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.