Oh dear, I just realised that it has been a month since I have written! We are here right here and doing our Munchkin and Gnome stuff. Unbelievably, we have managed to get out and work the whole July…usually it is wet with puddles coalescing into ponds. Gnome is mowing and the mower is working…that is great luck for us because it is usually sitting around needing a repair job…and we are usually sitting around twiddling our thumbs!. I think…cross fingers and touch wood…that we might be getting on top of things this year…wow, first time in 16 years!!

I will catch up with some pictures from this month. We did end up eating the guanacaste seeds:

This is what we did: we dumped the seeds in a pot of boiling water and let the seeds simmer for about an hour. I couldn’t find any cooking instructions on the Internet so I experimented. After a while, the pods started to soften and became more translucent. Once they were done, the shell opened up to reveal the edible part.

They taste like a low fat version of chestnut. Or if you are used to Chinese cuisine, they taste like malabar chestnut or lotus nuts. We liked them…it is probably good as a social snack thing where people gather around a table and open the pods in a leisurely way while they talk. Kinda like shelling peanuts or cracking open dried melon seeds!

Oh, and I never showed you my tofu making pictures. I last made tofu in my Glasgow flat about 20 years ago…it wasn’t much fun because I had to boil the soya beans for about 3 hours before they softened…and then there was some messy pressing and after that, that was the end of my tofu making days. We re-visited the idea of making tofu when we thought of using our wet grinder to do the mashing up part. We soaked 3 cups of soya beans over-night:

And then we added the soaked beans to water and put the grinder to work:

It took about 5 minutes for the soya beans to become a paste. Once this was done, the contents were emptied into a pot and heated up to 85C to remove the soya bean trypsin inhibitor. This was then filtered and the okara bits were fed to the ducks and geese. The remaining filtered liquid is soya milk and can be consumed at this point. The soya milk was then coagulated…we used epsom salts because we can find it here. This was pressed like so:

Okay, so we have been working hard and making our own tofu!! More next time…

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