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!