Half Way

We completed two weeks on the program today.  Jennifer and I enjoyed dinner looking at a full moon rising over the Pacific, simply magnificent.  Our evening cocktail is one half lime into an ice filled glass then pour to full with fresh squeezed sugar cane juice.  We ate pesto (lemon, mac nuts, and basil), beets, french green beans and cassava.  We are both amazed how full we get, even though what we are eating is very light.

Diner, cassava, pesto, beets and french green beans

I spent the weekend gardening and except for walking the dog did not leave our property.  Today I went over our 4 small greenhouses including harvesting, suckering and trellising the tomatoes, made IMO #4, weeded several of my upper garden beds (three wheelbarrows full of weeds into my compost pile), spread stored IMO #4 on a newly prepared garden bed, feed the chickens and collected the eggs, and harvested sweet potatoes and cassava.

I woke early with a cup of ginger turmeric tea and then headed directly into the gardens.  I am a morning person, so this feels right.  I love working in the garden in the early morning while working up an appetite for breakfast.  Upon my return to the house, Jennifer made me a fabulous smoothie. She through in a surprise this morning with some frozen lychee we had in our freezer from an earlier harvest this Spring.

Lunch

We had a calm relaxing lunch about 1:00 where we enjoyed home made cottage cheese, beets, and avocado with home made salsa.  Fresh squeezed Orange Juice was our refreshment drink.  Wow, great lunch on a Sunday afternoon.

One last note half way through the experiment.  I've lost ten pounds in 14 days.  That is 5% of my body weight! I am not starving myself, quite the opposite.  So how can this be?  I think it must be that I am not eating any fat or empty calories.  Losing weight was not my intention, it just happened.

truth in numbers

Day Thirteen

Fresh Squeezed OJ

I love Saturdays.  I don't have to go any where, and I didn't.  Jennifer and I and Drake had fresh squeezed Orange Juice and a hard boiled egg for breakfast.

I loved gardening today.  White pineapples ripen in late summer in Hawaii.  After harvesting the fruit there is a lot of new planting material to make new pineapples for next year including all the tops, suckers and the keikis from under the fruits.  Therefore I really needed to plant my new pineapple bed.  I laid down weed mat over a prepared garden including a top layer of IMO #4.  The weed mat should prevent the pesky Wainaku Grass and other weeds from coming up.  Pineapples take a year to fruit and weeding them is a royal pain.  Hopefully this works out.  The bed is four feet wide and about 40 feet in length.  Next August we'll have over a hundred  super sweet white pineapples which make the very best dried fruit treats.

I also harvested an older chicken today, my first meat in two weeks.  This is really the cycle of life on a farm.  If you don't eat meat, skip this.  If you do eat meat, this is how it is done, but by someone you don't know, probably in a factory.  Doing this myself gives me respect for the animals that I take for my nourishment as well as being assured that the animal was raised naturally without antibiotics or any other food factory tricks.

I grabbed a bird, hung it up side down by it's feet and it becomes calm.  Then I cut it's juggler vein with a knife and in a few short minutes it bleeds to death.  The next step is to dip the whole bird in some just boiled water for about two minutes to loosen the feathers.  Then it is easy to pluck the feathers off.  The next step is to remove all the organs and soon you have a bird like you see in the picture below or on your supermarket shelf.

before

after

I chopped this bird into my black eye pea and tomato soup.  That was dinner. Yumm!

Lunch was taro chunks which I am becoming quite fond of as it fills me up.

Day Twelve

Six New Chicks

It takes 21 days for a chick to hatch after laying.  We have a seven egg incubator.  I take freshly laid eggs from under our sitting hens and put them into our incubator in my office and voila, 21 days latter we have up to 7 new chicks.  This is the forth time I've hatched chicks this way, and I plan to keep this cycle going.  This is seven birds every 21 days.  The newly hatched chicks need heat ( they normally tuck under their mothers hot body), so we keep them in the house in a box on top of a heating pad.  I feed them uncooked brown rice for the first week, Master Cho says this increases the length of their digestive tract allowing them to be more efficient in digesting feed over their life span.  After a week or so I integrate the new chicks into our flock first using a big cage to have the chicks get enough size to survive the pecking order of the big hens.

My plan is to begin eating some of the older birds as I replace them with the younger birds.  They stop laying after several years.  I think I'll harvest one tomorrow and put that into our black eye pea soup.  This is a good way to make sure my meat is healthy and naturally raised.

I had eggs today for breakfast, avocados and salsa in addition to my daily fruit smoothie.

For lunch I had a salad with green leaf lettuce and beets.

Jennifer is hosting her monthly Friday night yoga potluck tonight with donations going to help a needy family in India.  I harvested taro this morning before going to work and Jennifer crafted them into taro burgers for tonights main course.

Day Eleven

Cassava, beets, french green beans and guava juice

Yesterday I fought off a few cravings.  Things like driving by the Starbucks I would normally pull into and having it call out to me.  Or in the evening before dinner wanting to munch on a bag of chips.  Today wasn't so bad.  

We are a third of the way through our exercise and it is interesting to observe myself.  The first few days I was tired.  I had energy in the day but early in the evening I would be sleepy.  Eleven days in, that isn't the case.  My energy level is much higher than before.  I'm not stuffed like I sometimes was after a heavier meal.  I think the lighter eating is giving me a higher energy level.  I'm also getting used to sometimes being a little bit hungry.  Normally I'd just go to the store or fast food and fill up when I felt hungry.  Now I just have a little bit of healthy garden food or nothing at all.  At first it was an uncomfortable feeling.  Now I am used to it, and actually like it better.

No coffee and no alcohol are big changes too.  I use to kick start the day with a jolt of caffeine,  now I'm having some ginger turmeric tea heated in the microwave.  In the evening I use to bring it all down with several glasses of red wine.  I don't miss it.  In fact I feel really good.  Clear headed too.

Breakfast: papaya, banana sugar cane juice smoothie and two boiled eggs later.

Lunch:  Pineapple chucks, and taro with a spoonful of pesto.

Afternoon snack:  dried banana and dried pineapple.

Diner: Cassava, beets, french beans and guava juice.

Day Ten

Well the stock market crashed again today down 500, yesterday up 400, and down 700 the day before.  One thing is certain, that there is NO CERTAINTY in our future.  So this experiment is timely.  Because no matter what is going on in this crazy world I know we can feed ourselves without leaving home.

Breakfast was a papaya, banana, sugar cane smoothie and two hardboiled eggs.

Lunch was taro.

Afternoon snack was dried bananas and dried white pineapple.

Dinner will be sautéed green beans and cassava with pesto made from our basil plants.

Number Nine

Steamed Taro

I said I was going to talk about taro in today's post.  This particular white variety, Mauna Kea Kea was prized by the Hawaiians.  It is very mild in taste and doesn't take too long to steam, only about 20 minutes.  One corm is almost more than I could eat in a day.  I must have over a hundred taro plants with large corms in my gardens.  Every time I harvest the big corm, there are at least 8 little taro plants attached that must be replanted.  I always have an empty prepared garden bed ready to accept the baby taro plants.  Soon I'll be able to feed the neighborhood.

For today's lunch I had steamed taro with some left over green beens.  It is very filling and full of nourishment.  Poi (mashed taro) is the perfect baby food.  I won't bore you with my meals today as it was fruit till noon, and a salad for dinner.  Better to leave you with the Hawaiian legend of taro:

One Hawaiian legend tells of Wakea, Father Heaven, who bore a child with the Daughter of Earth. Born prematurely, the deformed infant, Haloa, was in the shape of a bulb. Wakea buried the body at one corner of his house. The couple’s second-born child, also named Haloa, was a healthy boy who would become the ancestor of the Hawaiian people. Haloa was to respect and look after his older brother for all eternity. The elder Haloa, the root of life, would always sustain and nourish his young brother and his descendants.

Early Hawaiians supposedly consumed up to 15 pounds of taro (as poi), per person, on a daily basis. It was such a revered source of nourishment that only men were allowed to grow it.

Even today, much of the Hawaiian culture is based on taro cultivation. For example, no one is allowed to fight or argue when a bowl of poi is open. According to Hawaiian custom, it is disrespectful to fight in front of an elder. And as the living embodiment of Haloa, taro is the “elder brother” of all Hawaiians

Day Eight

Cassava

Tonight we had cassava, a widely grown crop in the tropics for starch.  Drake came over and we grated some root using our Cuisinart food processor grating blade.  In just a few short minutes we had a bowl of grated cassava.  Drake then fried it using some gee, and it comes out just like hash brown potatoes.  We had this with a pesto Jennifer made from our basil plants, and a fresh green salad with tomatoes and avocado.

I'll talk more about taro tomorrow but I ate the Mauna Kea Kea variety today for lunch and it was just ono!

Meanwhile, I'm cut and pasting from wikipedia some info on cassava:

Cassava is grown for its enlarged starch-filled roots, which contains nearly the maximum theoretical concentration of starch on a dry weight basis among food crops. Fresh roots contain about 30% starch and very little protein. Roots are prepared much like potato. They can be peeled and boiled, baked, or fried. It is not recommended to eat cassava uncooked, because of potentially toxic concentrations of cyanogenic glucosides that are reduced to innocuous levels through cooking. In traditional settings of the Americas, roots are grated and the sap is extracted through squeezing or pressing. The cassava is then further dried over a fire to make a meal or fermented and cooked. The meal can then be rehydrated with water or added to soups or stews. In Africa, roots are processed in several different ways. They may be first fermented in water. Then they are either sun-dried for storage or grated and made into a dough that is cooked. Alcoholic beverages can be made from the roots.

Young tender leaves can be used as a potherb, containing high levels of protein (8-10% F.W.). Prepared in a similar manner as spinach, care should be taken to eliminate toxic compounds during the cooking process.