on experience, my plants and vegetables grow well and produce more fruits and as for the Clitoria ternatea, it produces lots of flowers even some of my seedlings have started producing flowers in a month.
I've searched for the benefits of minerals our plants can get on rice water and I've found this post:
"Washing rice causes rice to lose up to 7% protein, 30% crude fiber, 15% free amino acids, 25% calcium (Ca), 47% total phosphorus (P), 47% iron (Fe), 11% zinc (Zn), 41% potassium (K), 59% thiamine, 26% riboflavin, and 60% niacin." [Source: http://www.christopherteh.com/blog/2017/11/washed-rice-water]

Clitoria Ternatea, Blue Ternatea, Butterfly Pea, Asian Pigeon Wings, Blue Bell Vine, Blue Pea, Cordofan Pea and Darwin pea

Today, it gives us a lot of flowers which is more than what we can consume. So, I give some to my friends and family and let them try it too. :) They were so eager to try it when they knew about its benefits. ;)

Clitoria Ternatea is commonly used as a tea, some call it Blue Tea as the natural color of its flower will fade when boiled or put on hot water. The tea doesn't taste that bad and you can make a refreshing juice when you add lemon or calamansi and honey to the extract that you collected from the flower.
 Here's a reference to a study made on Clitoria Ternatea and its benefits on its subject/s:
Clitoria ternatea , commonly known as Shankpushpi, is widely used in the traditional Indian system of medicine as a brain tonic and is believed to promote memory and intelligence. We examined the effectiveness of alcoholic extracts of aerial and root parts of C. ternatea at 300 and 500 mg/kg doses orally in rats in attenuating electroshock-induced amnesia. Extracts at 300 mg/kg dose produced significant memory retention, and the root parts were found to be more effective. [Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21214440]
Treatment with 100 mg/kg of Clitoria ternatea aqueous root extract (CTR), for 30 days in neonatal and young adult age groups of rat, significantly increased acetylcholine (ACh) content in their hippocampi as compared to age matched controls. Increase in ACh content in their hippocampus may be the neurochemical basis for their improved learning and memory. [Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12490229]
Evaluation of the antiasthmatic activity of Clitoria ternatea L. roots. [Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21575696]