Beef or beet, Horse or radish

I haven't heard anything interesting on the news since last week-end but this story of horse meat disguised as beef in Europe. Well, can we be fooled to recognise our beet from radish I wonder?
Beetroot is red and sweet and horseradish is white or grey and spicy!
I don't trust anything disguised as a meat product like minced, gravy, stock cubes, sausages, etc.
If I really have to eat meat, I need to see the animal with its head, eyes, mouth and body before it dies.
This reminds me of my experience when I was to enter my first supermarket in London. Overwhelmed by the variety and the brands, I took 3 hours to do my first shopping. It was some time gone before I realised that a white piece of meat rapped up in a plastic was called fish. No head, no tail, I took it home to cook, but then again it tasted like blunt rubber chicken! Sorry to say but I come from the jungle and everything has a taste!

But enough of that, today, I would like to introduce to you my avocado plant.

After litchis and mangoes, February is the season for avocado and peaches. Yes, I love avocado.
My first avocado meal today is a simple cut open avocado with red rice and green leaf vegetables. It was yummy! I usually eat an avocado as it is but I learnt from the west that it can be served as a starter. Mixed with vinaigrette sauce, salt and pepper. In Mexico, I had the famous guacamole but in Madagascar, we have it sweet for dessert. When in season, I eat avocado 7 days in a row. I try not to eat any other fat of any form during that period since even the butter on my bread is avocado!

If you would like to know more about what you are eating, you can always google everything. Here is one place I found interesting about avocado nutrients.

Miracle super food, Anan'ambo!

Happy to be back here to blog more nutritious food for all my readers.
I do not know, how many of you out there can grow or buy it fresh or have it dried in a sealed bag but here is my favourite green leaf power food. Moringa Oleifera or we call it anan'ambo.
This plant will give you so much nutrition for the day that really you can just have it as a full meal. You can grow one tree and you will harvest for years and years without thinking about buying yogurt or milk or carrot again ;)
In my garden in Mauritius, I have the plant as hedges! People over there told me that they do not eat that "thing" anymore because it is food for "di mun miser" which simply means food for the poor people. Well, if poor people can get to it, yes, it has so much nutrition and you do not need to prepare it much but eat it fresh as it is or boil it quickly for a soup and that is how "di jun miser" survived!

This is how my Mom taught me how to pick the leaf of its twigs, wash well afterwards and put in different size boxes to store in the freezer.

Do check on the net what this plant can do to your health! It's really is a miraculous plant!

Nutrients	Common food		Moringa Leaves
Vitamin A	Carrot	1.8 mg	6.8 mg
Calcium	Milk	120 mg	440 mg
Potassium	Banana	88 mg	259 mg
Protein	Yogurt	3.1 g	6.7 g
Vitamin C	Orange	30 mg	220 mg

Left over food! Pizza mangahazo

You will be very surprised of what you can make out of left overs! The same fresh food of yesterday but a day old today! With a bit of imagination, you can open your fridge and re-create a brand new dish. Well I have never eaten this one before and I was quite happy about how it turned out to be.

• I finely grated the left over of cooked cassava. 
• I added a little bit of wholegrain flour and warm water. 
• Mixed well before adding one egg, salt, pepper and 50g of grated cheese. 
• I buttered my oven dish, and layered the paste on it. 
• I finally sprinkle 50g more grated cheese on top and put it in the pre-heated oven.
• After 20mn, it was ready to eat!

I served it with green salad and slightly steamed beetroot without salad dressing. I must say that it was quite delicious and very filling indeed. All my co-workers were very happy with it since they too had never eaten cassava in any other way but boiled. They called the dish the peasant's pizza! Give it a try. I highly recommend it.

2013!

I just had a quick look at zen food blog and realised that it has reached 2013 viewers from so many parts of the globe! This is encouraging to know that I only started to post here since mid January and not even a month has gone and it has some dedicated readers.

I would like to attract your attention to the fact that, the choice of this blog came about because of so many people, journalists, young people on the street, people who have watched my stage show, old friends with whom I went to school, or just simply all my fans, all of you who keep asking me questions about how do I stay healthy, strong with lots of energy and how I keep my skin to look like it is, I had no answer except "it's all in the food"! So I decided to present my kind of food. It's simple, it's not expensive and it's fresh. that's all there is to it.

I am a busy artist and I cannot afford to be suddenly sick during studio time or touring or on stage or while travelling so I developed a system for food intake as if it was nutrition or medicine for our body, mind and spirit and not just food to fill your stomach!
I am fascinated about art, I love gardening, I spent a great deal of time with different creatures in a day and I am very concerned about the change of the environment we live in!

Thank you.

Expensive Malagasy family food

Yesterday, I had to eat with a Malagasy family and this is what they put on the table. Beautifully prepared free range chicken with a kind of clear green soup or "ro" and lots of chillies that they freshly picked in the garden. I must say that everything tasted so good although I only had the "ro", the chillies and a salad dish that I brought for everyone to taste.

 

They said that they would only cook this kind of dish when it is a party time or when they have valuable guest. I felt embarrassed since they went their way to kill a chicken for me without knowing that I only eat fish and vegetables. This whole plate bellow was just for me apparently! :)

As for the pili-pili chili, I was advised to just take it into my mouth, have a bite and then follow it quickly by a spoonful of rice and chicken and the whole thing watered down by the "ro"! The chili was so hot! I have to be careful before biting next time since I took almost half of it in, and my mouth was burning unbearably!

I picked some more chillies later, pounded and mixed the paste with garlic and ginger and I put the mixture in a jar covered with lemon and olive oil. This will last for a long time in the fridge!

Soy galette and cyclone dessert!

Finally, the radio announced this morning that cyclone is over for now. Time to look around the garden and repair the damage. Well, you never know what you can get to eat when you do not want to throw away food and with a little bit of imagination, you can almost make anything to eat. Spare one hour to prepare the dish and dessert and you are on for a good treat.

Soy galette and vegetables with yellow lentils for the main dish. Soya beans existed in Madagascar since 1900 and people use it in many different ways. I use a very small amount mixed with bread fruit flour to make my galette.

These are green mangoes, harvested from all the branches broken down by the cyclone! They look like they have some black patches but they are perfectly alright so if you see those, please do not throw them away. They are good.

Here is how the green mango compote looked like when finished. I much prefer this to the apple compote in plastic cups that you can find in any supermarket theses days. I made 3 jars out of 4 mangoes. Mind you, it did not last long since, me and my sister ate a whole jar! My brother topped it up with a bit of macadamia ice cream and nearly finished a whole jar. I highly recommend it.

The pot can stay in the fridge for few days if the kids do not find it!

Real food on the road!

On Sundays, I have to get out of the house and walk miles and miles away in the country side if I am not in my garden. For that, I bring or buy on the road what I call survival kit food on the road. Depending on where I was from or where I am heading, I would only opt for fresh food. Easy, healthy, cheap and no risk food. I'd eat light but I try to eat right. Raw garlic and onions would always be part of my meal. I like the taste, cooked or raw but on the road I opt for raw. Who doesn't know today that these two herbs are packed with nutrition and health benefits? I recommend everybody to eat them.

Sweet corn are the best food on the road of Antananarivo that I know of! These freshly picked sweet corn are either boiled or steamed on the road side and they just taste so delicious!

In this side road stall here, you can eat fresh sweet corn pipping hot from the pot, you can drink freshly cooked milk or have some honey poured into recycled whisky bottle.

Although I eat onions mostly as vegetables for savoury dish, I lately acquired the taste of home made onion jam that somebody offered me as a gift and I am tempting my Malagasy friends to taste it. After all, we have so many varieties of onions.