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...