I’ve been banned from doing any real work today (using heavy machinery to clear brush) since I’ve been afflicted with horrible sinus headaches and a substantial load of snot and mucus (probably from smoking too many cigars…naughty, naughty!).  I’ve tried to cooperate with my doctor’s prescription but being an obsessive compulsive git makes this sort of thing difficult…

Anyway, the results of my “light duties” include the following:

I finally managed to take a couple of shots of one of the toucans that come every morning around 0530-0600 and hang about on our Cotton Tree (Ceiba Tree) while we have our morning hot beverage.  Check it out, I actually succeeded in taking not one but yes, two reasonable photographs!!

Getting excited about miso, koji and fermentation again.  With the help of Munchkin, we took out our three jars of experimental miso and bucket of soy sauce for a quick look-see:

You can see that our miso needs another six months at least before getting that smooth even texture.  Our miso was made with rice koji and the ubiquitous Belizean Red Kidney Bean.  It is still young but has a lovely floral, fruitiness that imparts a wonderful umami-ness to food.

The next jar we tried was our Chocolate miso:  Rice koji and cacao nibs.  Definitely needs another year to do its thing.  We’re hoping it will turn out like a vintage hacho miso.

Noni miso is the next lot.  I have to say this technically didn’t start off to be miso.  It was an attempt to use rice koji to “malt” some rice to then ferment into a rice wine/beer; I didn’t like the way it was going though so, I mixed it all up with some noni fruit and seeds instead.  Again, this would benefit from at least another year.  Great umami-ness in this one as well that marries very well with the noni-ness.  I predict that it will be a favourite.

Finally, the soy sauce…which doesn’t have any soy beans in it but rather black beans, fully fermented craboo (you can tell we are becoming Belizean), peach palm fruit and balam (and the necessary koji, of course).  Yup, you guessed, needs another year and more frequent stirring.  Came up with the idea to use a paint stirrer to really get everything agitated:

And here is the bucket:

We really need that Mallard reaction (no ducks are to be harmed in the process, I promise!!) to start happening in order to be taken seriously as a real non-soy sauce.

Oh yes, I also wrote a post after a long hiatus from the keyboard.

Anybody out there want a photograph of what is coming out of my sinuses?!?!?Munchkin not happy with that last statement.

PS:  I didn’t take the miso photographs!!  ;-P

 

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