busy bees

With the onslought of talented, motivated, and absolutely PHENOMENAL guests, there has not been much time for computers.

there has been time for this:



and then some of this:


Very exciting! i will post details and explanations soon--promise! For now, it is my honor and pleasure to accompany our industrious guests on an off-the-beaten-path tour of Nicaragua.

critters

i thought it might be refreshing to switch the focus for a bit off las plantas, and onto los animales. because of course, in every healthy ecosystem the animal kingdom exists and interacts with that of the plants, fungus, etc. Granted, we don't have any of the traditional farm animals YET. Once the house is finished and we are living on la finca, our friendly fauna wish list includes un burro, gallinas, una cabra, y 2 perros (a donkey, chickens, a goats, and two dogs).
However, i am not so arrogant as to assume that the farm is absent of animal life. on the contrary! the place is crawling (literally) with both welcomed and pesky critters. A recent arrival heralding the official beginning of the Dry Season are las chicharras whose music, for me, captures the nostalgia of hot muggy summers.

Annual cicada, Tibicen linnei

Above, see the exoskeleton of a chicharra, its crispy outer shell evidence of its final foray in the chicharra life cycle: molting into an winged adult, after anywhere between 2 to 15 years living underground.
These guys are not known to harm crops, save young fruit trees where females may prefer to lay eggs, so what's all the noise about?
HEAR it is! listen to this video clip, recorded at the farm around dusk. Apologies for the poor visual quality.

While i am eternally grateful that chicharras are not the biblical locust plague sent to descend upon my humble garden, and i recognize the VITAL importance of beneficial insects and pollinators, i admit that i am not a huge fan of bugs. That being said, if i had some pics of bees and butterflies i would be eager to celebrate them here, a small slice of internet fame in exchange for providing VIABILITY to my poor little forever-flowering cantaloupes:

Turns out, cantaloupe flowers require pollination for fruit set, otherwise all you get are cute yellow flowers. Sadly, i haven't seen much bee action en la finca, despite the attractive blooms of zillions of flowering "weeds" surrounding the garden. the next step would be something called hand pollination, in which one manually transfers pollen from a male to a female blossom. Call me squeamish, but i'm not sure i'm ok with that? i'm a first-year gardener for crying out loud!

And finally, not to be overlooked, our domesticated yet (occasionally) working farm animals:

You might remember Niña from the compost scandal a ways back, she's a little gal with a keen ear and a fierce bark.

Meet: Negro

a new addition to the farm, currently compost-forage apprentice to Niña, goofy, scrawny, energetic--this was the best i could do for his profile foto

¡y La Zaya!

Formerly a Californian house cat, Zaya spends 5-10 minutes a week honing her hunting skills in preparation for life on a farm. Pictured here with latest kill

You say: papaya, I say: papaya...

Even the most gringo of gringos can pronounce papaya with the ease and elegance of well-spoken español. Try it: PAPAYA
So easy, si?
Papayas are tropical-loving plants all the way. Dr. Seuss has nothing on this tree--look at it! From their long giraffe-like trunks all the way to their enormous frog-fingery leaves, these guys make truffula trees look like your average joe oak. Not to mention those wild groovy fruits!!!

Carica papaya

If you had never seen the inside of a papaya, you might be startled by its vivid orangey innards, and even more so by the plethora of slimy black semillas. this is not the most flattering photo, but honestly papaya is a delicious fruit!

Like your other orangey-red fruits and veg, papaya contains antioxidants, as well as the digestive enzyme papain--which means that somehow, papaya is good for your digestion! The flesh isn't the only medicinal part, the SEED of papaya has also made a name for itself. Ground up maybe, or just nibbled, the seeds are reported to expel intestinal worms (around here, this is critical info, i should know),,,and others (raw foodists, who else) claim that the seeds' flavor mimics that of black pepper. i am currently drying some up to give it a try.

Over at the farm, i employed papaya seeds (from the tree shown above) to fulfill the One True Destiny of all seeds: PROPAGATION! Following the advice of friendly online tropical gardeners, i deposited somewhere between 50 and 100 seeds into a shallow, fertile bed with ample sunshine, the idea being to thin out the more scraggly guys after germination.

After almost 2 months of impatient watering, we've got papaya! In keeping with their bizarre atypical appearance, papayas are one fruit tree that will produce fruit within the first year--the countdown is on!

you can already recognize the frog-fingers on this one!

Matchmaking

My guest of honor for this post is an incredibly versatile FRUIT, and is in fact growing en la finca on at least 1 enormous tree (maybe more, i'll have to search).....
a fruit frequently featured in a savory DIP,
a fruit revered by raw foodists as well as cooked foodists.........
my personal FAVORITE FOOD, hands down, on the planet:

¡EL AGUACATE!

The avocados on our tree actually have not ripened yet, see below,


but with the range of mini climates in the area, perfectly soft yet firm fruit of the gods will be available for months starting now. Hailing from the very not-tropical state of Virginia, i maintain a fascination with and something like desperation for good, ripe avocados. In el mercado, i cannot say no to an avocado offer--i physically cannot restrain myself. they are so ripe and so cheap and so available! Of course the problem arises when i arrive home with bagfuls of the heavy green fruit, and only these two little gringo mouths to feed.

For sure, guacamole goes a looooooooong way

i serve it up on Nicaragua's comida tipica, gallo pinto, as well as the usual with chips, in a 7 layer dip, on a sandwich, with eggs, etc etc. By the way Nicas don't do guacamole--despite the sensational flavor combo of avocado with onion, garlic, lemon, salt, pepper, and tomato--they slice it and leave it blandly on the side of the plate, an afterthought not worthy of its own serving bowl. sacrilege i say!

However, i have been to that place of too much guac, where instead of inviting pleasure and delight, the sight of another bowl of smooshed avocado simply repels. With this knowledge, i am sashaying my way into avocado season, determined to keep my taste buds interested.

Taking a cue from raw foodists, i decided to incorporate aguacate into dessert for a change. Gross, right? i don't much prefer any fruit in my dessert if i can help it. as tasty as cherry pie and peach cobbler might be, dessert is CHOCOLATE and CARAMEL and CANDY. that's just me. little did i know what drama was to unfold....

the meeting of 2 tropical fruits

At first, they didn't seem to relate. The prissy packaged cocoa powder, her fluorescent price tag like bling, almost mocking the bohemian aguacates, naked and wild and free of plastic.

but when the package was opened and the powder emptied out, maybe she remembered those days growing as a cacao fruit, dangling from a tree in the hot tropical sun; before being harvested, fermented, dried, then pulverized, the cacao was living that same bohemian lifestyle!

Into the blender they went, 2 tropical fruits, footloose and fancy free!

+ 2 more, caña + vainilla...

=
a match made in heaven!

insanely delicious creamy chocolate mousse

Home Brew

Now that i'm appropriately armed with
glass bottles
fresh caps
the Red Baron capper
killer home brew,

LET THE KOMBUCHA REVOLUTION BEGIN!

ok so really i started with 11 bottles as a trial run. (this is a grassroots revolution, people! they all start small.) IF i perfect the bottling, and IF i can spread kombucha love throughout Nicaragua despite the language and cultural barriers and IF i can turn a profit selling re-used beer bottles, i may have my own humble kombucha business--refrescos fermentados!

My first bottling endeavor went a little something like this:

Step 1) Boiling re-used bottles about 5 minutes on stove top for sterilization


Step 2) Filling the clean empty bottles with my 2 latest brews: té verde con raspberry y té negro

i added a pinch of ginger to several of the bottles, which in retrospect, makes for a gross chunky swallow when you drink straight from the bottle. next time i will flavor before bottling.

Step 3) Using this nifty capping mechanism (the Red Baron), i sealed the magic that is kombucha into 11 air-tight vessels


¡que profesional!


It's that easy, folks. You too can bottle your own fermented tea at home. just please please not in Nicaragua! i'm not quite ready for competition.

In my eagerness to judge the bottling experiment, i waited only 2 days before sampling (usually i give the komucha 7+ days to marinate flavor.) oh well, taste test results:
1 botella té negro con jenhibre: fizzy and tart, deliciosa!
1 botella té verde con raspberry: sweet and a little flat.

Solar Muffins, upside-down tomates

Latest solar fare:
Banana Crunch Muffins, loosely based on this recipe http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Banana-Muffins-with-a-Crunch/Detail.aspx?src=etaf


sun-tanned delicious!




And finally the time has come to harvest from the Upside-Down Tomato experiments! Out of the 4 i planted, this is the only plant that appears healthy. The other 3 produced a few tiny tomatoes but their branches have dried and withered.

It was affirming to hear that many other folks who planted the UC-82 variety were also met with a disappointing, flavor-less tomato crop. The seeds were gifted to us by a local agricultural co-op, a sandinista program i would guess, that collaborates with the university to provide ag-info, workshops, seeds, and probably much more. We recently attended a lecture on zompopos (leaf-cutter ants), an ingenious insect that farms its own mushrooms (!!) and often destroys coffee crops in the process. The little einsteins harvest chunks of leaves and haul them back to their underground fungus farm, then feed on some bacteria or micro-organism that lives on the mushrooms. In Costa Rica there are eco-tours offering hikes to see leaf-cutter ants in action! Admittedly, it is cool to see a long line of them trekking back to the nest, the slices of bright green leaf seeming to herald the arrival of a medieval ant calvary.
In the lecture i was very impressed at the the organic approach to managing the pest, including the application of neem oil and the value placed on understanding the zompopo life cycle.

Back to the dangling tomatoes: as far as UC-82s go, these were not bad! Good color, typical square-ish shape, slightly juicier than the in-ground crop.

All in all, i'd say it's not a bad idea if you lack ample garden space. Otherwise......they weren't worth the precarious balance act of watering on a stool.

solar oven lovin'

Despite the discomforts of squinting, profusive sweating, heat exhaustion, and sunburns, the blazing sol de nicaragua has redeemed itself to me by generously cooking, toasting, and baking my food!
Solar Ovens are SUCH a GOOD IDEA! Not that i hadn't heard of them before, but i had not ever observed the simple miracle of cooking with the closest star to our planet. Solar chefs boast of a special sun-infused flavor achieved only through solar cooking and sure, maybe that's true. i haven't noticed yet and i don't really care because i am fascinated and grateful enough that my food is being COOKED just by leaving it out in the sunshine!!!
First try was plain old rice--2 cups agua, 1 cup rice + 2 hrs in the oven--which turned out mostly cooked, the top actually too crunchy and dry.
Next, keepin it fairly simple--baked potatoes.
Here they are raw, awaiting solar oven lovin

The whole contraption is ultra-simple--a box painted black on the inside, a plexi-glass door, and shiny reflective panels all around. Lots of people make their own. Cooking pot and lid should also be black.


i gave the taters about 2.5 hrs.....during which time, being the goddess of contradiction that she is, look where Zaya chose to retreat from the scorching sun:

classic.

As peak sunlight hours waned, i gleefully served buttery *star* baked potatoes, my gas tank no less full than before and the kitchen blessedly cool without the oven's suffocating heat.


For my next trick,

Sun Toasted Granola

1 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup honey
1/4 stick of butter, melted
1 cup chopped nuts--i only have cashews
1/2-1 cup dried fruit--raisins are all i could find around here, though i dream of dried berries
1 tbsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1 pinch sal

Los Ingredientes


Start with the liquids, mix 'em up



Add dry



Mix it all up



Spread onto a greased cookie sheet, or if your solar oven is a small square, spread onto aluminum foil inside a skillet



Catch some rays, though i think 2 hrs was a tad too long


what more can i say: Sola Granola!