Egg tart with cheese short crust pastry

It is great to have in the freezer some cheese short crust pastry, I cut some out to make egg tarts.
I use around 30gm pastry per tart, form the tart and fridge to keep cold.
Mix 2 eggs with 100 gm water, sweeten with honey/sugar, warm to around 60˚C to thicken, then keep cold in fridge.
Preheat oven to 200˚C, pour egg mixture into pastry shell, just right for 4 tarts. Bake until set, around 15 minutes.
I love the contrast of more savoury pastry with sweet filling.

Vegetable sourdough pancake

With the sourdough starter alive and bubbling well, I have to come up with ways to use it everyday. This time is kale and bell pepper pancake. Pretty good as kale shrinks a lot on heating and can with stand heat, so you end up eating a lot of veg in a thin pancake.

Cut kale and bell pepper in to small pieces, season with salt, oil and curry powder, rest for 15 minutes before mixing with sourdough discard. Pour on a paper lined baking tray, compact and flatten into a disc as much as possible. Bake at 170˚ for 15 minutes, turn pancake over to crisp up the bottom, another 10 minutes.

Veg seedlings and fruits

First batch of veg seedlings are being transplanted into the green house, Daikon, Kailan, Red Choi Sum, Misato rose Radish, hopefully they will grow fast to provide something to eat soon. The second lot of these vegetables will be planted outside, as they prefer cooler weather. 

Direct mix sowing of red beetroot, golden beetroot and carrot are looking great. 

Inside the greenhouse there are a few fruit trees, all carrying promises of fruits to harvest, with 12 mini figs appeared and some blossoms on cherry and peach trees.

Mackerel in curry sauce

 

 

These are small mackerels caught last year by my fisherman, it is time to finish them before new ones come in. They are small and not oily, best to serve with a sauce.

I make a light curry sauce with seared onion, garlic, red curry paste, coconut milk, carrot & spring onion, bath the grilled mackerels in the sauce and serve with a few slices of semi-dried tomatoes.

Blue fin tuna

Irish fishermen have zero quota for blue fin tuna, even though they are in Irish water. The quota goes to other European countries. However, bycatch are allowed to be sold which is the only way I can enjoy Irish fatty tuna here, not in Japan!

I sear tuna piece by piece on a hot plate, nicely browned outside and tender inside.

Hokkigai clam

I love raw clam sashimi, full of wonderful sweet umami flavour and crunchy texture, Hokkigai clam is one of my favourites. I would never thought that there will be a chance to get hold of fresh Hokkaigai clams, to prepare it myself in my kitchen in Ireland. 

Thanks to my industrious fish monger, he managed to convince a friend to drive a lorry load of shellfish from France over to him, hence I could enjoy this delicacy. After watching a couple of videos on YouTube, it is easy to know how to open and clean the clam, not any harder than opening oyster.

Vegetarian finger food snacks

Invited vegetarian neighbours to come over to meet up. Made some finger food snacks to serve with drinks, honey fremented garlic, nori pancake, Cheesy egg mayo tarts, Fried hard tofu with sweet sour sauce/sloe jam and Strange flavour hazelnut.

Cheesy egg mayo tarts

Using cheese biscuit recipe to bake as pastry shells, fill with egg mayo. Cheese biscuit is made with 100gm butter, 100gm parmigiana and 100gm flour.

Fried hard tofu with sweet sour sauce/sloe jam

Cut hard tofu into squares, sear in shallow oil all sides until golden, serve with a dollop of sweet sour sauce/sloe jam.


Strange flavour hazelnut

 

Variation of Mala peanut but using hazelnut. Basically cook soft ball sugar in a large wok, add miso chilli pepper sauce paste, then stir fry with hazelnut, and before mixture solidify, mix in finely grinded Sichuan pepper.

Nori sesame pancake

I always want to use more seaweed in daily meals, and not just sprinkling of seaweed flakes that does not show its flavour. Saw the use of nori as wrapper on internet, like making spring rolls using minced shrimp as filling, then fried. 

I thought of making this nori pancake instead, and using up the daily sourdough starter discard.
First brush olive oil on the smooth side of 2 sheets of nori, then spread sourdough starter (season with salt and oil) paste on one, sprinkle sesame on top and cover with the other nori sheet, oiled side outside.
Bake at 180˚C until edges of sourdough turns golden, pancake puffs up, around 20 minutes. Cut into squares to serve. Slightly crispy and tasty.

Fermented onion

Harvested a few large onions last autumn and not sure that they could survive well over winter, so decided to add salted water to ferment them, like sauerkraut. Worked well, turned sour after 2 weeks. I keep the jars in the fridge and use them a little a time in cooking. Great to increase intake of fermented food.

Smoked mackerel sour dough rostis

The sourdough starter that I kept in the freezer since last November comes back to life after one change of flour, water. No intention to make bread yet as I am enjoying having long cooked mix beans with egg as breakfast.

Still good to revive the sourdough starter daily to use as carbohydrate, sparingly, in meals.

Pull smoked mackerels into pieces, grate carrot, cut spring onion, kale into small pieces, mix with sourdough starter. Smoked mackerels is so salty and oily there is no need to add any salt and oil. Spoon onto baking paper lined tray, bake at 180˚C until golden, around 20 minutes.

Pickled Yacon

Dugged out yacon in February and have been eating them regularly, raw or cook with veg. Thought of making this pickle when I saw the bottle of honey fermented blackcurrant in the pantry. 

 

That was an experiment last year with a good blackcurrant harvest. Can’t use so many jams so add honey to ferment the remaining berries, thinking of making blackcurrant cordial. Turned out that blackcurrant is so sour that the resulting cordial is impossible to drink. So might as well use it like vinegar! Gives a beautiful pinkish red hue to Yacon.

Venison neck

Got introduced to a hunter living nearby, who shots wild deers that roam around nearby hills and farms. A nuisance to farmers as they eat grass and damage fence posts. We bought a few cuts and he gave us this neck cut for free. 

We will include venison into our meat quota, great to eat wild meat with different nutrients.

Season venison neck with salt & black pepper, place in baking dish with an inch of liquid (water, liqueur, soy sauce, Garam Masala and raspberry coulis) and herbs rosemary and fennel. Bake at 180˚C for 1.5 hrs, turn over every 20 minutes.

Deep red meat tasty and tender.

Spring flowers

 A rare sunny day, spring flowers look so much better under a deep blue sky. Cherry blossoms are opening well, so as others : daffodils, bay, camellia, viburnum, gorse.

Belize tour 5/5 - St Ignacio

After a week at a reef atoll, it is time to move back to mainland for the last part of the tour. St Ignacio is inland in the west surrounded by mountains, it is a stopover spot to enjoy birdwatching, river sport and Mayan ruins.

red custard apple

soursop & custard apple

St Ignacio turns out to be a pleasant and relaxing small town, still basic simple houses, but with a farmer’s market every day selling lovely fruits, and a few decent restaurants to dine in.

We joined a bird watching tour at Black Rock area. It was a rare 37 degrees hot day and viewing birds along a dusty road looking towards the forest in the distance was too uncomfortable. We did see a number of birds, including Keelbill tocan, blue bunting, trogon etc. Compared with our birdwatching experiences in Costa Rica and Panama, there are far less birds here and are far away, not an experience to rave about.

Xunantunich

Barton Creek cave canoe to see offerings

Joined two tours to visit Mayan ruins, Xunantunich and Caracol, the previous one followed by canoeing in Barton Creek into a cave with stalactites and Mayan offerings. It is nice to know more about the history of Mayan in this area, from 500BC to the peak at 750 AD with estimated 3 million inhabitants (compared with 40,000 Belizian now), and the final decline at around 900AD after 150 years of drought, when the area was deserted. There are estimated close to 300 of such Mayan settlements, only 5 being excavated, partly, and renovated to open to visit.

Caracol, the tallest amd most extensive Mayan Ruin

The last day in Belize we joined the famous ATM Mayan cave tour. This is an underground cave half filled with water, where we need to wade across 3 rivers to get to. Once inside the totally dark cave, we wear life jackets, helmets and headlights to swim, climb over stalactites, squeeze through gaps, climb up 2 floors, and return the same way . 

 

The total trip is around 3km return and took 3 hours. Along the flat areas in the cave, where there are shallow depressions, we could see offerings, near the entrance are pots carrying grains gradually changed to human remains, from commoners to nobles further in, then small children. The timeline of thr offerings coincide with the long drought period from 750 to 900AD, suggesting that the Mayans were desperate and had been increasing the preciousness of the offerings to please the underworld powers to pray for rain, but in vain, leading to mass death and deserting the sites.

One contribution to drastic climate change was the vast deforestation during the Mayan period to sustain population growth.

It may look like the settlements were surrounded by forest, but actually it had been cleared to bare ground for farming, and trees burned to make lime to use in stone wall building.

History is repeating itself, and there is a lot to learn from past events.