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.

Hard labour breakfast

We eat rice 3 times a day! Yes. But each household has a particular way of working around that dish. My breakfast today consisted of a cup of coffee, a kind of cake made of rice and coconut called mokary or mofogasy and I had it with sun dried litchis. I did not make the mofogasy but you can check on the net ways of making it. Over here, so many people can make it so I let others do their work. I prepared the litchis in December when they were in abundance. It is really like bread and jam in the western world except that the bread is made of organic rice flower and the jam equivalence is the dried litchis.

This could be considered as an extra slow cooking food. It took 48hours to make the mofogasy and one month to make the sun dried litchis. The result was a very filing breakfast but that was what I needed today since I had to walk 5 hours through hectares of land to look for new ways of growing food! If you are interested in making your own mofogasy, you can check this video here.

Problem solving coconut!

Hello everyone!
Here is a product that I use a lot in my everyday life. When I was young, my brother used to tease me that I stink of coconut from head to toes, and he wasn't wrong. I put this product in my hair, all over my body, in my food and everything about the plant is useful for me. It's coconut. This is a very Indian Ocean plant and almost every household is probably using it in one way or another. But here, I use it's milk from the grated fresh coconut to cook cassava leaves.

Cassava leaves is part of our national dish, yes my Malagasy friends would say that it has to be cooked with pork but since I don't eat meat, I show you what I do. Cassava leaves have a bitter taste and coconut milk marry very well with it. I only use, freshly picked cassava leaves, lots of garlic and plenty of coconut milk to simmer it in. 

Freshly grated coconut is a beautiful ingredient to have at home. You can make so many things with it. I consider it my forever beauty product and problem solving item in the house!

Proper vegetarian lunch for 20cents in U.S dollar!

My lunch today was prepared with love by my assistant and believe me, she did a very good job.
Ingredients for lunch: 500Ar or 0.20cents in US dollar.
Time she spent to buy the ingredients, prepare and cook and presenting it on the table: 1hour only!
Main dish: morelle greens (anamamy) with raw peanuts
On the side: Rice and green salad with carrots, tomatoes and onions.

I must say that I didn't expect much of it since that is really such a cheap meal but the result was surprisingly good and I need to learn more from her. The combination of the bitterness of anamamy in a rather milky raw peanut sauce was just delicious. She will definitely participate in my blog more often than not. Wow!

Roughly chopped onions and tomatoes on a bedding of green salad and carrots.

Cyclone dish, tilapia and lemon verbena!

It's been raining for 3 days and very windy. It's cyclone time! My lemon verbena tree couldn't stand the strong wind neither did the chillies. So I had to go into the garden this morning and made new cuttings, collected seeds and came up with what I call a cyclone dish. The wonderful thing about seasonal food is that I don't quite know what I'd eat from one day to the next which spare me from wasting time planning. Rivers are overflowing and tilapia fish are in abundance. Since I live not far from a lake, people come to my door to sell tilapia. So I decided to make a dish out of the broken plants and the fish. This is the result, a delicious, spicy tilapia in lemon verbena sauce!

You will need quite a lot of lemon verbena leaves. It is very easy to plant it in your garden but do not make the mistake like myself where I never prune it so it got to 3 meters high and cyclone brought it down. This plant has a very beautiful, strong fragrance and has a slight lemon taste to it. I use this plant a lot for tea.

You will also need a big tilapia fish, cleaned thoroughly. I must say that I am eating here a foreign introduced fish to Madagascar that has put our endemic fish species into disappearance. May be if we eat more of them, they will be eradicated. Here is an interesting video and article about the change in rivers and lakes in Madagascar.

• Put a bed of onions, lemon zest, lots of lemon verbena leaves in a non-stick frying pan.
• Stuff some more of that combination inside the fish itself.
• Put the two types of chillies (cayenne and habanero) washed and unopened next to it
• Add salt and pepper
• Cover and let it sizzle with its own juice
• Turn the whole fish to cook making sure you do not break it.
• Finally, drizzle a little bit of oil on top and cook 3 minutes more before serving!

One type of breakfast

Good morning! I don't know if breakfast was meant to be prepared in a hurry or eaten fast but everything around my eating habits is slow. Slow cooking and eating slowly otherwise I don't get to eat at all. Not that I am fussy but everything goes moramora we say over here. Here is my breakfast this morning. Breadfruit pancake with fresh strawberry compote. Yes! That tree that gives you bread if you are following my posts. You can make flour from it and the result is a very fragrant fruit flower pancake!

Pic.1 Breadfruit pancake and strawberry compote

Pic.2 This is how I plant my strawberries

No breakfast is complete without coffee and I know my coffee well. These are special highland arabica beans that I harvested from my coffee tree right from my small garden. It is almost surreal but yes, one of my small tree provided about 7kg of coffee last year. Now it has left many more small coffee plants in my flower bed and I am in trouble because I do not want to kill any of them!

Pic.3 Highland arabica coffee beans harvested last year

Pic.3 And more coffee trees to come!

Apple or Banana?

I prefer apple banana. Well, I grow 3 types of banana in my garden. Apple banana, Cavendish ones and Lady Fingers. I didn't know this but, according to scientists, we might not be able to eat bananas anymore in 20 years from now because they will be wiped out by disease. The reason being the cloning of the one type called Cavendish banana or the ordinary one that you find everywhere. Pic.1 Apple banana

If you can, plant your banana. It is my favourite snack and I have it permanently in the fruit bowl. I remember that when I was young, I went through a whole year hiding from my parents and eating mostly bananas during the day. Well, I didn't die from it! Those of you who knew me then, please don't laugh! I love everything about banana. I think it is the most useful food plant on earth.
Banana is full of nutrition, its leaves are very useful for cooking, its peels are very good for your skin, and it is of a great value for energy, digestion, heart health and leaving you all relaxed!
Pic.2 Apple banana fingers still on the hand for fruit bats and birds in the garden

Pic.3 Pile of ordinary Cavendish banana, sitting on the street waiting for a pick-up

This one is called Gros Michel and I use this type for making the Malagasy pudding Koba that I posted earlier on. For me, it is the sweetest of all bananas.
Pic.4 Gros Michel type of banana

Political bitter gourd or Margoze!

The second food on my plate is just a mixture of mushroom and young spinach leaves but the third one is the political food. That is funny, why is that you may wonder?
I saw an article about bitter gourd in Mauritius one day and posted it on my Face book. I had so many reactions and I decided that I will plant this gourd again because my family loves it. Mauritius has one of the highest level of diabetic people on earth and they badly need their bitter gourd back! But here is the article that I read on their local newspaper.

 Here is my Malagasy native margoze that came out of the earth without being planted!

And it is not the longer fruit "Taiwan variety" they talked about in that newspaper article. :)

Plant your bread!

So here I am with the explanation of what I ate last night, pictured on my post yesterday.

If there is such a thing as breadfruit, why would I eat processed white bread?

That big lump on my plate was a quarter of a whole breadfruit!

It comes out of my garden, freshly collected by my parents who taught me how to eat it in the first place. They love it when it is slightly yellow and very sweet, boiled and served as it is or with a bit of butter.

I've tried so many ways, grill, steam, fry or mash and to me, it just simply replaces any carbohydrates. So I swap it for rice or sweet potatoes sometimes.

Pic. bellow with my parents selecting their favourite ones, my baby dog and myself

I love the fact that I can still eat the food that my ancestors ate 3000 years ago! There are many varieties of breadfruit but the one we have in Madagascar is the Polynesian one.

Our fruit tree can produce up to 200 fruits a year and I seriously believe that this "tree of bread" has a great potential to play an important role in alleviating hunger. If we think environment, and food problems, this is one of many solutions. Please check its nutritional value on the net here and plant your bread!

Guess what I had for dinner? Political food!

Good evening everyone!

This is a dish I made for dinner tonight. You can guess what it is and please leave me a comment later. If you haven't found out in 24hours, I will tell you all about it. Basically, everything in this plate is extremely good for your health. Of course! I would say so wouldn't I? But it is true. It is a vegetarian meal and only two of the ingredients I put in it didn't come from my own garden! One comes from a very big tree and the other ingredient has political problem for food justice right now! It was so delicious, I am tempted to make it again next week. Go on, have fun guessing! :)

Local or international?

My friend helper came back from our local market this morning empty handed. Why I asked? Apparently, she did not recognise most of the vegetables on the stall and she was afraid to make mistakes. I decided that I would go myself to find out. And yes, I understood what she meant. There were different onions, different cucumbers, different honey, different green leaf vegetables!
When I asked the names of these strange looking vegetables, the seller did not know but he explained how each one tastes! I took the risk, bought the one that looked like a spaceship and spent time on the net to find out. To my amazement, the one which is supposed to be called a horned African cucumber was after all a melon that the vendor could have waited until it was ripe and yellow so it would have tasted like a mix of jelly, banana, and zucchini! Well, I learnt something today! I only buy local vegetables and look what I found. An ancestor of cucumber which originated from Africa! YES. Buy local if you can and you learn something new. Spiky cucumber.

Thank you Malala for taking the photo while I was sniffing the spaceship! :)

I cut it in half, scooped the inside and ate it. People, you do not need vinegar or lime! It is already naturally with the taste of lemon. I just added a bit of salt, pepper and drops of olive oil... Yummy!

KOBA, Malagasy pudding

Today I would like to introduce to you the first kind of koba. I had this one for breakfast earlier on in the morning today since I had to do some physical work and needed a bit more energy. It is made out of rice and banana. Normally, it is already sweet enough but I added a teaspoon of forest honey as well. It is so delicious and I have to admit that wherever I go these days, I always make a new version of koba because I have to eat it at least once a week. As I mentioned before, I was so inspired by this food that I wrote a song about it. You can listen and watch the Koba video clip here!