The sweet pulp that covers the (raw) cacao beans are really yummy.

It’s really sweet, remarkably different from the cacao nuts I’ve taken to snacking on at night as I writeup field notes. The cacao fruit is really a forgotten commodity. I like the flesh to a very soft mango without the annoying fibers that get stuck between the teeth. After the cacao beans (or nuts?) have been fermented and sun dried they give a nice chocolaty taste when cracked open.

Noah Jackson is in West Africa working with African farmers.

From the forest floor, a cacao farmer searches the mid-canopy of one of his avocado trees for a mid-day snack.
Like many farmers who live on small farms, these trees serve as important nutrient supplements.
Although avocado is not sold on the local market, cashews, oranges, papaya, plantain,
coffee and mangoes help provide a secondary income.

Email from the back of the pickup truck; Avocados are close at hand.

Community Interviews. It got a bit hectic here in one of the communities.
At one point crowds of kids showed up.
So we could have more of a focused conversation, I gave an extra camera to some kids.
It’s a technique I use often to refocus myself, the group I’m with,
and to move chaotic energy away from me so I can focus.
It works well. The images from the camera, like my community
photography workshops, are always unexpected.
This is a pretty good shot, made by young creative hands.

Walking in one of the villages at the end of the day, one young girl waved me into her family compound. I made a series of images of her and her older siblings before I was directed to these scene just inside one of the houses.
I spent some time photographing this part of the day, the end of the day cleanup.
“Mother and Child, End of the day farm washup.”

Solution of vinegar and soap

I was just reading a funny post about how this lady hated fruit flies, and guess what … I DO TOO!

Hate them.

I don’t like them hovering my bananas, and I certainly don’t like them to hover over my garbage bin and then fly over to hover over my fruits!

Apparently, there are scores of people who have tested ways to kill these buggers (don’t you just love this British term?) and here are the environmentally freindly ways to do so.

1. Alcohol kills 

One guy found out that a few inches of wine in a standard wine bottle works extremely well - as he found out the next morning, after he took a glug of wine with some dead flies floating in it!! The little bugs love wine and they will dive into the bottle only to drown after having a few hick sips. Apparently, the reason why they can’t fly out of the narrow opening of the wine bottle  is because these lovable  fruit flies can only fly side to side, not up and down. 

Here’s what he says “I don’t like killing anything, but I salve my conscience by shaking the bottle regularly, to drown them so they don’t swim for hours, struggling…”

Note to self, look INSIDE the alcohol bottle to make sure there’s no drowned animals before having a go at the hoo-hoo-hoo. However, if you already ate these bugs … accidentally … consider this. They are a good source of uncooked protein. 

2. Wash / hand slap trick

This same wino guy tried another tactic which he said worked well for him. He washed the  fruits right away and then hand slap the flies as soon as they appear, right before they settle in and procreate. 

3. A deadly cocktail of apple cider vinegar and soap

If you are too lazy to wash the fruit or kill hand slap the silly buggers, then you might want to try this instead. Leaving a mixture of foamy, soapy apple cider vinegar solution on the table next to the fruits. It seems the pesky flies are attracted to the vinegar. But the foam traps them and they die. Something you can easily try at home.

Speaking of insects, I found that they drown easily in soapy water. If you are a sadist, you can try picking up ants, cockroaches, bees, whatever takes your fancy and slowly release them into the soapy water … to test my theory. There’s one insect I truly dislike with passion, and that is mosquitoes. Just one mosquito can cause so much damage to a baby. One day, I found multiple Mozzie bites on my precious baby’s skin. Horrified I tell you. So this fuming mommy sat there, waiting patiently with soapy wet hands. I took a slow easy swipe at the nasty mozzie just as it was about to make another meal out of my kid and it promptly got caught in the foam. Then, I walked to the bathroom and triumphantly release the struggling mozzie into the soapy water and watched it slowly sink down into the abyss.

Bliss! No more bites that night. 

So, if you don’t like nasty insects like me, you know what to do.

Peace!

Image and info taken from Re-Nest.com

I want to share Alton Brown’s recipe for a home made ginger ale.  I love Alton and his somewhat unusual cooking show called Good Eats. Part science, part crazy cooking show, it’s all in good fun. Big boys love it because he really gets down to the scientific reasons for why things done in a certain way tastes so much better.

Anyways, I don’t really drink frizzy drinks because it’s usually loaded with sugar and all sorts of chemicals and artificial coloring I can’t pronounce. And really, I tell you, if I can’t pronounce it, it usually can’t be good AT ALL! So when Alton came up with a home made frizzy ginger ale drink, whoa! it’s really something to try at home.

Home made ginger ale is not something new. People have been cranking up frizzy drinks in their back yards for years … (can I saw centuries??) now. Some have tried making sparkling apple juice and all sorts of other fruity drinks. If you’ve never had a home made frizzy drink, then this is a good recipe to start with.

Times:

Prep                     15 min

Inactive Prep  49 hr 0 min

Cook                    3 min

Total:                  49 hr 18 min

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 ounces finely grated fresh ginger
• 6 ounces sugar
• 7 1/2 cups filtered water
• 1/8 teaspoon active dry yeast
• 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

Directions

Place the ginger, sugar, and 1/2 cup of the water into a 2-quart saucepan and set over medium-high heat. Stir until the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat, cover and allow to steep for 1 hour.

Pour the syrup through a fine mesh strainer set over a bowl, pressing down to get all of the juice out of the mixture. Chill quickly by placing over and ice bath and stirring or set in the refrigerator, uncovered, until at least room temperature, 68 to 72 degrees F.

Using a funnel, pour the syrup into a clean 2-liter plastic bottle and add the yeast, lemon juice and remaining 7 cups of water. Place the cap on the bottle, gently shake to combine and leave the bottle at room temperature for 48 hours. Open and check for desired amount of carbonation. It is important that once you achieve your desired amount of carbonation that you refrigerate the ginger ale. Store in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks, opening the bottle at least once a day to let out excess carbonation.

The young ginger gives a milder flavor than old or mature ginger.

Again though, the most important thing is to use FRESH yeast, and to expect the bubbles to be a lot softer than what you are used to with the commercial stuff.

I just heard that one of my friend’s kids was down with the H1N1 virus. My god! Is that bug still around?

It IS! So, recently, I find myself slacking when it comes to absolute hygiene. Not to say I’m a dirty person, but when the first H1N1 wave came in, I was pretty anal about bringing my kids out, washing hands 10 times a day, stuff like that. I was pretty alarm to say the least, and at that time, my kids were ill all the time, so I was deathly afraid their weak bodies would not be able to cope with something so dangerous.

Anyways, no prizes for telling me that we should all still be really careful.

Here’s what Kristen Suzanne, (a raw food chef) from Kristen’s Raw blog (who by the way is happily pregnant) tips on keeping oneself healthy. Those below and chugging green juice like there’s no tomorrow.

…After scouring the Internet for information on pregnant women and the seasonal / swine flus, I came have a list of things to do (I came up with most of these from Mothering.com’s forum):

Wash hands for 30 seconds with soap OFTEN (avoiding anti-bacterial gels). A good trick is to hum the “Happy Birthday” song three times while hand washing.
PLENTY OF REST!
Don’t touch face
Get Vitamin D!!! (I get mine from the sun, 15-25 minutes daily or every other day)
Gargle with warm salt water twice a day
Take warm salt water and dip a q-tip into it and swab the inside of nostrils daily (or use a neti pot)
Eat fresh, organic, raw garlic
Drink warm liquids
Consume plenty of vitamin C-rich foods
Stay hydrated
Avoid crowded places

This is how some of the UHT milk packets look like

I was thinking of how schools were given UHT packets of spoilt milk last year, thinking why was this happening. Milk is truly expensive in a country mainly exports it’s dairy products from Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The act of packing the milk in pricey UHT packages. The cost of transporting milk from packing factories to schools.

There are food just as good or better than dairy milk, and cheaper to boot too.

Why not make soy bean milk, barley water or red bean drinks instead for kids from poor families? Low cost, easy-to-make, full of protein and other minerals, filling, FRESHly made. Pay the canteen operator and skip the middle men who makes all the profit from distributing milk.

Just soak the beans overnight, dunk the beans into soy milk machine with water, sugar N pandan leaf. Fresh food in 1/2 hour.

While we are on the subject of healthy school food, why not ban sugary soda drinks like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and all those artificial drinks, hook up a water cooler machine and sell healthy drinks instead to kids and teens.

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More on school and food

• Mothers Cook Healthy Meals For Students
• Edible food colors for kiddo finger painting sessions
• Beautiful home made Bento box meals for school kids
• Regular bread is full of additives
• Is food making school kids crazy?
• Raw anise seeds, full of iron. Good for kids
• School shoes stink to high heaven?

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I love writing about food, so let me tell you about this cute festivities we have in Malaysia where Mandarin oranges play a huge role in getting masses of single men and women hooked up.

Yesterday, the Malaysian Hokkien Chinese celebrated the 15th day of the Chinese New Year festivities with what is considered their version of the Valentine’s Day. More than 50,000 people headed towards the Penang Island Esplanade, where the Chap Goh Mei (15th day) celebration was held last night to mark the end of the Chinese New Year festivities.

Telephone numbers, names and even email are written on the oranges

What the women singletons do on this particular day is to grab a couple of fresh Mandarin oranges, write down their names in ink on the oranges and throw them into the sea or a lake, hoping some young handsome, and we hope, single men (not dirty minded lecherous guys) will get hold of the oranges and give them a call.

Young people in yellow selling oranges for charity

Women throwing oranges

More women getting ready to throw oranges

No sex discrimination here as you can see because lots of men are throwing oranges as well into the lake

I’ve been told that this was a form of flirting in the old days as eligible young women were usually not allowed outside their homes. This is the only day throughout the whole year where the young maidens would be allowed to walk the streets but they must be accompanied by a chaperon. The young men would also go out and in hopes of catching a glimpse of the young maiden and taking their hand in marriage. Obviously this does not happen anymore but the concept of match-making still lives on.

Modern style Nonya outfit

This is how the chaperons would have dressed

Old fashion marriage costumes