Sweet potato queen: feeding the gods

No matter how much I picked the tips for stir fried greens, the rampant vines wanted to take over the garden, so I thought to investigate what was going on underground in the sweet potato department.

ʻUala (sweet potato - Ipomoea batatis) from the convolvulus (morning glory) family was one of the canoe plants which came to the Hawaiian archipelago with the first Polynesian voyagers. It is thought that this plant originated in South America.

Interestingly, DNA research into sweet potato varieties, combined with other archaeological and linguistic evidence, reinforces the case for Polynesian voyaging canoes crossing vast oceans with deliberation and sophisticated navigation techniques. This NPR article has a good summary of contemporary thought on the significance of the sweet potato in the story.

I am not quite sure where my sweet potato stock came from as there were a few plants holding their own against the Roundup regime, when I arrived.

It took me a couple of months to organize the back yard into suitable areas for cultivation. I did not pay much attention to the tendrils unfurling underfoot. By February/March of this year I began to notice that I had spreading ʻuala fields, almost without my having done anything. This plant really wanted to be in this backyard food forest.

This picture from 5 June 2013 shows the original corrugated iron garden bed on the left middle distance, and a pile of weeds, grass and ʻuala which I had pulled out while exploring what was viable. It was not really until December 2013, and Lionheartʻs visit, however, that this area was truly remodelled, resulting in the crazy abundance and food independance celebration of my Fourth of July, 2014, first ʻuala harvest.

Initially I also dug my kitchen organic waste into the growing medium which I was introducing for the food plant areas. This growing medium, specifically in the sweet potato areas, consists of a mix of red cinder soil which was in the original corrugated iron garden bed, some purchased organic growing medium ("soil") which they sell in bags at the various hardware stores and a mulch and horse manure mix, which I have laboriously fetched truckload by truckload from the county green waste site and a local farm.

Some of my first harvest could be stock which was on the land, or it could be sprouting tips generated from my kitchen. Yes, I know I am not being very scientific about this. I should be keeping a better diary, but there are only so many hours in every day and my first cycle of seasons in a rainforest climate zone is unfolding with surprises and discoveries from all directions.

What I am harvesting right now is purple inside but generally much larger than the little stubby, swollen-finger-size roots which I have been purchasing at the local farmerʻs market. The biggest are bigger than my big, flat, US size 9 local feet.

At first, after hauling the leaves and stems away to the side,  I was using a small spade to dig for tubers, but found that I was nicking them. Now I plunge my hands deep into the earth and feel for tubers. Harvesting the bigger ones can be a little like tooth extraction. I wiggle them gently until they come loose, trying not to break them. The longer thinner ones, or those that have had to curve around a lava rock, can snap off. Fortunately they seem to like growing close to the surface as I do not have an enormous depth of growing medium built up as yet.

From my reading it seems that the wounded ones might not have such good shelf life. The heat and humidity of summer might also not be the best storage conditions for my purple treasures. There is nowhere that is going to be consistently below 65 degrees in my house or garden

These tubers are not the prettiest or most photogenic of harvests. Arrayed on the ground on day of harvest they swam and swirled in front of me like a school of fish.

Up close, they are generally gnarled, brownish or speckled grey white, (multiple varieties?) occasionally hairy with little roots, and some have split a bit (possibly from too rich a growing medium).

 As a staple food, the purple sweet potato more than fills my belly. Research seems to indicate that they are nutritionally valuable: "very low in Saturated Fat and Cholesterol. It is also a good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin B6 and Potassium, and a very good source of Vitamin A, Vitamin C and Manganese." (source here)

This article lists the sweet potato amongst the worldʻs healthiest foods. Imagine that? I can grow all this goodness with very little effort.

They are also the simplest meal to prepare. I slice a few, then steam for a few minutes, until soft. Hot or cold, I find that they are sufficient unto themselves with a beautiful, elusive sweetness and very filling, satisfying both a carbohydrate and a sweet tooth kind of food urge. Like the stubby local bananas, as in this bunch salvaged from the birds in my front banana grove, there is a slightly perfumed nature to flavour. Some writers call it "floral" but we are talking staple food here not beauty products or wine.

 Just in case there was something other that I could/should be doing with this food, and because it was pouring with rain, I went online and requested what seemed like every yam and sweet potato growing and/or cookbook from my local library system.

I was sorely disappointed with my haul. Most of the books went back very rapidly. Almost every recipe, both traditional and modern, adds sugar or sweetener to this lovely food. And donʻt get me started on the yuck factor of baking with dollops of added sugar, cream and marshmallows....uuuuurgh....

To make my sweet potato meals more complete, and to add protein, I have devised a homemade spicy peanut sauce which really has its roots in African cuisine where the often confused yams, (genus Dioscorea) rather than sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) are the staple. Initially I used peanut butter, then discovered that one of the grocery stores on my route sells roasted, unsalted valencia peanuts in the bulk foods section. A handful of these nuts blended with apple cider vinegar, a Hawaiian hot pepper or two (fresh from the garden) Thai basil (ditto) a clove or two of garlic, some coconut milk to desired consistency and voila!  the Halemahina backyard cooking channel has another winner!

This set me to thinking that if only I could grow peanuts, I could be almost at food independance on a quarter acre of lava rock. So, after exhausting the seed supply stores within a 30 mile radius, I went online and ordered seed peanuts from a continental USA seed supply company. Whether I will be successful remains to be seen.

In the meantime, and while I wait for the rest of life to unfold, I wear the sweet potato queen crown with gratitude and a full tummy.

 ʻUala feature in Hawaiian creation stories, most notably as the favourite food of Kamapuaʻa, the wild pig (boar) fertility god figure, legendary lover of tempestuous and fiery Madame Pele.

Laying up stores of food for (and from) the gods isnʻt such a bad way to pass the time. I am thinking that my next printing block, after the coconut palm, might be a wild pig and sweet potato design. I feel something stirring there, in that primeval slime. After the pineapple tricolour printing, of course. Oh yes, that project.....

Oh feather!

For some reason somebody or bodies keep leaving feathers in my path.

These from my garden this past month.

I am not about to make a cape, but these feather gifts, aside of all the other feather symbolism, do bring to mind the ʻahuʻula feather capes of the Hawaiian aliʻi (nobility) in days gone by. You talkinʻ to ME?

A delicate flowering

The Tillandsia usnoides (variously aka Peleʻs Hair or Spanish Moss) at the front door has put out the tiniest green flower.

I had been promised in the background article which I researched, that the flower would be inconspicuous. It might be tiny, and extremely pesky to photograph, but this little flower is exquisite in my book.

Golden apples of the sun: poetics of ethnobotany

Almost every day now, I harvest a handful of golden apples of the sun: Physalis peruviana

In Hawaii, this South American native is known as Poha berry. I grew up knowing them as Cape Gooseberries, or just gooseberries. The French common name of Love in a Cage obviously refers to the beautiful little lantern sheath design feature.

This fruit is very different from the thorny, green, naked-and-looking-it, little berries (Ribes uva-crispa) which I discovered uses the name of Gooseberry in north America, and which I am NOT currently growing. I think that gooseberry prefers a cold winter or maybe a four season climate. I did plant a bush at two of my previous houses. One had an unfortunate fate when the landlord, in his less than infinite wisdom, had his hired help spray with a herbicide relative of the more famous Roundup.

The other attempt to grow Ribes uva-crispa, at the back door of Skunk House a few years earlier,  produced a couple of the tiniest translucent grey green globes which were not very appetizing on the eye nor the tongue. I am not sure if they were immature, or whether unappetizing is their nature to a palate raised on golden apples of the sun.

The Cape Gooseberry features strongly in my childhood food memories: gooseberry jam, gooseberry pie, gooseberry ice cream with homegrown thick, rich, yellow, Jersey cream. They grew abundantly and widely having gone native years back, when sailing ships probably brought them first to the fairest cape.

I suspect that I am currently getting ample vitamin C eating my daily handful of golden globes right there in the garden: sun warmed and slightly tart, almost sweet.

My single Poha berry bush, found as a seedling at a local Farmerʻs Market, and planted late last summer, did not do too much spectacular through the winter wet and wild months. It has really spread and straggled in recent weeks however, leading me to consider the benefits of some kind of trellis structure. Right now the Cordyline/Ti plants on either side are providing a bit of support, but the lower branches do rather trail the little love cages in the compost, making them vulnerable to robbery, rape and plunder by slug, snail or rodent.

A few weeks ago, around about the solstice,  I noticed a plant at my local natural foods store labelled XL Poha. I asked the cashier whether she knew if it was the berries or the plant that was going to be extra large. The cashier looked at me as if I was speaking Martian, then focussed very determinedly upon her cash register keys so I shrugged, swiped my credit card through the machine, bagged my (expensive) groceries and brought the XL Poha home to see whether the season will give me answers. Or the wandering Aengus sing to me.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

W.B.Yeats: The Song of the Wandering Aengus

(the completely poetry ebook can be read here)

Solstice dreaming cooking channel: hey shuga!

I had a neighbourhood gathering to attend late afternoon on the the summer solstice Saturday. The invitation had said "pot luck" but start time was 4 in the afternoon.

I thought some South African oat crunchies would serve well for my offering. They struck me as a sort of between supper time and afternoon tea, elevensies type of food.

I remember the recipe for oat crunchies being on the back of the Hulettʻs brown sugar package, and requiring Lyleʻs Golden Syrup. In the trademark green and gold tin, with the lion and the bees, and the motto: "Out of the strong came forth sweetness", Lyleʻs Golden Syrup is reputed to have the oldest branding for a food product.

There is a bit more about sugar syrup here  where I found this picture of the tin, more or less as I remember it from my childhood. {Note: this is not my picture, unlike all the other images I use in my blog posts}

I easily found recipes online, but the syrup component had me stumped. Last time I made crunchies in north America,  I used maple syrup. At that time I was living where maple trees like to take root and flourish abundantly. Maple syrup seemed the natural choice for substitution.

This time I am far from where maple syrup is harvested, so, though it is easily available in the great Aliceʻs Restaurant commodities trading culture, maple syrup didnʻt seem to be the right thing. I could use honey, but I donʻt really like heating honey.

Wandering the aisles of my local natural foods store, pondering this weighty sweet dilemma, I found Hey Shuga! Caribbean syrup from raw sugar cane. Caribbean soul food! Yes! Pour your sweetness on me, baby - or so the label tells me. All those old sixties songs. Someone else besides me was listening to the words. The label was keen to tell me a lot of other things too. Curiously Organic! Vegan! Gluten free! Has there ever been a cane sugar syrup which is not vegan and gluten free? Easy points for guessing the target market here.

I might have taken this batch of crunchies from the oven a little soon. They turned out looking like slightly anaemic versions of the golden brown oat crunchies I remember from that life in another country. They are also a lot more crumbly. Maybe wetness and binding needs some work.

Like most recipes in the United States, the recipes which I found online from the ex-pat community all seem to call for way too much sugar. Too sweet. Too salty. Thatʻs the USA life for you. Excess.

I have learned to automatically cut sugar by a third to a half, and remove salt completely in my cooking, when using US recipes.

Now I have to work out what to do with the rest of the 12 oz bottle of pure cane sugar syrup. Is that perhaps a few more batches of crunchies I spy in the crystal ball? I have local honey and my own harvest of sweet potatoes aplenty for my sugar needs.

The sisterhood of the travelling fruit: solstice dreaming edition 2014

On the summer solstice this year I set aside some time to sit outside to carve a new printing block.

I have been thinking about doing a pineapple design for a while now.

Pineapple is one of my favourite tropical island fruits. They are easily found at the markets. From the bromeliad family, they seems to grow really easily from the crown of thorny leaves twisted of the fruit at time of eating.

I have thirteen and counting, robust looking, spiky plants in the garden already, from a year of eating well. Survive and thrive rate seems to be about 80% though I have not been measuring scientifically. Sometimes the tops shrivel and rot. I have tried placing them at a slight angle to allow the rainwater to run out of the crown. It seems to help to let the rooting end dry out a bit - sometimes a challenge. I have had some turn green and mildewy when kept indoors. Now I toss them under the eaves for a few weeks then move them to rocky borders in the garden where they can root without being too soggy.

So back to the pineapple design. The pineapple seems to offer great graphic opportunity. I needed a new design for decorative all-season cards. The pineapple, hailing originally from the Caribbean, being fruit of kings and associated with hospitality seemed to fit well. I found an interesting potted social history of the pineapple here. How food plants got around the world fascinates me. Sometimes I think I should call my caravanserai The Sisterhood of the Travelling Fruit. Or maybe I should dream up a parallel life as an ethnobotanist.

I also wanted to try a multi colored block and thought the simple pineapple fruit shape would lend itself well to this technical exercise.

Actually I have not yet cut the separate colour blocks for the leaves, the fruit or background as I discovered that I could print two colours on the same block pretty well. The multicoloured block project is thus still in the development stage.

I set myself up at my free-from-the-side-of-the-road table and chair in the garden, alongside some bromeliads and nascent pineapple plants.

The sun warmed the linoleum so that it carved like butter, so different from carving in a cold climate where the lino can become brittle and chip and the knives slip and cut my hands to shreds. The sun also warmed my shoulders and back.

Then, because it looked like it might rain, I set up the printing tables next to the truck, under the carport roof with a fine view of the beans, taro and bananas, to print the first set of cards and a couple of kitchen tea towel cloths.

This very simple, perhaps primal, design, will mostly be a card printing block, though I can see myself printing fun tropical shirt/skirt fabric lengths too. A pineapple and protea theme appeals to my quirky imagination. Kitchen curtains? Maybe. Even pineapple panel curtains for the glass paned doors at the entrance to the house. Hospitality and welcome and the sailor is home from the sea symbols seems like it could be a good thing at a front door.

Sigh. Time time time...again the vision runs ahead of the physical capacity to carry it out.

I did, however, manage to invest in the solstice energy to carve out a little space of pure creativity.