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.

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

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!