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.  

Marketless Monday

Today I am going to just eat off the land.  We eat lots every day that we pick but always mix in some store-bought goodies like eggs, salmon, crackers, garlic, chia seeds, and chocolate.  So it's a little push to be just eating what's here, especially on the protein front, as our chickens haven't started laying yet (although I plan to check soon... any day... could be today!).  (Nick suggested he could plant an egg in their roost but that would absolutely be cheating.)  Some of the greens are high protein though, the chaya and  katuk, and the Okinawa spinach is very high in good stuff.  Found this link while looking to see if the spinach has protein: http://www.agroforestry.net/pubs/Can_I_Grow_a_Complete_Diet.pdf
We have most of those foods growing, just not nuts, but do have peanuts, which I am boiling right now.

Here's my diet as the day goes:

Smoothie:  frozen apple bananas, 2 types of lilikoi, blueberries, poha; fresh turmeric, cane syrup and lemon (this was more like a slurpie with all the frozen ingredients, and was really delicious).

Snack: avocado with lemon

Lunch: Fantastic salad!  Started off thinking I was making a green papaya salad but added so many different things it became something else.  To the grated green and also ripe papaya I added grated daikon radish, arugula, basil, katuk, avocado, peanuts, garlic chives, scallion, mint, mild green pepper, dried hot red pepper,  and squeeze of lemon.  The peanuts did have salt from salting the water while boiling them.  Also although I didn't add any purchased oil or vinegar, I did soak the greens in apple cider vinegar as the going precaution against rat lung disease, not officially sanctioned but the theory is it loosens slug slime and then you rinse it off (so appetizing!).

Snack: 2 apple-bananas and some peanuts (after swimming in waterfall pool)

More peanuts and avocado at 6:30 waiting for taro to cook... I should have started it earlier, was very hungry by 7:30.
Dinner:  Steamed yard long beans and a few bush beans, a few carrots, and Okinawa spinach with lemon, salt and cane syrup; boiled and mashed taro with coconut oil (cheat), salt (cheat), and cane syrup - this last was very satisfying.

:)

Harvesting

August 27 - A beautiful day.
What made it beautiful -
Working with everyone in the garden this morning, and getting a lot done in small groups. The community garden had been neglected while Dan and I were "vacationing" back on the mainland for 3 weeks - the gang here sheepishly admitted they found that while we were gone it felt like "ooh hey the folks are gone let's goof off!" Although the 10 people currently here are from 20-55 years old, and only two of them are our children, there still was this effect - and I should add that some of them did work in the garden, just not the concerted effort needed around here to keep the aggressive wainaku grass from taking over. So, the fact that today we had 8 folks in the garden today working for at least 2 hours each was huge and made me very happy.

We harvested Okinawan (purple) sweet potatoes, which are very very dark purple and hugely high in antioxidants, as well as delicious!

Then later in the day I helped Sophie in her garden. She rescued me from the sun (I had returned to the community garden and was rapidly wilting) to work on the shady side of their house where we had planted peanuts a few months ago. They were ready to harvest, and we collected around two pounds, and they were so easy to grow with no pest damage!! Very exciting.

Dan and Nick and Dave were working on a new water line to Dave's house, so since the water was turned off for awhile I took a dip in the stream to wash the mud and grubbiness off. Was late in the day, lightly cloudy but still warm; went down through the plantains and sugar cane Jason got started before he left - this area is a very pleasing polyculture now, with blue corn (already growing from our own seed), sweet potato, spinach, avocado and cassava growing under the plantains. Scrambled down the bank and splashed and soaked. The sun came out and sparkled in my eyes as I tried to practice the art of "Hakalau," a Hawaiian meditation we just learned about, where (my lazy western interpretation) you look at a plant, soften your gaze, awaken your peripheral vision and listen to what your innate wisdom and animal knowledge of the environment may tell you. This is a particularly special meditation since the watershed we live in is also Hakalau; it's the name of the river that our stream runs into that forms a breathtaking gulch.

The stream is an essential element to life here- exciting, relaxing, rejuvenating. And providing relief from the heat. I have to correct my earlier statement that all the seasons seem the same. Summer is definitely hotter! Dave, Nick and Dan work so hard building the house, I can't believe it; I get zapped from an hour or so of weed-pulling and digging in the sun and have to take a break, but they are out there all day. At least they get to do this:

They cleared a path and attached a rope to climb up the right side of the waterfall so they could jump. That's Simba, Dave and Nick on the cliff, Dan floating. Ok so even this activity was work but they did have a lot of fun jumping into the pond! More harvesting - also today I boiled some pohas to finish with cane syrup as jam tomorrow. Pohas grow a lot like tomatillos, and have the same little tent around them that protects them from bugs and dirt. You pick them or collect fallen fruits when this tent is yellow or brown and inside the poha is orange and the size of a large marble. This batch made a delicious pie that, with added fresh bananas, we agreed tasted incredibly like peach pie!

What else was today... oh, another highlight was talking with Sophie, she said her little house is the favorite place she has ever lived, and she wishes she could take it with her wherever she goes. Reason she likes it so much is it is finished with all the details to her specifications, and it's all one room, which is something I like a lot about our little house, too. However, a bedroom for changing will be nice, I kind of get stuck when people come over and there's no place to swap my shirt. So I do very much look forward to our new house, which is growing nicely now - by the time I send this, we will have a floor! (Update - and all the walls, and two decks!) It will have one main room and then a bedroom, bathroom, and little office. Laundry will be outside on a screened lanai, as well as a second bathroom and garden food prep area.

Two more food updates - we have also been harvesting bushels of lilikoi, both the regular kind and Jamaican, to make jam, popsicles, and of course smoothies.

Second, the blue corn has dried pretty nicely and we were able to grind it and make some experimental tortillas... very crumbly (probably from the coconut flour) but... edible!





Sept. 12 - This is what happens, I start writing one day and then before I can make it ready to go so much happens that it feels all incomplete and inaccurate... so here are a few house pictures, there's Nick on the new floor - you can see behind him the deck in progress; the last photo is Dave walking out on a wall to work on the deck. The deck was tricky to build but they did it and it will be a wonderful place to catch a breeze.

Aloha til next time! Rachel

May Becomes June Ah Now July!

I guess it means I am getting pretty comfortable here, that the days slide into one another and I barely notice another month has gone by. There are really no seasons that I can discern, so far, and this is somewhat disorienting as to noting the passage of time. This is supposedly summer and it is exactly like winter... okay maybe the nights are a little warmer. We haven't thrown off the covers in a swelter of heat though, it still can be just a bit nippy (nippy is not even the right word ... you can want a long-sleeved shirt, is all) of an evening. The major difference is it is light much earlier, and stays light later. Also the sun has arced around to a whole new side of the house that I never would have expected. It is just as rainy, which has interfered with house building, but then does give me time finally to send this update off!

Major developments are - house footings and walls are poured, and waterproofed! The cement pours were a ton of work - many tons - I think we had overall 8 truckloads? The framing will have to wait until we get back from our Olympia/Woods Hole visit. Currently Dan is sorting gravel to get ready to backfill the walls.

The framework for pouring the footing.

David, Nick and Dan pouring a wall.


We also now have a cesspool for the new house, and much of the other infrastructure (drainage, roadways) all improving, and - big news - the perimeter fence is almost up, as well. The purpose is to keep pigs and other wandering creatures out of our gardens, so we can freely plant taro and trees without discovering one morning that they have been thoroughly mucked up.

The community garden is coming along nicely. Thanks to weekly garden work parties with all on the land participating, we have really got a nice garden going. Some things are a struggle, some things are a snap, and that's what this year is all about, experimenting and trying to grow lots of things. I have been harvesting lettuce, fennel, tsoi sim, arugula, radish seed pods (to stir fry), radishes, basil, tomatoes, bok choy and flowers (I like to eat them, so do the chicks), peas, two kinds of beans, cherry tomatoes, a little broccoli, and various herbs. Compare this picture with the one of the work party we had April 3rd.

Garden in June.


The blue corn is looking great, already has big ears, we'll be tasting it soon! Although it is more grown for cooking than fresh eating, still exciting. And we'll see if Sophie can eat this truly heirloom variety - brought to us from a friend who got it from Central American indigenous people - without her throat swelling up and getting asthma, which is what happens with the faintest bit of regular corn, even from buying deli food in those compostable containers made of corn.

The chickens - 31 down to 26 due to mongoose and possibly hawks - have been a major occupier of time.





Sophie and Ariel. Was so lovely to have Ariel visit!


Getting some taro.


We're coming to Olympia July 20th to see family, friends, do a million practical things, and then Ariel and I go to Woods Hole from July 30th-August 12th, and Dan and I return to Hawaii August 14th. Still working on whether Jason and Dan will join us to Woods Hole. Sophie is there now, so she and Nick will tend things for us here in Hawaii while we are gone.



Aloha for now, enjoy your days :)
Rachel

Spring - Hawaiian journal #5

Aloha friends!

First, before I forget, I added photos to the last entry, see here:
http://rachlwrites.blogspot.com/2011/03/feb-7th-from-olympia.html
You will see Sophie working our sugar cane press, and pictures of preparing coconut for milk, and Dan moving a small house with his excavator.

Returning to Hawaii from my unplanned visit to Olympia/Tacoma was very revealing. I had built up a strong curiosity about how I would feel given a chance to compare and reflect, so the timing was excellent to circuit back and forth. It also turned out to be a much-needed visit with Ariel, whom I hadn't seen for over four months. The visit had its share of drama, even a day or two when events were suggesting that the responsible thing to do might be to stay in the northwest. Which had a tone of reality... and sent me into a spin of panic. What was this crazy thing that I'd been doing, anyway? Real people have to work, and drive on I-5, and be cold in the winter, and defer having fun until vacations, and wait to live out their dreams until retirement. Of course this was a lark that had to end!

But, we sorted out options, and this was the best one, and I came back. Man, was I happy to come back! The splendor of this lifestyle hit me with new appreciation. Back to growing food as my daily drive, and helping craft an abundant and resilient community farm.

So here is an update.

Dan continues to focus majorly on infrastructure. Big news is that we now have a wonderful echo-chamber-like ferrocement catchment tank! Catchment means less town trips to buy water that we lug home in heavy glass carboys. Which is good for many reasons, including that gas is now approaching $4.50 in downtown Hilo. Ferrocement so it won't get destroyed in an earthquake - we had a little 4.0 shake-up call the night of the big one in Japan... also our own tsunami sirens for a long time... Right now the water is collecting from Bear's roof gutters, and a pipe strings across the valley from their house to the catchment. We are within spitting distance of actually getting water from the rain.



The large pipe on the side is the home-made first-flush mechanism, for dumping off the first wash of rain with its dust etc. You can also see the pipe strung across the valley from Bear and Joy's house to the catchment. (Hesitate to mention the little accident that happened just after this picture with the excavator... Joy thought it was another earthquake...)

'Course, this is ready just in time to not want to drink catchment because of radioactive particles in the rainwater, which are too small to be removed by the 5 micron carbon filter we will use. Although we seek out news and weather reports, it's hard to tell what our exposure really is or has been. Same boat we all are in - actually because of the way the jet stream moves, we're less at risk than many parts of the mainland. Not that we should really be a focus of attention compared to Japan. Still, while the Hawaiian islands don't get the jet stream as soon as the northwest, apparently we have received enough radioactivity to have detectable Cesium 134 and 137 and Iodine 131 in the local milk (see http://www.epa.gov/japan2011/rert/radnet-sampling-data.html, scroll down to milk, Hilo). So, we eat seaweed salad to make sure we have at least a healthy amount of iodine.

As always, our best health insurance policy is to do what we love. Which, in Dan's case, is building things. He and several excellent helpers have put together a few temporary utility buildings - here's one that we turned into a house for Sophie's - the same one being transported in photo on last blog:

It really is adorable inside, we'll have to get some photos of how colorful and cozy it is.

And here's another small building, used as a job shack:

These were built by David, Dan, Bear and Jason... with painting by Michael, Rebecca, Sophie, me and David.

Oh and Dan has also been hammering out cesspools, literally, using the hammer attachment on the excavator. Several holes almost got down to the required 10 foot depth but then started to fill with water. This has been hard and expensive work. He was digging in a very dense and thick streak of blue rock - valuable as crushed rock* for a soil amendment, but really hard to hammer through. Kind of goes, hammer for 15 minutes, 1 day to fix broken hose. Ten minutes of hammering, 2 days to find replacement for broken clamp and fittings ($80 each for 4). Benefits and drawbacks of living in an old rock quarry, in case you are considering same. * We also just learned that this type of basalt rock holds radioactive particles so it doesn't get into plants that are grown on it. This comes from a study done around Chernobyl of the greens grown in basalt. Pretty amazing thing. So in case of further fallout... get a goat, feed it greens grown on basalt, drink her milk instead of water. Our emergency prep plan!

While Dan continues to focus on infrastructure, my big drive is gardening. I have done less cooking lately, with Sophie here she's quite wonderfully taken on a lot of the major cooking. I did try to make lau lau. We have the ti and Chinese taro, the kind with the purple stem and piko (the dot where the stem joins the leaf), which has the tastier leaf with less oxalic acid, and local pig in the freezer, so all we needed to purchase was butterfish and sweet potatoes and Hawaiian salt. Filling and wrapping lau lau is the kind of thing you need an auntie or two to guide you with the first few times, not to mention more fun to do with a group of women. I did okay but hadn't realized the butterfish, which is also called black cod or sablefish, was already salted, so we got our share of saltiness with that dinner.

Other discoveries: the little patterned moth-like insects hovering around my vegetables? Those are types of fruit flies, and are responsible for the rotten ends of cucumbers filled with little green crawlies. I'm going to have to put paper bags on soft veggies like that if I want to grow them - or pick them underripe.

And I discovered that this bird poop, which at first I took as a sign that birds are visiting our citrus trees to keep off the caterpillars...


Is the larvae of the very hungry caterpillar of the Common Lime or Lemon Butterfly, Papilio demoleus, eating the citrus!


Here's a partial view of the pretty butterfly that is the parent of the bird poop larva, selecting a lemon tree to torture.


I will end with a few pictures of our community garden and chicken-coop building. At one of our regular meetings to talk about farm projects, several people wanted to work together in the big upper garden that has been an on-again off-again effort. Since I have been working in that garden and planning for new beds, and was eager to get help, I became community garden organizer. Here's a picture of our first work party preparing new beds:


Here it is after 2 weeks:


At one end of the garden we are building a chicken coop -
Up on legs to be mongoose-proof. We will add metal around the legs before we pick up the baby chicks.


Must be pretty!


Aloha until next time,
looking forward to your email updates,
Rachel

The neighborhood beach.