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