Jackfruit and coconut!

Monday October 17, 2011

4th Marketless Monday, aka Eating off the Aina in Hamakua, and a catalog of what I am doing today.


Dawn patrol - woke up early so went to collect hono hono grass tips to make fermented plant juices, one of the key recipes in Natural Farming.  You collect one type of a vigorously growing plant, just the growing tips, just before dawn when they are full of... whatever makes them so vigorous.  Pack tightly in a jar or crock with layers of brown sugar.  Weight down, and wait a week, then pour off the elixir and use it on sick plants and to make IMO 3 and 4 (soil amendments based on culturing local soil fungi).

Also very early I transplanted some non-GMO papaya seedlings that Dave had started, since he has hundreds and not enough places ready to transplant.

Breakfast - smoothie of lemon, turmeric, frozen lilikoi and banana
Blue gruel - blue corn boiled in hot water, with toasted pumpkin seeds (salt and hot pepper) and poha/cane jam

Snacking on jackfruit as I separate the seeds and fruit, to roast the seeds for flour and eating, and to dry the fruit for a treat.

Roasting in a pan this way made the seeds too hard and dry for eating, but good for grinding up for flour.

Dan opened a coconut that Bear gathered from friends down lower, and we drank the water.  Young coconut with lots of water!

 Made lilikoi juice, saving seeds to feed to chickens.  Sophie has requested the juice to make popsicles, which she makes by adding sugar or cane syrup and water.

The chickens are extremely fond of lilikoi seeds.  We gather up the empty fruit so that rainwater doesn't collect in the half-shells, providing little mosquito-breeding pools.  We have extra impetus to minimize mosquito habitat since learning that mosquitoes carry the Avian Pox, which many of our our chickens just had (but are fine now).

Lunch was mashed pumpkin, sweet and creamy, but kinda plain so I added salt and hawaiian hot pepper.  And roasted peanuts - good addition (now we're out of peanuts though!).  Takes so long to open up peanuts... didn't George Carver invent something for this?

From bottom of cutting board up:  lemon grass, turmeric,
boiled & chopped jackfruit seeds, coconut milk 

For dinner, I stir fried sliced jackfruit seeds (boiling for 5-10 minutes made them much softer and like chestnuts vs. the pan roasting); yakon, bok choy and broccoli leaves, string beans, bell-like peppers, hot peppers, lots of grated turmeric, and lemon grass.  Last minute HUGE addition - Bear opened an older coconut that, unlike the younger drinking coconut this morning, had a thick layer of meat - yeah, coconut cooked into the "curry"!  Sophie and I sliced it out of the coconut and put it in blender with water.  Made the dish wonderful.  Which surprised me, I was totally expecting a very odd and unsatisfying meal, but this was the opposite, very fulfilling and tasty and I had seconds until full.  Dan also liked it, but said it would have been better with just the jackfruit seeds, skip the yakon.

Jack fruit is going to be a very important staple.  Not only is the fruit good and dries well for later, but the seed is nutritious and versatile, can be a snack, an addition to stir fries, or a flour.  Good source of carbohydrates, fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C.  The wood is also very good quality and said to be termite-resistant.  Plus jackfruit trees bear when pretty young (our trees can't be more than 6 years old) and are insanely prolific, with huge fruit, like their sister the breadfruit tree.  I wonder if jackfruit was a canoe species?


...Dessert - frozen bananas, frozen blueberries, coconut milk (very thick).  Whirled up in Vitamix to make ice cream.

At some point I am going to build on the marketless idea to also only use products from the aina - toothpaste, shampoo, bug repellent, soap...

Eating off the Aina at our Hamakua Homestead

October 10, 2011

Marketless Monday #3

Yellow lilikoi on the left, Jamaican on the right 

Smoothie - lemon, turmeric, frozen lilikoi (regular and Jamaican), frozen banana.  I freeze the bananas without their peels (feed the peels to the chickens).  The lilikoi I had opened en masse and froze in ice cube trays, then stored in large baggies.  I use 2 cubes per person for a smoothie. (Only problem with the frozen storage method is we have a propane fridge, and the other night it ran out of propane must have been right after dinner, because it clearly had all night to thaw and create large puddles of lilikoi mush in the freezer.)

Hot blue gruel cereal - made of ~ 1/2 cup finely ground, toasted blue corn boiled in 2 or more cups water for 5 minutes with salt, and poha-cane juice jam liberally mixed in.  Had to keep adding water and stir constantly to cook this thoroughly and keep it from sticking. I had pulverized the dried blue corn kernels in the Vitamix into flour, which earlier this week I used to make a great cornbread (also used brown rice flour - not from the land).  The poha and cane juice had been cooked way, way down until the cane juice formed a thick syrup, which I had canned a few months ago.  Cane juice is thanks to our craigslist electric sugar cane press, which runs on solar power.

Lunch - am re-creating the green papaya salad I made the first week.  Lucky to have avocado again today!  Grated green papaya, basil leaves, arugula, green peppers (bell-pepper kind, small but not hot), green onion leaves, garlic chives, avocado, carrot, steamed yard-long beans, peanuts, dried hot Hawaiian peppers, lemon AND lime (the advantage of occasionally wearing my glasses, which I have stopped doing except for driving to town... I was wearing them while peeing under an avocado tree, and found not only an avocado but, in the distance, saw the lime tree has limes again!).  I think the katuk added a really nice flavor last time, but this was still a great salad.

Next week hopefully I'll have Jackfruit - there are 3 large ones on a tree in the banana patch.  One that was brown-yellow wasn't quite ready to pick.  A fourth had already fallen and partly rotted - sad!

Snacking on squash seeds toasted with salt and hot pepper, a few blueberry guava (these are berry-sized and nothing like other guava), a Jamaican lilikoi, and lilikoi juice on ice.

Dinner - baked yakon and pumpkin.  Delicious.  Major cheat - put butter on the squash... but all in all an easy and satisfying day of eating.

Food from the Land Day

Marketless Monday - October 3rd

Cheats: salt and coconut oil - but only at dinner.  This diet is really showing me how delicious salt and fat make food. I am pretty sure it's a matter of habit, too, and getting used to a different diet where these are used more sparingly, not at every meal in every food preparation, just where really needed to make something edible!  

I also like how this exercise makes crystal clear what we need to have: animals and staples.  Salad is great but it's not what gets you through the day (for me anyway). The bit of meat at dinner was very appreciated.  The chickens may not lay much at all this winter, but when they do that will be HUGE.  And of course animal poop of any kind is so important to the garden.  At least we're now getting plenty of that from our 26 chickens!  But also for cooking, if we had sheep, goats or a cow could make butter and ghee and then could cook and bake most anything.  I haven't tried to make coconut oil, but it sounds hard.  Peanut oil may be easier, or just mashing peanuts, or sunflower seeds, or avocado into foods that require some lubrication.

As for staples, we have taro available most of the year, but I see now that we need to plant way more sweet potatoes, and work harder to find pumpkins and squash resistant to the stings of fruit flies.  We have ~6 ulu, the breadfruit tree, but they haven't started bearing fruit yet.  The air potatoes, which are tubules of the plant Dioscorea bulbifera (a huge pest in Florida), are good on occasion but not a real staple.  Also cassava, the tapioca plant, is growing and will be ready for harvest in a few months.

Today's fare: 

Smoothie made of frozen banana, frozen lilikoi (2 kinds), frozen poha, blueberries, and a few thimbleberries, cane syrup, turmeric.  This was a great smoothie yum!

Snack: roasted peanuts and blue corn, banana.  Roasted both at 350 degrees.  I roasted the peanuts for 25 minutes, which was too long, but I still liked the taste.  Next time try just 15 minutes. The blue corn (dried from June, off the cob) started to pop!  Although it didn't make big puffy popcorns, you could eat the individual kernels which were of popcorn texture.  Smelled wonderful, too.

Lunch - salad made of boiled air potato with arugula, katuk, basil, lemon, garlic chives, poha, cherry tomatoes, tarragon, scallion, nasturtium flower.  The boiled air potato was great, tasted very much like potato, very filling and kept me from being hungry all afternoon. But without avocado to make the salad flavors smoother and mellow out the lemon, this was a very sharp tasting and overly zingy salad!  Gave my eye a twitch!

Snack: orange (Sophie got it from a friend at work who picked it in Honomu).

Dinner: Yard long and bush beans and soup of pork with taro leaf, hot peppers, turmeric, basil, and a few tomatoes and poha (turmeric not so great in this recipe).  The pork was from a wild pig David caught in the spring and we still had a little left in the freezer.  Salt and coconut oil turned this soup from just okay to tasty.  I also made blue corn tortillas from the roasted corn - ground it up in Vitamix to a fine flour, added water and salt, shaped into little patties and fried in coconut oil.  These were quite good and when added to the thin soup, gave it a robustness that was very nice.  Roasted blue cornmeal is also used as a drink or porridge by native peoples.  I found many blue corn recipes here.  Maybe next week I'll try this with some cane syrup or poha jam!

Dessert: a few rounds of cold sliced purple sweet potato.