Time to say ‘good bye’ to the Root Vine and say ‘Hi’ to the tasty root dishes

Hingurala(Dioscorea alata L) is a root vegetable that is found widely across Sri Lanka and true to its character, the Hingurala vine that was planted near the kitchen just spread all across the top of our kitchen roof. The Hiungurala vine starts to die around six or seven months and that means the root is getting matured and if you want to eat it a bit less matured , you have to dig up the root when the leaves of the wine are yellowish green.
What you will see in this video is the variety of Hingurala called “Maha Hingurala" which grows much bigger than the regular variety and if you don't clean out the skin properly before eating it will make your mouth itch.
My brother who has been the protector of the Hingurala vine that grew near the grinding stone by the possible trampling of passers-by, helped me dig it up as well. You all know that my brother will help finish any dish I make too.
In different parts of Sri Lanka Hingurala is called by different regional names. This is the same thing as ‘Katu ala'. There is also a white root instead of the usual purple root and that one is called ‘Rajala'. The Rajala leaf and the Hingurala leaf are very similar. Among traditional Sri Lankan cuisine, types of root vegetables take a special place and there are more than one hundred varieties of strength building root vegetables that grow naturally in Sri Lanka. Our people are used to eating these mostly for breakfast and you can make a lot of different dishes from root vegetables. I boiled the roots in the morning with extra hot chilli sambol with added dry shrims and made cutlets from the leftovers in the evening. Although I considered making a separate dish and sending it to my Aunt’s house, I decided to send the raw root as it was too late in the afternoon to cook again.