It’s the Wet Season and the puddles have coalesced into ponds and we are ankle-deep in water. I am not exaggerating!! Nevertheless, the work still needs to be done. It’s all day rains right now so you basically have to run out during the breaks to get things done. Yes, I wish right now that I could hole myself up in a cave (with a full pantry) and ignore the whole farm! But alas, the animals need to be tended to, the farm still needs maintenance and can’t be ignored (otherwise it will turn into one horrible mess) and I still need to harvest and preserve the fruits of the season.
Gnome, despite his hand injury, is trying to help me out and is doing “light work” right now. He’s helping me collect vegetables and fruit and generally trying to keep the level of the humour up by reading to me…he could pick something like a light novel…but this is Gnome humour…
Gnome Keeping Out of Trouble.
Here are some pictures from the farm; we have been harvesting wax apple….have to get them before the birdies…
Wax Apple.
The craboo are flowering…really quite beautiful:
Craboo Flowers.
Oh and on Sunday we had a few casualties from the torrential rain. We have a very old grey goose (we reckon she is ancient…like about 30 years old… because she has cataracts) got caught in the rain. I found her all sodden in the mud and she was too weak to move. She’s now been placed in emergency wheel barrow 1 with water and food. The other casualty was the Overlord (aka male turkey) who had been sitting on turkey eggs for 7 whole days without taking any breaks. Alas, he was found with his face down in the grass…for a minute I thought he had carked it but he let out an enormous whimper. I quickly dried him up and carried him to emergency wheelbarrow 2; he seems okay now but is really crabbit (I think this is a Scottish word that means crabby) and feeling very sorry for himself.
Right now our mini medical unit is under the house. I hope that we don’t get any more sick animals because we have used up all the wheel-barrows!
Anyway, the Duchess (aka female turkey) is still sitting on the eggs…what a champion. Let’s hope that we get some hatchlings out of this one…about one more week to go.
Gnome admonishes me and says, “Stop complaining, Babes…”
And I reply, “It’s not a complaint! It’s a description!!”
It is really grey. It is really muggy. 🙂 Ha-Ha, one must keep up the humour especially during these times and use emoticons to show that everything is really in the greatest humour possible!! 🙂
Well anyway(s), here are a few small things to show you what’s happening.
Since my Mabe cooker done broke and I don’t have an oven, we are resorting to our old “tried and tested” methods again. Back to the Dutch oven and cooking over coals. We had a stash of Fray Bento meat pies from British Foods Belize so we decided to cook them traditional style. They puffed up very nicely (a lot better than the conventional oven) and they are a little burnt since we haven’t cooked like this for a while. These were a nice Sunday afternoon treat. Also, the fire kept the bugs away for a while which was a welcome break.
Dutch Oven Pie.
This is a vegetable that grows on a vine which we have planted up the side fencing of the Duckie Zen coop. The best way to describe them is that they taste like firm, little cucumbers but they have to be cooked. They are growing prolifically with all the duckie fertilising so we are harvesting a basket of these each day. I’ve mostly been steaming or putting them into soups and stews. This vegetable is called tindali (a vegetable of Indian origin)and was obtained from the Spice Farms in Toledo (courtesy of Dr Mathew).
Tindali.
Oh, and it’s Mango Season again! This is the chance to stuff yourself with Mango everyday…it’s great. There should be a Mango Festival down here at this time of the year; it is definitely worth celebrating!
A while back I tried to make some home-made senbei (Japanese rice crackers). I used ordinary glutinous rice flour because that was all I could find. The final result was that they were chewy (still tasted good) but not the usual crunchiness that you would expect from these type of crackers. After discussing with Gnome (and reading Wiki entries) we realised that the Mochiko flour that is traditionally used is cooked (not raw) rice that has been dehydrated and then ground into a fine flour which then gives the crunchy quality to the food. So you can’t get Mochiko flour for love nor money in Belize (!) so Gnome says that when we get really bored (ie. during the rainy days when we can’t get out) he will help me make the flour. Watch this space…it will probably take about 72 hours to make the flour by hand!
Home-made Senbei.Home-made Senbei.
Keep well everyone and keep on going despite the weather!! Well, we’ll keep on going because we like to think that we are cool and tough…Ha-Ha!!
It’s that awful buggy time of the year again…June and July. The Monster Mosquitoes are out to get you and they are biting through clothes and socks. Despite all this, we still need to get out there. But we sure are doing our jobs faster so we can run into the protection of the house (although, there are still mosquitoes in the house). 🙂
Anyway, on a more positive note, there are other monsters (better!) on the farm…
With the big over-night rains, practically over-night, all our plants have quadrupled in size. There are Monsters Everywhere!! Check out the size of the aubergine bush:
Aubergine Plant.
Oh, and it is producing such lovely fruit; we are eating aubergine everyday right now (steamed, stir-fry, oooh and deep fried in tempura batter is yum-yum). This Black Beauty variety has a good firm texture unlike some of the other types that we have had in the past (we don’t like the spongy ones).
Our Aubergines.
This is the pumpkin…it was really struggling over dry season but now it has spread over the whole bed. Unfortunately some of the newly formed fruits are rotting because of the excessive rains. I guess you can’t have it all…
Pumpkin.
We are growing air potato in one of our raised beds. They were doing nothing two weeks ago and all of a sudden, they are climbing.
Air Potato.
Air potato is a type of yam. We rather like them because we don’t need to go digging around for them.
Air Potato Vine.Air Potato.
This is the giant bamboo at the pond; it gone absolutely wild so Gnome will be giving it a hair-cut this week. We are using some of the bamboo (they are 30 to 40 feet in length) as rafters for our new building.
Giant Bamboo.
Hope you are all surviving buggy time in Belize! By the way, we do have Insect Repellent products so check on The Apothecary….
We are always into eating on the farm and it’s always good to experiment with food. Here are a few interesting things to eat this season.
Ahhh…this first one starts with a story. For a while, the geese forgot there was a pond and hung around the house chasing us around the yard whenever the mood took them (which was very frequently). Then one day, they remembered that there was a pond and en masse trooped off to the pond. When we went to see what they were up to, they were diving under the water lilies and emerging back to the surface with round things the size of chestnuts stuffed in their beaks. They were gobbling them down like there was no tomorrow. And they were back the next day for more of the same.
Pond:
Pond.
After a week or so of watching the geese stuff their faces, Gnome decided to wade into the pond to find out what they were eating. What he discovered was water lilly corms embedded in the mud. He dug up a bucket of these and told me that there was tonnes of them.
“Oh, it would be great if we could eat these too!”
And of course we did a Google search on “can you eat water lily corms” and sure enough, you can. It’s not just for geese.
Water Lily Corms.
To prepare, peel the outer layer to reveal a whitish carbohydrate-like food which can be boiled to eat. I will have more pictures later of the cooked corms. They taste like yam with a mild crunchy texture. Not extra-ordinary (like any carb really, you kinda dress it up for flavour) but definitely edible and worth harvesting if they are just there for the picking. Better than paying for shop bought potatoes!
The next interesting edible is the soursop. This year our tree is loaded so we are getting to experiment with it more.
Soursop.
From the information that I have gleaned from the Belizeans, the fruit is usually scraped over a sieve and the juice is collected to make juice, ice-cream and smoothies. The fruit has a cotton-like texture and tastes mildly sour with fine banana-like nuances. In short, it has its own particular soursop flavour and it is very difficult to liken it to any well-known food. My preparation method involves taking the seeds out of the fruit and eating the pulp as it is.
Soursop pulp:
Soursop Pulp.
Personally, I prefer to do this so that none of the fruit is wasted. Since Gnome and I have been going crazy with a gelato marathon right now, we have been making soursop gelato. By the way, when I say “gelato” I am not trying to appear fanciful. Gelato simply means that you are making an iced milk product with less air in it. We personally prefer this texture to the puffed up fluffiness of soft serve ice-cream. We are also not adding any sugar to the gelato so that the dessert is naturally sweetened with fruit only. In our latest experimentation we have found that a combination of banana (a variety called ice-cream banana incidentally) and soursop gives a very good texture and flavour without any sugar. Ice-cream bananas are very smooth and creamy:
Ice Cream Bananas.
Last but not least, this is an interesting edible pod. This is called Bukut in Belize and the trees are flowering every where right now. The blooms are a showy pink and make a nice ornamental if you have a very large yard! Very big tree! Anyway, the pods can get up to about 2 feet in length and to prepare, crack open and eat the pulp which are adhered to discs. (you can crunch through the whole thing). The seeds are not edible and are very hard in consistency…I think they use the seeds in Hawaii to make jewellery.
Bukut.
This is worth trying: the pulp of the bukut is sticky like thick syrup and tastes like molasses combined with oyster sauce. Really nice!! More for the Asian types that are used to fermented like products like miso and soya sauce. This is also very popular with the Belizeans. Gnome made a bukut frappe the other day; it was tasty….would go great with a shot of rum!! Gnome’s already thinking of using it as a flavouring for wine.
Bukut Frappe.
Here are some pictures. We gathered this lot from Belcampo Lodge in Toledo, Belize; our bukut tree has just started flowering this year and there are only a few pods on our tree so far.
They look great as foragable hors d’oeuvres (I just made that up but it’s the kind of thing people like to market!).
Podded Bukut.Bukut.
This is how we make our lives interesting on the farm. A combination of curiosity and creativity!
Hello…still in the kitchen! It’s great to “boycott” the farm now and then and refuse to descend into the dirt and wetness (yes it has been raining so now time to swap the mantra over to “wet, wet, wet” instead of “dry, dry, dry.”
Gnome says,
“You can come back to the reality of the farm in your own time my dear…”
Ahhh…I think…that is so supportive of him. But then he says cheekily:
“The grass is getting longer as we speak. And little goosies are calling out for you. Oh and there’s a jackfruit dying a super squidgy death on the veranda….”
Hmmmm. I can ignore alll duties for one more day whilst I re-charge my batteries in the kitchen. Sort of like a re-boot…
Anyway, this is one of my most favourite things that I like to do. Gather lots of food on the farm and make something good to eat. I do this everyday anyway but I am making a concerted effort to ignore anything talking, quacking, wee-weeing, mee-owing, bow-wowing or honking demands at me! 🙂
Yummy Garden Food.
Today, I have made a meal out of everything from the farm. All except the onions. Ahhh the onions…that is going to be called “Munchkin & Gnome: Plant Acre of Onions Project” and will require ingenuity on our part since it is soooo wet (there we go again with the new mantra).
Thank-you my darling duckies for the eggs; I am rather fond of them…the duckies, I mean:
My Lovely Duckies!!
The Meal of the Day! This includes onions (not ours) and aubergines, tomatoes, jalapeño peppers and duckie eggs (all ours). Oh, and thanks to Panda for his Roma tomatoes which I nicked out of his bucket! This is a great way to poach eggs…which Gnome taught me a long time ago in a land down-under: cook your dish as usual on the stove (can be anything; beans, lentils, stew, anything really) and once cooked, crack eggs on top. Place lid on pot and cook eggs, on medium heat, to desired consistency. Hard-boiled yolks require about 8 minutes; so if you want anything in between, give yourself up to this measure of time.
Monday Meal.
Okay, back to farm work tomorrow with renewed energy and inspiration…
Munchkin has sequestered herself in the kitchen to invent new recipes.
I said to Gnome:
“I’m not budging an inch from the kitchen!!”
He replied with:
“It’s okay my dear. Nobody is moving you out of the kitchen.”
So everything is fine and I can go Munchkin Crazy in the kitchen spilling my creative juices and stuffing my face with fine yum-yums!! Yay!! The Joys of Being a Munchkin!
You’ll get the full recipe in the above link. This is a quick walk through with nice pictures of food.
Ooooh…first of all. Here’s a picture of my soup cauldron. It is one of my most favourite possessions…
Clay Pot.
Chaya is a spinach which grows in Belize. It is sometimes quite tough in texture but loaded with nutrients. Blending chaya is a great way to get the best out of this vegetable:
Chaya.
Blending Chaya:
Blending Chaya.
Making Chaya Onion Soup:
Add Chaya to Onions.
Oh and cassava croutons are amazing. Well, let’s face it…anything fried is rather good!! Cut into crouton like cubes to mimic croutons:
Our Lovely Cassava:
Peeled Cassava.
Cassava Croutons:
Cassava Croutons.
Et Viola…
Chaya Onion Soup with Cassava Croutons:
Chaya Onion Soup with Cassava Croutons.
Lovely in this cooler weather!! Have a Great Sunday!! 🙂
Ahhhh!!! It’s actually cool today…what a relief from the unrelenting hot, dry weather. When it’s blistering hot every day, you always feel that there is no end in sight. So today we had already decided not to have our 4am wake up alarm and wake up with the light. Waking up naturally is such a lovely thing and we had the added bonus of a cool weather change. Great stuff: we are both in better spirits with the cool weather; heat makes you hot-headed and tense all the time…it’s maddening!!
Anyway, I took the time to walk around the farm to take some pictures to give you an update on what’s happening.
Oh, the garden is getting very bushy; despite the dryness this year, we have managed to get plenty of greens from our bucket garden.
Container Garden.
The fennel is flowering. We can collect seeds and start a whole load of these:
Flowering Fennel.
Gnome’s tobacco: Not fi eat!! That’s flowering too:
Tobacco Flowering.
Jalapeño peppers are doing really well:
Jalapeno Peppers
The farm keeps on producing and we feel so fortunate that we have an abundance of food.
Jackfruit is loaded:
Lots of Jackfruit.
It’s been a good year for soursop:
Lots of Soursop.
(Hi Tanya!! I’ll let you know when some are ready!! 🙂 )
There are some things that I miss about Scotland (The UK). In terms of food, I miss chocolate eclairs and salmon (smoked and fresh). Fish and Chips: just for the smell on fresh paper…although they probably don’t serve it on paper any_more…just like they stopped serving it on newspaper! Oooh maybe Irn Bru…oh, but you need to be Scottish to know about this very orangey beverage…
Anyway…just wanted to show you the inside of British Foods Belize in Cayo. It’s a lovely shop to go into because you can see the love and the care put into the displays. Thanks Joyce and Graham for a bit of British…
Shop is nice and cosy, like a “real” shop:
British Foods Belize.
Bird’s Eye:
British Food.
Oooh…tea cosy!! Look at these!!
Tea Cosy.More British Food.
So glad I have found a place that stocks Yorkshire Tea…
We need to catch a healthy-choice rat that comes into our kitchen at night. He eats only organic, home-grown vegetables, fruit and grains. He can even sniff out this fine food through plastic wrap and munches through to get to my choice food. He turns his nose up at anything in a flashy package including ramen noodles, biscuits and sweets. What a discerning rat!
Tomato.
Okay, so I was getting fed up with the rat taking out all my sapodillas, tomatoes and other fruits in season. I was waking up to a gnawed piece of fruit in the basket every day. It was really frustrating because I was waiting for the fruit to ripen and the rat was getting them when they were perfect to eat. You can imagine how self-righteous I was feeling…all this hard work in the garden and the rat gets it!! That’s not right!!
I proceeded to store all my good food in closed baskets and then got the rat trap out for Gnome to set up. He asked me for some food for bait and I got out some cheese. He gave me a funny look because it came out of a packet. He looked like he wanted to say something but then felt that he better not.
I didn’t know what his problem was…don’t you catch rats with cheese?? I’ve seen it in cartoons.
Well the next morning, I found the traps empty still with the cheese bait. Gnome had accidentally left an extra piece of cheese on a plate (in plain sight) on the kitchen table…that had not been taken either. It was clear that the rat did not feel enticed by the cheese.
Gnome just looked at me…you know with that knowing look: I didn’t tell you so but you should no better look.
Hmmm…I really don’t want to bait the rat with my good stuff but it looks like I have no choice. Oh dear…the bait will have to come from my lovely garden harvest…
How quickly we forget that we actually had a wet “dry season” this year and it is only in the last few days that it has been unbearably hot. I say this because, the wetter weather has given the opportunity for wild mushrooms to come up around us. Some of them are edible so that is an absolute delight to us.
Just to give you a bit of a background on the adventures of M & G:
We started foraging in Scotland about 2 decades ago; we had so much fun running into the woods to find chanterelles, boletes and all manner of yummy mushrooms. We even collected enoki in the local park for breakfast every day. We still remember the time that we would secretly go into parks at 4am in the morning to tap maple trees. Oh, and we also collected and made nettle soup, dandelion salad and lots of wild greens. Outside of work (hospital, accident and emergency and all that stuff), we started calling ourselves “Munchkin and Gnome” as a personal joke. It was a conscious way of “making light of ourselves” outside our serious medical doctor demeanour.
We think that it is important not to feel self important and that’s why we call ourselves Munchkin and Gnome. Plus we think it’s funny!!
Anyway, let’s go back to the present and show you some pictures of mushrooms that we have found on our farm.
This one started off promising and we had to wait for it to open up in order to identify it properly. It ended up being the green spored parasol Chlorophyllum molybdites. It is not edible because it causes gastro-intestinal upset although David Arora, well-known mycologist with very good books, does state that some people can eat it without any stomach upset. We haven’t tried it but occasionally, Gnome will see a whole load of these and say,
“…hmmm….should we try them…what do you think?”
I usually give him a funny look and say that I don’t want to:
“We’re not starving, my dear.”
It opens up to look like this; it has green spores which is the key to its proper identification.
Parasol Mushroom.
This fungus looks like a type of mold. It doesn’t look edible but interesting to look at if you are into fungus and molds like us.
Funny Fungus on Aubergine.
This one we found eating into an old tree stump. Honey mushroom, Armillariella mellea. Edible!! Very tasty. After proper identification (we examine, take spores and go through identification keys in an obsessive sort of way) we identified it and then took a test sample to eat. Whenever we find a new mushroom that we manage to identify as edible, I take only one mushroom and cook it up (usually just sautéd in oil). We both share this tiny little morsel and wait 24 hours. If we feel fine after that, we proceed to cooking up a larger portion. We are doctors after all and we so we still have to behave responsibly with foraging and all.
Honey Mushroom.Honey Mushroom Close Up.
If you stumble across any mushrooms in Belize, Gnome would be happy to assist in identification. We would need the following information:
Pictures of the mushroom showing the top, the underside (gills) and from all angles.
Please make a Spore Print. Omit Step 5 ie. don’t spray with hairspray!!
Make a note of where you found it and where it was growing.
Note that our identification efforts are geared towards determining edibility. This is for eating and no profit. Be prepared to send us the spore print if the mushroom turns out to be edible.
