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!