We’ve had a lovely Festive Season this time and I made a tremendous effort to keep the celebrations going on the farm with lots of yummy food. Here are pictures of some Munchkin goodies:
Sorghum and coconut flour flat bread with Swiss cheese and bird peppers:
Flat Bread Hors D’oeuvres.
More flat bread hors d’oeuvres with sapodilla sauce and blue cheese (more Bird Peppers to add heat and give the Christmas colour!):
Sorghum Bread and Sapodilla Sauce.
For Christmas, we had ham this time, unconventionally with sorghum and vegetables and home-made sour peach jam.
Sorghum, Ham and Sour Peach Jam.
Ooooh, lots of this…Ribena and Rum!! When I was a kid, Ribena was the stuff that we had with our packed lunches at school…a kid’s drink. Now, we are grown ups, we have it as an adult’s drink! By the way, Ribena is a British cordial made from black currants.
Ribena And Rum.
For the New Year, I decided to do Chinese for a change. This is tripe with calamondin.
Tripe and Calamondin.
Also, we had Venison with Lotus Root. And a yummy sauce made from home-made chocolate miso, calamondin zest and bird pepper.
Venison with Lotus Root.
Okay, we’ve had our fun!! Now, back to work diggin’ in the dirt!!
This is Part II from yesterday when I spoke about how I cooked up 20lbs of venison meat. Twelve pounds of the meat was cooked up as Cantonese BBQ Venison (yesterday’s post) and the rest was made into a slow cook curry.
Slow Cook Venison Curry with Pumpkin.
The trick is to use plenty of onions to make up the base of the curry sauce (15 medium onions in this case) and to cook it in a slow cooker for 48 hours. After this time, the meat is sooo tender and falls off the bone and the curry sauce is so aromatic. The kitchen smells great!!
Lots of Onions with Other Fresh Ingredients.
I learned to cook curries when I was a medical student at university; many of my friends were second generation Indians (mostly Bengali) and they taught me how to make this wonderful dish. Besides, in Scotland, everyone eats curries…it’s the 2nd national dish after Fish and Chips!!
A few days ago, I sequestered myself in the kitchen for the whole day (I know…I do that a lot). This is my usual “go-to” response when I can’t face the ongoing pressures of maintaining the farm and I just want “time-out.” I had bought about 50lbs of venison and I set about trying to process about 20lbs of it.
So, the first thing I made was Cantonese BBQ Venison which is really Char Sui made from venison rather than the typical pork. I am not sure what to call it since I do not know the word for venison in Chinese! So, if there are any Real Chinese people out there…how do you say BBQ Venison?
12lbs of the venison turned into this:
Cantonese BBQ Venison.
I coloured it with a Central American spice called Recado since I did not have any Chinese food colouring:
Recado Powder.Sliced.
Yummy…it turned out really well!! You would have thought you were in a Chinese restaurant in Singapore or Hong Kong!
The other 8lbs of venison became a slow-cook curry with lots of spices (cumin, mustard seeds, tumeric, chilli and lots more):
Venison Ready To Cook in Curry.
You will get the Venison Curry Recipe tomorrow. That was delicious too!!
Just catching up on some recipes that I created over the last few weeks: It is sapodilla season!! This is a sweet tasting fruit with the flavour of caramel and cinnamon. Gnome has got first dibs for making a Melomel (honey and fruit wine) but I have been sneaking some past him to create some tasty dishes..they don’t call me Ninja Munchkin for nothing!
Wheel Barrow of Sapodilla.
Sapodilla fruit makes a great base for a curry especially with its aromatic cinnamon tones. I have complimented this “earthiness” with dried orange peel which I have coarsely ground with a blender:
Dried Orange Peel.
Other spices in the curry include: cumin, mustard seeds, fresh curry leaf and fennel. Venison was cooked in the curry and then the dish was served with basmati rice.
Sapodilla Curry with Venison.
Gnome decided to overlook the fact that I had taken some sapodillas, without his permission…since the curry was so good!!
When you live on a farm, there is a time of the year for different fruits and vegetables and when there is a bountiful crop, it requires inventiveness on my part to think of as many ways to eat the same thing without getting tired of it. It is Tangerine Time right now in Southern Belize and basically we have lots of it. Here in Toledo, anything that is citrus but is not an orange, grapefruit or lime is grouped under the category of “tangerine”. See below the many faces of the Tangerine:
“Tangerines” of Belize.
Now, I am sure there are proper names for each of these including mandarin, tangelo and satsuma but for all intents and purposes it really does not matter, because my exploration on this matter is on the eating of it. In this blog, I would like to share with you what we have actually been eating in the last 24 hours which have been tangerine-related. Firstly, I would like to introduce the concept of attempting to use the whole fruit for culinary purposes and in this example, the wonders of the zest. All you need is a sharp knife (we have no zesters in Belize) to get the zest off the citrus. Try to only get the coloured part off without the pith (the white part) which imparts a bitter taste to the palate. The zest gives a wonderful, fresh citrus flavour to food.
Tangerine Zest with Peel.
Last night, we had a meal of venison marinated in tangerine zest (and other things) with sliced tangerine. Frankly, I don’t have a problem mixing fruit with the main meal because it is a great substitute for carbohydrate. Plus, you spice up a fruit by adding a bit of black pepper to it.
Venison and Tangerine with Peach Palm Flowers served with Sweet Potato Greens.
As an aside regarding venison…I am not trying to be posh about eating, I just happen to have some in the freezer. The Mayans in the surrounding villages like to hunt game in the dense bush around here and occasionally, they turn up at our front gate with very fresh wild game. I have no hesitation in snapping up a hind leg whenever I can get my paws on it.
Today, continuing with the same theme, I baked bread with tangerine zest. I love the smell of home-baked bread and this one had high notes of tangerine citrus…very aromatic!
Tonight, we have another tangerine meal in the making! I am presently marinating minced pork in tangerine juice and zest (with other things) to make burgers. And of course, we will be eating more of the tangerine zest bread with it. I am thinking about pan frying some citrus in brown sugar as a side dish. You will probably get the picture tomorrow. Incidentally, I also made a tangerine zest Mojito for tonight which I am sipping in between writing this blog.
So far, so good. We are still enjoying the tangerines!!!
