Week 4 - Going Bananas and Feeling Corny, Not Cheesy

This week I have been going bananas – quite literally. Green ones, yellow ones, boiled, fried, raw and dried. You may remember from a post or two ago the bunch of bananas I picked too early and which, as a consequence, weren’t ripening. Nessie was beginning to give me sideways glances as the whole bunch stubbornly refused to yellow. But, Hoorah! All is not lost! I have found out that these are perfectly edible, giving me an easy out from the unforgivable crime of wasting a whole bunch of otherwise perfectly good bananas, while also giving me a large source of starchy carbohydrate. 

The Raw Material

Potential "fries"

Behold, the Deep Fryer.

You boil them, smash them up with a splash of olive oil and they taste like Mum's homestyle mash - a little lumpy. Boil them and then roast them with a bit of extra virgin and it's just like Sunday roast any day of the week - without the lamb. You fry them like chips and they’re practically indistinguishable from the fries you get at MacDonald’s, excepting of course the price, shape, packaging, texture and perhaps the taste. As a result of this versatility my freezer is now full of the humble,boiled, frozen, green banana.

Whoops!

Number 42, your chips are ready

The boiled green Lady Fingers ready for peeling

Here are a few bananas which did ripen, eventually, about to be put into my Christmas present - the dehydrator. Thanks Mum!

Another breakthrough came this week with the manufacture of some corn flour. Well, more corn meal I guess you'd call it. (By the way, have you ever looked at the ingredients on a packet of corn flour? Go to your cupboard and check it out. Weird eh?) 


The "breakthrough" started with some extremely manky cobs of corn I scavenged from the school garden beds after we returned to them post Christmas holiday break. 


Insert Defensive Disclaimer Here: Yes I know its not strictly food from Lofty Meadows but I reckon it is allowed seeing as how I helped plant all of the crops there too, even if I was being paid to help the kids do it, it still passes the "Did I grow it?" test. So there.


Rather than look at these old, brown, dried out,  and frankly quite useless cobs of corn as being merely chook food, I was determined to see them as Dave food. But how? I happened to be cooking "Taco Mix" (beans, tomato, spring onions mashed with enough cayenne pepper to bring a tear to a Mexican's donkey) for dinner so I thought - "How bout some corn flat bread senor? Come on Hombre, let's mill some flour."

The Raw Material

Young Tobes expending some valuable kilojoules for me on Nessie's Vintage Husqvarna  mincer (Made in Sweden!)

Watch the goodness flow......

The course meal out of the mincer

After about half an hour in the mortar and pestle, with cramped elbows all round we finally achieve our goal - A cup of corn meal. It smelt delicious by the way.

A fuzzy picture of the "Nacho Mix"

The "corn flat breads", note that that title is now in inverted commas, were not as successful as I had first envisioned. There must be very little glutenous substance in the corn, at least in the sweet corn that I used, to bind the "bread" together. Ness suggested whacking an egg in there; always a safe option when looking for cohesion. The result were lumpy little, grainy textured pikelets. 


They were delicious of course, but then again that is one of the upsides to being constantly hungry.


The rain over the past couple of weeks has been both a blessing and a curse. This is the case with many things in this world I suppose. The rain of course is essential out here at Highvale, God's own nature strip, not only for the growth of the garden, but also because we are on tank water exclusively. 


Putting drinking water on vegetables is hard to swallow, especially when you have to buy it in lean, dry times. And so, I hear you exclaim: "Get a dam you eegit!"


Thank you for your input. We have a dam, which is actually more of a pond, which for most of the time is actually more of a depression with some anxious looking lilies at the bottom of it. For those of you not in south east Queensland at the moment, it has been really wet of late, and though our dam was full to overflowing a week ago it is back down to half way level now. 


I feel I have to confess at this juncture that this inability of our dam to hold water is from some home grown Wwoofer powered excavating we did to enlarge the it. Apparently dams have a clay seal in them that when ruptured can tend to leak like the proverbial unhousetrained puppy. This leaves us no water to pump out for the gardens. So you can see the upshot is that the rain is great for us in two ways - it fills the tanks so that we don't have to buy water, and it wets the gardens so we don't have to irrigate. 


The type of consistent rain that we have had in the last two weeks can be detrimental to the garden though. Many plants don't like wet feet. Some of the smaller carrots have been rotting. The Zucchini vines are completely cactus and the squash plants among the corn are looking a bit sodden. I thought I heard one ask me for a trip to the bahamas the other day, you know, for a spot of sun bathing to burn off some of the fungus - a bit like an Englishman I suppose. The tomato flowers probably haven't set to fruit as well as they could have and to cap it off, I fell on my fundament negotiating a flooded, slippery and quite frankly treacherous path. At least the lilies look relieved for the time being and our new Muscovy ducks are looking very pleased. It's nice weather for ducks. I'll have a picture of them next week, once they've stopped looking so gosh dang cute


I'm loosing weight like a jellyfish in a sauna. See....

From Mama Cass to Karen Carpenter in three short weeks

I dreamt of cheese the other night. It was melted. There was crispy toasted bread under it with some kind of tomatoey stuff looking red in there. Oh Cheeses.... cripes. 


I have heard that some other people around are doing an IRP (See first Showing Rib post). What project are you going to do? Please comment


Until then, spread the word. Link me. Like me. Show some rib. 

Showing Rib